Queen Barbie Vs King Oppenheimer: Both Films Offer Lessons in Gender Equality

I am late, ‘cos I have been processing. Watching Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in Barbie and Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer nearly again to again was an expertise. It gave me, and I am guessing lots of us, loads to course of.

And most of us should not consultants, not movie critics, not totally sorted about feminism and patriarchy, not historians, we have now little or no data about quantum physics or splitting the atom, nor are most of us psychologists or sociologists.

And but, we must always have our say. In any case, Greta Gerwig and Chris Nolan made these superior films for us. Additionally, it will be totally comprehensible if every of us walked away from these movies with a take of our personal. This is mine.

For me, even because the movies are vastly totally different in each approach, they’re factors at which they converge. Each have centered on a few of greatest themes of the twentieth century. Oppenheimer focuses on the atom bomb, and thru it, on the human means to unleash horrific destruction by itself, and mankind’s absurd motion in direction of growing the capability of destroying itself. Barbie talks about consumerism, and patriarchy, and the place of an iconic doll and the colour pink within the understanding of feminism. However curiously, these are some essential overlaps of their themes, which we could have missed if the 2 movies had not launched on the identical day.

Since we discover ourselves grappling and obsessing with them effectively into the twenty first century, its apparent that even at a societal degree, these themes from the earlier century are lot to course of, and stay related immediately. 

Barbie, with the subversive alternative of Margot Robbie within the title function, units up the Barbie doll phenomenon as one thing that inadvertently challenged patriarchy. It recognized and blew up the large buying energy of the feminine client. And with all the opposite avatars of Barbie, from ‘President’ Barbie to ‘Nobel Prize Winner’ Barbie, it additionally created a way of girls succeeding as a gender in twentieth century.

Greta Gerwig then very cleverly busts this fantasy, by revealing {that a} Barbie-dom that is completely Barbie-driven and Barbie-centric, through which Ken and all Kens are secondary, is definitely a gender-inverted mirror picture of the ‘actual world’, which is completely male-centric and male-driven. The purpose is pushed residence additional when Ken, performed brilliantly by Ryan Gosling, phases a coup, dethrones Barbie and units up a Ken-ruled, Ken-centric, Ken-dom.

How does this tie in with ‘Oppenheimer’? Nicely, to my thoughts, Los Alamos was nearly a Ken-dom. Virtually each one of many atomic scientists and quantum physicists and mathematicians gathered there by Robert Oppenheimer was male. Whereas there was the motivation of preventing fascism, preventing Nazi anti-semitism, it was additionally a boys’ membership. The race to separate the atom, and the race to construct the A-bomb, as proven by Nolan, additionally struck me as an all-male, narcissistic contest, through which the world-altering penalties of their actions had been nearly consciously ignored, in order that they’d merely not are available in the way in which, till the ‘race’ was received. At which level, because the movie powerfully drives residence, it’s far too late.

Christopher Nolan additionally chooses to present us a glimpse of Oppenheimer’s private life, the place once more there’s a trace of narcissism. His marriage to Kitty Puening, performed within the movie by Emily Blunt, had its controversy. He had an affair along with her whereas she was married, which led to her divorce, after which she married Oppenheimer. We’re additionally proven that Oppenheimer continued his on-off affair with Communist activist Jean Tatlock, even after his marriage to Kitty. Jean Tatlock suffered from despair and died by suicide in 1944.

We additionally see Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer being given the choice of selecting pacifism greater than as soon as earlier than and in the course of the begin of the Manhattan Mission that he headed in Los Alamos. However for the higher good, and maybe for private glory, he pressed on. And he ensured that his hand-picked all-star scientists’ crew stayed in line too, regardless of lots of them questioning the motives of the challenge, and having a number of episodes of self-doubt. We see an Oppenheimer happy with profitable the ‘atomic race’, applauding his crew even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been worn out, and seemingly savouring his standing as ‘father of the atomic bomb’, and seeing his face on the quilt of TIME journal.

Was the world then run and ruined by a boys’ membership? Is warfare a by-product of patriarchy? Was the nuclear weapons arms race and the chilly warfare among the many crudest examples of poisonous masculinity taken to its extremes? There are various who would argue, sure. After all, there have at all times been different forces at play. Additionally, within the a long time which have adopted, we have now had a couple of girls leaders, and a few of them have proven nearly the identical urge for food for violence and destruction. So, nobody is pedaling the outdated argument about how girls ‘nurture’, whereas males ‘destroy’. That is too simplistic.

However what can maybe be mentioned, is that each movies, ‘Barbie’ as a key message, and ‘Oppenheimer’ as further meals for thought, remind us that gender equality is central to our lives, for us as people, and as a society. A ‘Barbie-dom’ form of world isn’t emancipating. It is a Xerox of patriarchy, however in reverse. And an ‘Oppenheimer-dom’ lays naked the self-destructive endgame of a male-led world – on this case a mindless contest of constructing atomic bombs and nuclear warheads that might destroy the world many occasions over.

What this world must be, is neither Barbie’s nor Oppenheimer’s. It must be genuinely respectful of, and pushed by, each gender.

(Rohit Khanna is a journalist, commentator and video storyteller. He has been Managing Editor at The Quint, Government Producer of Investigations & Particular Tasks at CNN-IBN, and is a 2-time Ramnath Goenka award winner)

Disclaimer: These are the non-public opinions of the writer.