At the beginning, Barbenheimer seemed like a joke to some. Rumors of audiences planning a double feature of Oppenheimer and Barbie began weeks before the films hit theaters on July 21, 2023. Film industry expert Robert Mitchell called it “the strangest double bill ever,” two films that seemed to have little in common in either content or target audience.1 Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer positioned itself as a serious, artistic biopic, a historical film about the creator (and creation) of the atomic bomb, shot in color and black and white and showcasing dozens of powerhouse actors. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie promised a nostalgia-drenched pink palette that posed the question: what does it mean if Barbie’s feet go flat? But the pairing fascinated audiences, even as skeptics scoffed, and when opening weekend ended, Barbenheimer had fueled the biggest movie weekend since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.2
The movies aren’t the same—no one ever argued that they would be. But despite their differences, both are fundamentally about possibilities, and about what happens in the wake of drastic world changes. Oppenheimer imagines a recent past dominated by white men who turn their ideas into reality, individuals whose decisions have dramatic, irrevocable impacts on their world and the one we live in today. Gerwig, in contrast, takes viewers on a journey from the feminist utopia of Barbieland to the real world. In both movies, acts of imagination have real, lasting impacts on everyone, whether the movie’s characters–or creators–recognize those impacts or not. But both Barbie and Oppenheimer turned out to be history films in their own ways as well, grappling with the ways viewers engage with the past.3 Oppenheimer goes about this by making an argument about the past, but it’s Barbie that gives audiences space to think about their own ideas of the past—and who gets to make arguments about it.
Films have lives beyond the screen, as critics and everyday moviegoers alike interpret the films they see, creating new (and often conflicting) discourses in the days, months, and years following the release date. Even the most skeptical of critics would agree that the summer of Barbenheimer has been a summer of discourse, for better or worse. Barbie has been hailed for its feminism and criticized as a piece of man-hating, woke propaganda.4 Oppenheimer has been called a masterpiece, but critiqued for not showing the actual impacts of the atomic bomb.5 In India, concerns have emerged as well over the film’s use of the Bhagavad Gita during a sex scene.6 But these interpretations draw on a film’s life before the screen as much as they do on anything seen on the screen. A viewer brings much of themselves to a film, and even their choice to see one film or another, or to see a film at all, is shaped by whether they see a film’s subject matter as worthwhile.
Oppenheimer resides in the realm of Great Man histories, a world where there is no question as to whether the subject’s story should be told, or even that he is the subject of the story. After all, he made An Important Contribution to History. Barbie and Barbie were not given that benefit of the doubt. Despite the fact that so much of the pre-release buzz and so many of the personal conversations leading up to those Barbenheimer viewings centered on the history of Barbie, both cultural and personal, that history wasn’t seen as weighty and important to engage with. In fact, it wasn’t even seen as history. This is because Barbie engages with a subfield of history—women’s history—that has long fought to be seen as legitimate in the public eye, and within the broader field of academic history as well. My own background as a historian of women, gender, and the Cold War era meant that despite Oppenheimer’s position as the “real” historical film of the two, I went into both films with an eye towards the history depicted and how the filmmakers engaged with ideas about the past, especially the areas of interest to me as researcher.7
This summer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the 75th anniversaries of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act and Executive Order 9981 (desegregating the military) in the summer of 1948. Neither of those anniversaries seemed to have anything to do with Oppenheimer, but my interest in those events meant that as a viewer, I came to Oppenheimer thinking about how the film might portray women and people of color.8 I also wondered how the film might address the U.S. government’s mining of uranium on Navajo lands, which began in the 1940s, and the impact of Los Alamos on Hispanic and Indigenous peoples living in the region.9
Coming into the film as a historian and history teacher, rather than a film buff, I wondered what choices Christopher Nolan would make in depicting Oppenheimer’s world of the 1940s and 1950s. Oppenheimer did not act in isolation, and Los Alamos was not the only site of the Manhattan Project. I was curious to see if the women of Oak Ridge and other women in the Manhattan Project might appear. I knew Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt had prominent roles, but I only knew that Blunt was playing Oppenheimer’s wife.10
Because I was curious about women’s roles in particular, I paid attention to their roles in the larger story from the beginning. Blunt appeared early on as Oppenheimer’s (silent) wife. Scenes of Oppenheimer’s education at Cambridge reflected the school’s all-male population at the time. Slowly, women began to appear, particularly as Oppenheimer shifted to schools in Germany and then finally to Berkeley. I noticed that women had no speaking roles in the first 20 minutes of the film. I was particularly surprised to see Nolan cut from those first scenes of women speaking to a sex scene less than a minute later.
