Sarah Harte: My ‘Barbenheimer’ binge makes it clear that it’s still a man’s world

But reviews are glowing (I’ve read only two negative ones so far), and Gerwig’s indie street cred is intact, making history securing the biggest opening weekend for a film directed by a woman. This presumably means she will find it easier to get her movies financed.

This can only be a good thing in a world where the average production budget for female directors is expected to be about 20% less than those of their male peers because female directors often mainframe female actresses which means they get less money. The female gaze apparently is less important.

Barbieland

While I’ve no interest in deriding a doll that has given generations of small girls pleasure, it feels necessary to disclose that I didn’t go to the movie with an open mind because hyper-feminine Barbie gives me the “ick”.

Call me a crank, but I remain firmly convinced (the movie hasn’t changed this) that the doll’s body shape is unhealthy for young girls, sending a body negativity message.

For the first section of the movie which is set in Barbieland, I gritted my teeth and it seemed in need of a good edit. The clever voiceover by Helen Mirren introduces us to the idea that “since the beginning of time, since the first girl ever existed, there have been dolls”. We’re sold the idea that when Barbie was invented young girls were liberated by throwing away their baby dolls which trained them to be mothers, freeing them like Barbie to be anything they wanted. Hmm.

Real-life LA

I half-heartedly scribbled notes, glad for something to do while thinking, bang goes part of my weekend that I’m never getting back. So, it was a major relief when Barbie and Ken headed to real-life LA and the movie markedly improved — cue knowing, satirical lines like, “I’m a man with no power, does that make me a woman?”

And overall, the central message in this movie is positive, everything exists in the world to expand the presence and power of men, so women have a right, to be whomever they want, and must say no to imposter syndrome (which seems to be a particularly female phenomenon) and should never quit.

Nods of recognition

America Ferrara playing a Mattel employee gives a smart, accurate and surprisingly poignant monologue about the difficulties and paradoxes of being a woman and suddenly, I found my head nodding thinking, you can sing it, sister. And I looked around and realised that I wasn’t alone.

Having a communal experience with what largely looked like a young female audience also worked strange magic on me. Most looked to be under 25 with the odd boyfriend type dotted here and there, with one teenage boy in a Barbie sweatshirt and pink hair dye going with his inner Barbie.

There was lots of laughter and murmurs of recognition at the sly quips and humour (there’s a great scene where Ken plays the guitar for four hours at Barbie) and, by the end, I had a weird lump in my throat. On that note, I wouldn’t bring a young boy to this, it felt like the message that men are confused, simple, chumps, (sexism in reverse) wouldn’t be great.

Patriarchy double bill

So, after grabbing food, it was time to see what damage patriarchal ideology had done to society in a different context because patriarchy is the nexus between these two films.

Cillian Murphy is incredible as the eponymous American theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer who was director of the Los Alamos laboratory during the Second World War. He brilliantly conveys both the complexity of the man and the outsized moral dimensions of being credited as the “father of the atomic bomb” which killed and maimed so many Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The cast is excellent except maybe for Kenneth Branagh. It feels more like he’s playing Branagh rather than Danish physicist Niels Bohr. I’d like to avoid what has been described as “the film industry’s fetishisation of the male ‘genius auteur filmmaker’” but this film is stellar.

Three hours, and I didn’t get bored once. As somebody who usually goes to the loo several times during a normal-length movie hated by the entire row as I “sorry” my way past and tread on their feet, this says something.

Engines of destruction

When you’ve first watched Barbie, then Oppenheimer, it reminds you that the patriarchy has not only shaped the individual lives of women by limiting and harming them but also by enabling men to build machines that destroy lives, cause wars and outsize problems for humanity.

Initially, watching Oppenheimer I felt grateful I didn’t live in a time when men swept around the place being important, and women were entirely relegated to the background, even more than today, reduced to being sexual objects and mothers.

Then getting a hint of the two women’s backstories who played outsized parts in Robert Oppenheimer’s life, it was disappointing director Christopher Nolan who wrote the screenplay, didn’t grab the chance to write meatier roles for these interesting women.

Under-written women's roles 

The parts for Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, a German American biologist and former member of the American communist party (Oppenheimer was her fourth husband) and mistress, communist activist Jean Tatlock, played by Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh respectively, are seriously underwritten. What a shame that Nolan, who otherwise made a stellar movie, didn’t figure this out.

Pugh, an actress of considerable talent, does her best with her role but is essentially reduced to a woman who gets her kit off. To put it in context, I now have a better idea of the shape and size of Pugh’s breasts than my own.

Reduced to a trope

And while Emily Blunt knocks it out of the park with her limited time on the screen, really showing her acting chops in a late scene where she defends her husband, against a McCarthyite committee/kangaroo court, she is also largely reduced to a trope.

Male journalists and reviewers are lining up with cries of “a masterpiece” for Nolan, while a different equally valid jury is back too on a different movie.

Post Barbie, I hung around the lobby canvassing young women for their take, all of whom were buoyed up and happy to share their unanimous opinion. With shining faces, they told me that they “absolutely loved it”.

So, go Greta Gerwig, go Barbie (with reservations) and go all the young women who laughed out loud in the cinema. 

Watching them walk out into the rainy Cork summer evening, I felt strangely hopeful, and yes, a little bit emotional, wishing that their lives will turn out well and that they’ll get to be whoever they want.