It was July 21st, 2023 when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer both hit theaters. The internet quickly coined the collision “Barbenheimer,” a Frankenstein word as playful as it was revealing. As the release date approached, instead of generating rivalry, discussions humorously encouraged watching the films as a double feature. Three years later, I still find myself fascinated by this cultural phenomenon and one question still remains: what was Barbenheimer really about?
At first glance, these two films were polar opposites. Barbie, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a whimsical, candy-colored fantasy comedy journeying into the world of Mattel’s iconic doll. Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is a stark biographical thriller diving into the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. However, when stripped to their essence, underneath their enormous differences, these two films are arguably about the same thing: ideas and the weight of creation.
By 1942, fear that Nazi Germany might build an atomic bomb first drove the United States to launch the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was appointed to lead the weapons laboratory at Los Alamos. In July 1945, more than two months after Germany surrendered, the idea became Trinity, the first nuclear explosion in history, inaugurating the atomic age.
The historical overlap is uncanny: the atomic age and the company that would create Barbie were born in the same year. Indeed, in 1945, Ruth Handler co-founded Mattel with her husband Elliot Handler and Harold “Matt” Matson. Watching her daughter use paper dolls to imagine womanhood, Handler recognized something missing from a toy market that offered girls primarily baby dolls: a three-dimensional figure through which they could project themselves forward. The idea of Barbie was born.
Ruth Handler created Barbie to give girls a way to imagine their future, not knowing the doll would become a vehicle for impossible beauty standards and exclusion. In an entirely different realm and with consequences that cannot be compared, the Manhattan Project created the bomb under the logic of wartime necessity. But the weapon immediately exceeded the particular historical circumstances that produced it, inaugurating the nuclear age.
However sincere or defensible the original intention may seem, no creator can fully anticipate what a creation will become. This is the terror of creation. Our own imaginative power is a great gift and a huge responsibility. Maybe, Barbenheimer is a warning about what happens when an idea becomes real. This is a topic I personally grapple with. Putting anything out in the world feels risky and dangerous when you know it will eventually and inevitably be taken out of context and may cause unforeseen, unintended consequences.
There is violence here: every act of creation is also an act of exclusion. To make one thing real is to choose it over all the other things it might have been. The violence of the frame is what I find most devastating about movies. Every filmmaker must decide what enters the frame and what remains outside of it. To the audience, every film feels whole, although it is only a fragment. The movie Barbie is only one fragment, one perspective, one angle at the Barbie story. The movie Oppenheimer is only one fragment, one perspective, one angle at the Oppenheimer story. I always find myself circling back back to the same question: What am I watching? Are these movies about Barbie and Oppenheimer? Or about the people who made them? Or the culture they were born into? About us? About me?
And what of the phenomena “Barbenheimer”? If Barbie and Oppenheimer are creations of Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, neither of them created Barbenheimer. Neither did Warner Bros. or Universal Studios. The audience did. We did. Creation generating further creation, none of which could have been predicted or controlled.
This is the terror of creation. For better or worse, creation escapes its maker at every level. The moment an idea becomes real, it no longer belongs entirely to the person who made it. The terror is not merely that our creations will become evil, it is that we cannot know what they will become at all.
But then sometimes, it escapes us toward something unexpectedly joyful. And perhaps the strangest creation of July 21st, 2023 was neither Barbie nor Oppenheimer, but Barbenheimer itself: an accidental third work, authored by no one and embraced by everyone. Something collective and deeply alive.
