Barbieheimer

By the time many of you read this, you will have seen the much-touted film, Oppenheimer, based on the biography that calls him “American Prometheus.” The release at the same time of a new Barbie film is not a coincidence; this joint release is making a connection between doll and film that some moviegoers are also making. But what is the connection?

I think it’s profound. The girls and young women who collect and love the doll are also perhaps the girls and young women who would call the creation of nuclear bombs an essential defense for this country of dolls—as the U.S. sometimes seems to be. If we are pretty and pink and can depend on male attention, do we question any form of authority?

Barbie is an authority; she represents capitalism in its most alive form, channeling millions of dollars in profits to the parent company, some of which—a fraction—will end up in the form of taxes, benefitting the rest of us.

The nuclear industry—for that is what it is and has been since the 1940’s—is also a lively offshoot of capitalism, funneling billions of dollars into what President Eisenhower called “The Military-Industrial Complex” with eventually some tax profit going into our economy. But that profit is a tiny percentage of the profit these weapons manufacturers absorb.

In his farewell speech at the end of his terms as president, Eisenhower counseled against the unrestrained and unquestioned growth of the weapons that he called a deterrence of Soviet aggression—this is in the context of the Cold War—but which we now recognize as giving this country a first-strike capacity, outlawed in earlier treaties.

It sometimes seems to me that we women, historically if not so much today, have served unconsciously as distractions from what the above statement implies: a nuclear holocaust destroying the planet.

And here’s where Barbie and her long lineage of dolls representing every version of female and churned out in holiday editions comes in. They are images of distraction, delusion and ancient hope, that “pretty in pink” can somehow provide access to what President Lincoln in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861 called “The better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln’s hope that the nation plunging into Civil War might still retain its gloss and shimmer seems delusional now, another version of “pretty in pink.”

But then I remember, “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all”—Emily Dickinson—and I ask myself where I find bits and pieces of that hope, essential to all of us?

Certainly in the richness of mid-summer produce in the Farmers’ Market yesterday morning.

But even more strongly, I find hope in what seems to be our increasing acceptance of those among us who were once shut away in shame and forgotten: the man dancing through the crowd and singing an incomprehensible song and the large young man screaming something incomprehensible as his caretaker rolled him through the market in an enormous stroller.

And so we go on, dancing on the edge of doom, and perhaps wearing pink and smiling relentlessly are just a better way to go.

In Women, Politics Robert Oppenheimer Favorites of 2023 Film