Bobby NorCal vs. Barbie SoCal
Which is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?
That’s the urgent question raised by 2023’s great cinematic contest between “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie.”
Sure, these are entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. But both movies are also global nightmares full of warnings about the damage that Northern and Southern California can do when we send our ideas out into the world.
“Oppenheimer” is the Northern California nightmare. While much of Christopher Nolan’s film takes place in New Mexico, the most important moments occur at Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor from 1929 to 1943 There he meets the Manhattan Project’s military chief, Leslie Groves, and collaborates physicist Ernest Lawrence (the Lawrence of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab).
In fact, the lab in New Mexico that produced the nuclear bombs was managed by the University of California.
The Manhattan Project was a quintessential Bay Area enterprise. Very smart people from around the world came together to create a disruptive technology, without fully appreciating its perils and complications until it’s too late.
Among the nuclear age’s commercial products was Barbie (born in 1959). She, and the new film about her, are Los Angeles nightmares.
The director Greta Gerwig, a Sacramento kid who shares her home city’s loathing of L.A., pins the damage that Barbie has done on Southern California, where she was invented and manufactured.
The central joke of the film is that when Barbie leaves the seeming perfection of Barbieland for “Reality,” that reality is L.A. Amidst the city’s most unreal Westside precincts Barbie learns of the impossible expectations her example places on women.
Barbie’s would-be boyfriend Ken, who is confined to the beach in Barbieland, discovers the possibilities of patriarchy after he falls in love with the phallic office towers of Century City. When Ken takes those Southern California values back to Barbieland, that utopia of feminism collapses. Soon, the various Ken dolls have imposed a bizarro dictatorship of men, who subjugate the various Barbies, who’d previously served as president and controlled the Supreme Court.
It might be wrong to think too hard about a movie as addled and antic as “Barbie,” but the film does reflect the Hollywood work realities of the women who made the movie. Gerwig, star-producer Margot Robbie, and their colleagues have had to navigate an entertainment industry dominated by dimwitted Kens. The rest of L.A., thank goodness, is a bit more egalitarian, as Mayor Karen Bass and the all-female Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors can tell you.
Both films, however, feel more than a little soulless. “Barbie,” for all its righteous feminism, is a corporate vehicle for selling dolls. It misses opportunities to make light of the cynicism of this American moment, when corporations try to talk like social movements, and social movements often behave like corporations. The anxieties of Barbie are firmly upper-middle-class and higher; none of the women or men of the film worry about what worries most Angelenos — scratching out a living in a too-expensive place.
“Oppenheimer” is even more callous. It’s a film about nuclear weapons that doesn’t show their victims. We never see the human horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is why the film can’t get screened in Japan), or the damage people endured because of their proximity to the testing of such weapons, from the South Pacific to Central Asia.
This distance from real-life human concerns is what makes both films so unsettling — and so convincing as apocalyptic documents.
Together, they offer a two-part scenario for the end of humanity. First, we grow divided and isolated from each other because of the unattainable lifestyles and cultural expectations that Southern California creates and promotes. Second, we kill ourselves with the technologies masterminded by Northern California.