The absence of women in classrooms, as well as Kitty Oppenheimer’s silence at her husband’s hearing, reflected a historical fact.11 But the decision to jump from women’s first speaking role to a bedroom scene is not a fact of the historical record. This was at the heart of the observation I tweeted immediately after I saw the movie: “Fun Fact: no women speak until 20 minutes into #Oppenheimer and then within a minute there’s a sex scene.”12 Nolan made a creative choice to center men’s voices for 20 minutes and then to cut straight to a bedroom scene. That choice is less about the times in which Oppenheimer lived; it tells viewers more about how Nolan has chosen to portray history.13
Oppenheimer concludes with a proclamation of irrevocable world change, but Barbie asks viewers to think about the way ideas about gender operates over time and space. Idealized plastic dolls, handed to young girls for the past half-century, provide the foundation for thinking about gender. As the narrator says, “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism have been solved.” That line stopped me short, until I realized that this was exactly what Greta Gerwig meant when she said “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.”14 It’s clear that Gerwig intends the narrator’s line as a joke, especially as Barbie goes on to confront the stark realities of what it means to be a woman—or at least a living Barbie doll—in the “real world”. There, men dominate the conversations and women are objects to be ogled and touched. Oppenheimer ends by asserting: “This is the way the world is now.” Barbie asks the audience: “But does it have to be that way?”
A key individual in Barbie says “Humans have only one ending. Ideas live forever.” But even as Gerwig’s characters grapple with the multiple, impossible meanings of modern womanhood, the film also maintains a message of hope. This is not true of Oppenheimer, of course: Nolan imagines a world that centers white men and their power at the expense of all else.15 Gerwig encourages viewers to imagine what might happen if we remade the world into a far better place, even with all its issues, even for white men.
Oppenheimer mansplains lectures to viewers. Barbie invites viewers to think historically. Together, these films reflect larger debates about what history is and how we should learn about the past. Is history a series of facts about important people and events, to be taken in, lecture-style, as truth? Or, is history about understanding the things that have created our society and culture, and thinking about how those things work, engaging critically with ideas and their legacies? One of these approaches tells audiences to consume history unquestioningly, while the other invites audiences to learn from history to create a better future.
Does that 20 minutes of silence in Oppenheimer matter? Does it matter that Barbie, in contrast, brings in Ken’s voice at 7 minutes, 35 seconds?16 That’s really up to each viewer to decide, just as Nolan and Gerwig made choices to create those gendered silences. Ultimately, both filmmakers present truth in their own ways—but only Gerwig invites us to think about what could be if we are brave enough to keep speaking up and showing up and refusing to be silenced.
- Claire Moses, “Mark Your Calendars: ‘Barbenheimer’ Is Coming,” New York Times, 28 June 2023.
- Barbie tallied the year’s biggest opening weekend sales ($162M). Oppenheimer sold about half the amount, but still exceeded expectations at just over $82M in the U.S. Rebecca Rubin, “‘Barbenheimer’ Even Bigger Than Expected: ‘Barbie’ Sources to $162 Milloin, ‘Oppenheimer’ Jumps to $82 Million,” Variety, 24 July 2023.
- Nearly three decades ago, historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen observed that television and film were a common way for Americans to engage with the past. Their project, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, surveyed more than a thousand people from diverse American backgrounds to understand how Americans engage with the past. Rosenzweig and Thelen found that in a 12-month period, more than 80% of Americans experienced the past through watching films or television. In 2001, historian Paul Weinstein acknowledged this data, arguing that “We should acknowledge film and television as the great history educators of our time.” Roy Rosenzweig, “Professional Historians and Popular Historymakers: Popular Uses of History in the United States,” Perspectives, 1 May 2000; Weinstein, Paul B. “Movies as the Gateway to History: The History and Film Project.” The History Teacher 35, no. 1 (2001): 27–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3054508.
