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.

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