Barbie or Oppenheimer: which wolf will you feed? The death drive or joie de vivre?

I can’t fairly judge Oppenheimer because I haven’t seen it, but I’ve made my singular choice for the summer blockbuster season. Barbie look squarely at the finality of death (no joke!) in order to affirm life, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it considers death more intimately than ‘Oppenheimer.’

Both titular figures am become death. Oppenheimer irrevocably expanded the human species’ capacity for mass murder by orders of magnitude. Barbie chooses to be human and defer, here and now, to mortality’s own hidden schedule. In so doing, her movie celebrates and multiplies the joys of our world. It is an improbable outpouring of grace on a global scale. It comes at the cost of the millions of tons of plastic garbage it also serves to create, but if it’s a choice between the two, I’d prefer Barbie’s fallout to nuclear winter.

Barbie accomplishes so many things a blockbuster based on a  mass-produced toy shouldn’t be able to. When a major piece of capitalist entertainment incorporates such a multidimensional feminist analysis and self-critique; when its plot calls for, by name, the overthrow of patriarchy (while caring in good humanist faith about men and how patriarchy spoils them—feminism is for everybody!); and when it points out just as baldly that corporate lip service to feminism deftly advances the continuation of patriarchy, you can appreciate the battles feminism has won to get us there. You also have to assume the capitalists behind the production are in the same breath neutralizing feminism’s advance. In a way it’s boastful of Warner Brothers and Mattell to allow Greta Gerwig to include in the film this outing of their co-optation’s capacity to keep patriarchy safe.

Political analyst and cultural critic Mike Savage argues that the increasing, nakedly self-aware inclusion of corporations in their own cultural products, going so far as to make the companies themselves characters in their own movies—who claim ownership and control of fictional worlds from within and exposit their obvious, persisting motivation is to mazimize profit—can’t be regarded credibly as irony anymore and is better diagnosed as burlesque: the garish, triumphalist flaunting of of those who remain on top. 

Maybe Barbie breaks even on this count. Gerwig gets away with having it both ways about a great many things and seems to be incapable of assembling anything muddled or cynical out of the parts laid in front of her. The movie is silly and earnest and joyful and still abounding in the kindest ironies in spite of the atmosphere it’s breathing. It’s wish-fulfillment to call it subversive, but wonderful to see Gerwig depict the in-universe Mattell bosses as floundering buffoons who never never get hold of their own reality. Barbie‘s spirit, like its pallette, is both both blunt and tasteful; the glow of its radiation loves thine enemies and tempers their burlesque; its neon flourishes are an affront to all garishness. 

The Barbie movie deserves full celebration if we don’t regard it likewise to be a firmly planted and immutable triumph. It will endure as a success for the inestimable moral support and day-to-day empowerment it’s keenly disseminating to multitudes of girls, women, femmes, femmes-to-be, feminists and feminists-to-be, but it can only be regarded as a “triumph” outside of the Cineplex if the masses make organized use of it as a wedge to be driven back into the opening it came out of, against an exclusive ownership class and towards the horizon of all-gender liberation.

The Barbie movie’s second triumph would have to come as a symbolic, rhetorical, and spiritual tool in the service of more substantial and strategic efforts to make gains against our shared exploitation. The other summer blockbuster crossroads is of course the combined strike of the Screen Actor’s Guild and the Writers Guild of America against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The more important choice this summer is whether or not to support the struggle to adequately feed and shelter journeyman artists. Possessing the tendency and potential to create progressive change orders of magnitude greater than any omnipresent affirmational miracle movie on its own, these are the sorts of historical struggles and junctures upon which all the dreams and means to create a more just and free world depend.