- Chloe Laws, “Barbie is an extremely pro-men’ film – and yes, men are still mad about it,” Glamour Magazine UK, 24 July 2023.
- Rachel Leishman, “The Absolutely Horrific ‘Oppenheimer’ Takes are Detracting From Genuine Criticism,” The Mary Sue, 25 July 2023.
- Sarakshi Rai, “‘Oppenheimer’ sees pushback in India over sex scene that quotes Bhagavad Gita,” The Hill, 24 July 2023.
- It also meant that I went into both Oppenheimer and Barbie thinking I might share my thoughts, grounded in my expertise, with others who were having conversations about the films.
- Barbenheimer captured my imagination because I am both a historian of the Cold War era and of women’s history. My professional training and experiences as a historian and history teacher made me well prepared to understand both films’ context. This also attuned me to particular things that most audiences probably didn’t care about. In early July I surveyed both films’ IMDB cast listings and tweeted that Oppenheimer had a cast that appeared to be 19% female (out of 115 cast members), while Barbie’s cast list was 61% female (out of 70 cast members). Neither of these facts surprised me: I was merely curious to see the breakdown and went looking for it.
- “‘Yellow Dirt’: The Legacy of Navajo Uranium Mines,” NPR: Talk of the Nation, 22 October 2010; “Civilian Displacement: Los Alamos, NM,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, 26 July 2017.
- I didn’t know if Pugh might be a female scientist in the Manhattan Project or someone else entirely. Any of these subjects might plausibly appear in a movie about Oppenheimer creating the atomic bomb. For that matter, since the bombs were then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it would also be reasonable for such a movie to consider the impact the bombs had on those places. Significantly, though, these were subjects that I personally found interesting and wondered whether Nolan might have as well.
- Women could not earn Cambridge degrees until 1948 and were not admitted to Christ’s College— Oppenheimer’s college—until 1978: https://alumni.christs.cam.ac.uk/womens-40th-anniversary-. Nolan took inspiration from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus. The authors note Kitty’s presence in the opening hours of Oppenheimer’s 1954 security board hearing. See American Prometheus, 499.
- I followed this with an observation about the limited representation of Black Americans in the film. Both tweets contained factual observations that I simply wanted to record briefly. They drew no conclusions, nor did I have the opportunity to follow up on either tweet in detail before the first tweet went viral with more than 22.4 million views and thousands of responses that drew their own conclusions about what I was saying. See, for instance, Joe Hutchison, “Feminist academic slams Oppenheimer…”, Daily Mail, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12327307/Feminist-academic-slams-Oppenheimer-no-women-speak-20-minutes.html.
- Others have also remarked on how Nolan used women in Oppenheimer. Noting the contributions women made to the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, TN, and other sites, journalist Radhika Seth writes: “I’m not asking for a rewriting of history in which these women are placed at the center of this seismic event, but could a three-hour-long film not have dedicated a few minutes to giving these figures even a minimal level of believability, when it lavishes so much time and attention on Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, and Josh Hartnett’s Ernest Lawrence?” Radhika Seth, “Justice for the Women of Oppenheimer,” Vogue, 22 July 2023.
- Willa Paskin, “Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job,” The New York Times Magazine, 11 July 2023.
- Jason Guerrasio, “Christopher Nolan says the ending of ‘Oppenheimer’ drives home the idea that we now live in a world created by the father of the atomic bomb and ‘we always will’,” Insider, 21 July 2023.
- Given my tweet about the 20 minutes of women’s silence in Oppenheimer, I walked into Barbie with a stopwatch. I retweeted my findings with my original tweet, this time pointing out that it takes 7 minutes, 35 seconds for men to speak in Barbie – and there are no sex scenes. While the tweet garnered a bit of backlash, similar to what I’d experienced the day before, people paid far less attention to it. Instead, in the days since I tweeted about Oppenheimer, I’ve continued to get hate mail from men and women, questioning my credentials, insulting my appearance, and telling me in no uncertain terms that I should just shut up. It’s arguably par for the course in social media these days, or perhaps just confirmation that Gerwig’s depiction of the real world is really not off base.
