We’d barely made it a few steps from our front door on Saturday evening when we were spotted. “Oh, you’re going to Barbie,” said the man passing by with his dog. “We went last night.”
From Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Ljubljana, Slovenia, stepping out in pink this past weekend meant only one thing: You were Barbie-bound (well, unless you were in Seattle and managed to score Taylor Swift tickets). The list of box-office records Greta Gerwig’s movie set is still being written: among them, its $162 million take was the biggest opening weekend of 2023 and the biggest domestic opening ever for a movie directed by a woman. Still, its biggest achievement is harder to quantify: It got people excited about going to the movies together. In Philadelphia, one man stood before the film, pink fedora over his heart, to recite Nicole Kidman’s much-memed back-to-the-movies bumper. But the collective joy of July 21–23 wasn’t just a matter of dazzling images on a silver screen. It was the feeling that watching a movie actually made you a part of something. To paraphrase Kidman, we didn’t just “come to this place for magic.” We were the magic.
Barbenheimer started as an internet gag, then grew into an IRL phenomenon. With more than $300 million in tickets sold, last weekend was the fourth-biggest moviegoing weekend of all time, and the only one not driven by a Star Wars or Marvel sequel. And yet even that doesn’t capture what it felt like to show up at a suburban multiplex on a Saturday morning and see the lobby crammed with people, or to hear from friends that every weekend screening in their cities and towns was at capacity. And it wasn’t just Barbie. Oppenheimer likewise blew past projections, making it the strongest second-place finisher in history. (Oppenheimer’s viewers might not have dressed up in color-coordinated outfits for the occasion, but they did turn out at 4 a.m. to see a three-hour biopic in Christopher Nolan’s preferred 70 mm IMAX format, which has already sold out its full three-week engagement at some of the 30 cinemas in the world projecting it.) There have been bigger opening weekends, but never one when two movies opened so well at the same time.
Exactly how much the fluke of a competing release date might have affected either movie’s fortune is unknowable—a lack of access to the premium screens booked up by Oppenheimer might have even cost Barbie some revenue—but there was a particular synergistic thrill of stepping into a theater filled with people going not just to a movie but to the movies. What did it mean? Was it a triumph of original filmmaking, as some industry heads have described it? Not according to the Oscars, which count both Oppenheimer, based on a Pulitzer-winning biography, and Barbie, based on, uh, Barbie, as adaptations. A sign that audiences are fed up with IP-driven franchises and sequels? Maybe, but ask again when there are dozens of movies based on Mattel products instead of just one.
Apart from being the latest works by beloved writer-directors, there is one quality that Barbie and Oppenheimer share, which is that they’re both movies of ideas: not just full of them, but about them. Oppenheimer is the story of a theoretical physicist who learns the consequences of applying his theories to the real world. And the Barbie of Barbie is not a doll so much as she is a concept, one that can take any form—doctor, lawyer, president—and yet still retain her essential Barbie-ness. When Barbie makes her way to the human world, she runs into an incredulous teen who can’t believe that such an obsolete product of patriarchy actually exists. “What are you doing here?” she scoffs. “You’re an idea!”
Oppenheimer, a brilliant prodigy who is hopeless at lab work, is pushed into his particular field by the scientist Niels Bohr, who advises him, “Go somewhere you can think. … Learn the ways of theory.” But theory, he soon learns, will only take him so far. When the news breaks that German scientists have split the atom, Oppenheimer rushes to his blackboard to redo the calculations that prove it can’t be done. Meanwhile, one of his colleagues runs to the lab next door and repeats the Germans’ experiment, with the same result. The world is the world, whether theory has the means to describe it or not. When he arrives in America, Oppenheimer explains to his first student that, according to quantum mechanics, light behaves like a wave and a particle at the same time. Does that make sense? No. But is it true? Yes. “It’s a paradox,” he concludes, “but it works.”
Oppenheimer isn’t naïve, or as idealistic as Bohr, who thinks that with a big-enough bomb, they’ll be able to end all wars, not just this one. But he does believe an atomic bomb is inevitable, and the only way to prevent the world from destroying itself with it is to see exactly what it does. “They won’t fear it until they understand it,” he says, “and they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.”
But Oppenheimer himself doesn’t fully understand what he’s done until the first test, when the sound drops out of the theater and all we hear is the sound of his breath as his face is bathed in a flash of light. After the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, there’s a celebratory rally in a basketball gym, and Oppenheimer riles up the flag-waving crowd as he exults in the prospect of Japanese annihilation. But even as he’s spurting jingoistic rhetoric, his mind starts to contemplate the consequences of what he’s unleashed, and the triumphant roar mutates into the hellish shriek of his victims. When theory collides with the real world, the results can be catastrophic.
Nuclear annihilation isn’t on the table in Barbie, even if one of the Barbies is a physicist. But it, too, sets ideas on a collision course with reality. Barbie Land, where every day is the best day ever, is such an obvious paradise that the Barbies can only assume the real world has reshaped itself to fit their example. Now that we know women can be anything and do anything, surely the real ones have. But our world isn’t easily changed. Men still hold most of the power, although they’re sneakier about how they use it, and the diminishment of obvious obstacles makes it easy to make women feel responsible for their own lack of advancement. As America Ferrera’s Gloria—who works at a desk just outside the meeting room for Mattel’s all-male board—sums it up, “It turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”
While Margot Robbie’s Barbie is absorbing the disappointments of our world, Ryan Gosling’s Ken returns to Barbie Land and puts to work what he’s learned about patriarchy. Soon, the Kens are in control, and the Barbies have forgotten everything but their own names. The living dolls who once held every position of importance now trail the Kens like eager pups, waiting for the opportunity to stroke their egos. But it turns out there’s a simple solution. Since, as Gloria puts it, “it is literally impossible to be a woman,” all it takes to free the Barbies is pointing that out. As soon as they realize there’s no way to be everything that men, or Kens, require of them, they stop trying to meet their demands. “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power!” Barbie coos.
In the real world, women have been pointing out the contradictions of patriarchy since Seneca Falls, but there’s only so much a movie can do, whether or not the primary reason for its existence is the selling of toys. The line is both an acknowledgment and an escape hatch. No movie brought to you by Warner Bros. and Mattel is going to pull down male supremacy in all its forms. But if it weren’t for those corporations, we wouldn’t have Barbie, and Greta Gerwig wouldn’t have woken up this morning as one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. We wouldn’t have seen movie theaters flooded by a sea of pink, or been so powerfully reminded that going to the movies can be an experience of its own. It’s a paradox, but it works.
