The Barbenheimer Guide to Creativity.
An-end-of the summer pause from our "White Paper" series to consider the blockbusters of our epoch.
We’ve gotten lots of great feedback on the series of “White Papers” on individual artists’ markets this past month, and they shall resume in September—but, as we do annually on my birthday, I’m taking the day off from thinking about The Market to pursue a flight of fancy—one which I’ve gotten a lot of requests for! If you’re not one of those readers, come back next week for more brass tacks and hard facts—but for now, it’s a cage match between two of my favorite directors, Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan—and what they can teach us about the artist’s life! (Spoilers in the footnotes only).
Setting Barbie against Oppenheimer started as a good joke—the juxtaposition is just too perfect. Christopher Nolan’s super-serious, ice-cold puzzle-thrillers may be the most mansplained movies of all time—Gerwig doesn’t name-check Nolan as she skewers Bro Culture in the final act of her doll-land feel-fest, but Nolan should sit atop the pile of Man-Cave ephemera with The Godfather, Pavement, and the Snydercut of The Justice League. Barbie, even more than usual Gerwig entries, embraces everything that Nolan avoids as a director: heavy green-screen, long landings, and honest narrators telling you what’s happening beyond the visible. The two movies seem to fit perfectly into one another’s teeth—almost too perfectly.
Gerwig is a lithe composer of delicate isometries, and the dichotomies upon which Barbie is built are successful because of their subtlety. Ken, one of the film’s antagonists, isn’t contrasted to Barbie as the male equivalent, but as an aggrieved subordinate within Barbieland. It isn’t Barbie vs. Transformers,1 and Ken’s inability to understand the nuance of this imbalanced relationship is what drives him. Right from the top of the movie, as Helen Mirren dryly describes the delusions of Barbieland’s bubble, you know that this is not going to be a simple rah-rah “girls rule” story, but at least partly a critique of that one-note march.
Nolan, too, is not much of a “message” movie-maker, let alone a proselytizer. Any moral core in his movies has to be excavated at great effort, and it’s rarely what it appears to be at first glance. While his movies have a lot of testosterone splashing around, it’s not clear, at least to me, that Nolan endorses any of it.
But weirdly, Gerwig and Nolan navigate the same terrain this outing: the strange process of shaking off the puppet-strings of causality and becoming a prime mover. Strains of Pygmalion problems in Barbie, more Pinocchio in Nolan, but the Oddcouple pairing of these two directors shares more than it lets on: an exploration of breaking free from what you were created to do in order to do some creating of your own.
It’s a fundamental question for the artist: how can we create when we are ourselves a product?
II. Barbie, Visionary.
It’s an ultra-femme land where everything is pink, but it’s also a place where feelings are limited to a narrow band of confidence and enthusiasm—Barbie is a cinematic hour into her crisis when she learns to cry for the first time. Her story begins when her feelings falter for the first time—her relentless confidence is mottled now with thoughts of death, and she becomes unglued from the high-achieving society of Barbies, Kens and Allen around her. So begins a quest that ends in self-actualization, with many detours and attempts to turn back to pink plastic positivity.
This is Chris Nolan’s favorite sort of protagonist—maybe his only protagonist: a visionary who sees a world that no one else can. Nolan has bent his career around this character, Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception,2 Al Pacino in Insomnia,3 Guy Pearce in Memento,4 Christian Bale in Batman5: a higher voice speaks to him and him alone, separating him from the rest of the rule-following society. Pacino just knows that he’s found the killer, all evidence to the contrary, in Insomnia; in Following, Jeremy Theobald knows he is not a criminal in spite of all the crimes; Batman knows that his is the just course, despite contributing to society’s collapse through his vigilante, Big Brother-like tactics,6 and chronic destruction of civic infrastructure.
And this is how Nolan’s visionary is different from Gerwig’s: Nolan’s always struggles to prevent himself from getting what he wants—his higher vision is a self-imposed obstacle. Barbie doesn’t want the visions, but finally embraces them and transcends. Nolan’s hero clings to the visions, as they destroy him.
III. The Wizard’s Mojo Dojo Casa House.
It’s probably only fair to tell you now that I’m engaged in the most mansplain-y boys-club activity possible: defending my boy Chris no matter what he says or does—I haven’t even seen his new movie! Friends have called it “excruciating” and “over three hours long,” and I just haven’t been able to convince myself that three hours of Nolan will be more enriching than three hours of sleep, and as long as that calculus holds true, I may never see it! Nolan makes a different genre every time, but it’s always the same protagonist with the same damned problems, and I’ll be shocked if the eleventh film in the extended Nolanverse isn’t the same as the first ten.7
I did see Barbie, and if there’s one take away from the prize-fight faux-clash between these two films, mine is that these are two really great directors making movies far outside the hitsville model, and after Barbie made a billion dollars and Oppenheimer did whatever it did in revenue,8 no one is going to say ‘no’ to whatever weird and beautiful movie either one of them proposes to do next.
As for the fundamental questions of the artist, Barbie ends with a beautifully Wizard of Oz encounter between the living doll and her creator, Rhea Perlman’s Ruth Handler. Like Dorothy, Barbie asks her wizard for permission—that asking may be the last vestige of her life as a product—before being reassured that she needn’t ask for what is already hers.9 Nolan has a similar view on the creative spirit: it’s hard to say where it comes from, but ultimately the obstacles to creativity are of our own devising.
The only one who can give you permission is you.
Thanks for indulging this flight of fancy, and sorry I didn’t do the required reading. I’ll get to it before the end of the semester, I promise.
Jonathan
But now that I mention it, that nightmare franchise is probably already in the works, right?
Leo has to go into his own subconscious to silence the voices that keep him from visiting his kids. Dude, just go see your kids, man!
He can’t sleep because he’s in the arctic circle where the sun never sets because he framed an innocent man in LA and it takes Maura Tierney’s thoughtful hotelier to point out that it’s actually really dark when you draw the shades so the problem really is you.
Remember?! Guy Pearce killed his wife and became a contract killer for the mob and then took steps to keep himself from ever figuring out that he was his own antagonist.
I haven’t mentioned Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, but it’s my favorite Nolan in part because of how unclear it is who the protagonist is. Bale is the tragic hero but Jackman is the Nolanian damned hero — but those roles are obscured by a plot more obscure than Inception. It is the only Nolan movie I have cried during.
It’s such a pile of evil deeds for Batman: in Begins, he literally destroys the commuter rail his father built, before burning down his father’s house; in Dark Knight, he does a full Gitmo, with international kidnapping, warrantless wiretaps, and covering up a friend’s serial killing. When his city is finally a lawless wasteland by the end of the trilogy, it’s almost hard to keep Batman in your focus as anyone’s hero, but that’s the magic of self-deception.
Ooh, I forgot Interstellar, another movie about a dad who would rather go through a black hole and hide in a bookshelf than visit his kid.
$777.1 million by August 28. Keep at it Chris, you’ll get there!
Nolan has tried his hand at interpreting the 1939 classic, cribbing the black-and-white/technicolor technique in Memento and rendering a version of its ending in Inception.