Meditations on Barbenheimer
An exploration of the phenomenon of the theatrical juggernaut combination of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer"
It was a strange opening weekend.
The release of two seemingly opposite kind of films both taking the box office by storm, beating all exceptions. One film was a somber biopic about the father of the atomic bomb and the other a pop culture fantasy about an iconic doll. The films, Oppenheimer and Barbie, miraculously were not competing with each other but were becoming an impromptu double feature for the audiences...a phenomenon that quickly became the meme Barbenheimer.
But on closer inspection, these two films may actually have a lot more in common than they appear to have at first glance...
As Hollywood was reeling from the incursions of AI into the creative domain and shutting down from industry wide strikes, these two films defied the current successful box office conventions of sequels and remakes by both being uniquely original works.
Both are integral works that take us deep into the multiple dimensions of their storyworlds and integrate them into an evolutionary journey toward a bigger picture perspective.
Both films at heart are anti-war films; one diving into the undercurrents of the existential threat of nuclear war and the other a trojan horse projected into the heart of the culture war.
When combined in a double feature these two films act as a kind of metamodern cocktail of sincere-irony potentially easing our journey into our collective shadows which they are exploring.
Like the classic movies of 1939 that collectively foreshadowed the coming of World War II, are these two works prescient echoes of the rising tides of World War III and are they trying to help us “wake up” before its too late?
Barbie asks us to wake up to our objectification of ourselves, each other and the world and to go beyond the polarizations and warring extremes of our ideologies, including the battles between the sexes and between wokeness and anti-wokeness.
And Oppenheimer asks us to wake up to the gap between our technologies and our capacity to use them in healthy life affirming ways.
Essentially both are films about the evolution of consciousness itself…and calling us to go beyond the war within and between our hearts and minds.
Here is our video podcast diving deeper into "Oppenheimer": https://open.substack.com/pub/markallankaplan/p/oppenheimer-and-humanitys-first-existential?r=216lnq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Here is our video podcast diving deeper into "Barbie": https://open.substack.com/pub/markallankaplan/p/barbie-a-trojan-horse-into-the-heart?r=216lnq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web