By Adam Bloodworth
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer offer revealing male character studies, says Adam Bloodworth
You wouldn’t think it from all the beaming photos of Margot Robbie plastered about the place, but ‘Barbenheimer’ has actually ended up sending some pretty prescient messages about masculinity, asking questions about what it’s like to be a man today. In case you’ve been hiding under a pink shiny rock, ‘Barbenheimer’ the term has been coined by film fanatics who will be spending five hours glued to cinema seats this weekend, as both of the summer’s biggest film releases, Barbie and Oppenheimer, are coming out on Friday.
Hundreds of millions of searches have been made on TikTok for the term, and cinemas across the country are running special themed screenings. In short, the world seems to be collectively expressing that they are craving distraction from the real world in a huge, powder-pink way. Well, as of tomorrow, they’ve got it.
Read more: Oppenheimer review: Not quite atomic, but it goes off
Barbie has a surprisingly powerful message about feminity, but an even more surprising one about men. Oppenheimer too is a particularly potent cross examination of one particular man who paid a big price for not quite fitting in.
First up, Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of Ken is one of the most thought provoking parts of the Barbie movie. His Ken character escapes Barbie World to go to the Real World where, naively, he begins to believe that men rule everything. He sees the ways men behave and thinks he fancies a bit of it. With the swish of his toned body and a snarling wide smile, Gosling’s Ken changes completely, becoming one of those men who are drunk on arrogance and privilege. Living in a subverted matriarchal world in Barbie Land, Ken has always played second fiddle to Barbie.
That is what makes his discovery about the power men have in the Real World so powerful to him: if you’ve spent your whole life as subservient to someone else, surely you get to have your revenge and act up for a while, right? Well, no, but in Barbie, Ken does it anyway.
Read more: Barbie movie review: Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling shine, but what’s the point?
Over to Oppenheimer, which tells the real life story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The film is a pertinent character study of the type of men that get walked over by people with more power. Despite developing the atomic bomb which went on to land on Japan, Oppenheimer was a deep sceptic of his creation, turning away from plans to advance nuclear weaponry after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He was disowned by the US political system, even by the President, after a kangaroo court alleged that he had associated too closely with Communists. Here is the story of a man whose invention might have changed the course of history. His invention was due to his multi-faceted talents: the way he managed his team of scientists, his inherent knowledge and his patience and perseverance, but justice isn’t served. The good guy doesn’t win.
Oppenheimer is a complicated type of man for a film to convey. Even for us to get our heads around. A lover of art but also a immensely intelligent scientist, and with Socialist leanings, he was the sort of ball of contradiction that powerful men of the time could not process, so they dispensed of.
Let’s not distort the message of feminism at the heart of Barbie. Most importantly, don’t forget to enjoy the escapism of a marathon cinema trip. But it is interesting what is going on here: men may historically not be the most underrepresented group on screens (!) but here at least are two very different and thought-provoking iterations of the male.
Barbie and Oppenheimer are in cinemas from 21 July. There are ‘Barbenheimer’ special event screenings taking place across the capital
