Canfield: I didn’t. To keep with your metaphor, I wanted Barbie to feel like an aperitif—and it did. Which is not to say the movie is weightless, by any means. But laughing with such an energized crowd for two hours, as the movie zigs and zags with Gerwigian abandon, made me feel excited about movies and the theatrical experience.
And then Oppenheimer sprints out of the gate—relentlessly and, I’d argue, brilliantly—for its first two hours. Movies! Wow! But without spoiling anything too directly: Once that bomb went off and Nolan went for something a little different (Sorkin-y?) with his last act, it kind of abruptly dawned on me that I had been watching movies for four hours, and still had a lot of men-talking-in-rooms left to go. I guess this is my way of asking how you felt about Oppenheimer and what the transition, as it were, felt like.
Murphy: The transition between the two films was a little rocky, to be honest. Having just spent three hours in the psyche of the man who created the atomic bomb, I was definitely in a more serious, contemplative headspace going into Barbie then I normally would have been. This led me to overthink certain aspects of Barbie, at least at the beginning, because of a lack of internal logic within the film. (Barbie is malfunctioning because her owner is sad? Humans can go into Barbie Land? There’s a liminal kitchen in the Mattel office?) Of course, the logistical details of how one gets from Barbie Land to the human world don’t really matter (it’s a movie about a toy!), but at times I found Barbie harder to follow than Oppenheimer. I know that’s kind of a crazy thing to say about the man who made the famously easy-to-follow films Tenet and Inception.
I also think because the narrative and emotional arc Nolan created for Oppenheimer was so clear, I was maybe a little unmoored and unprepared for Gerwig’s absurd, existential, and somewhat heady take on Barbie. There were a lot of themes to grapple with in Barbie that I did not necessarily expect to be confronted by! I found myself thinking about gender, society, mothers and daughters, corporate greed, depression and mental health, and asking myself a lot of questions. What does it mean to be a woman? A man? A human being? Who is the villain of the narrative?
Canfield: Patriarchy? Society? … Mattel? But yeah: Nolan is hardly a dry director, so the idea that he’d present something too dense and discursive to end a double feature on never quite landed with me. Gerwig, meanwhile, is a filmmaker overflowing with ideas and a very particular point of view. I both really liked Barbie and spent most of the movie trying to figure it out (even as that middle stretch gets pretty clunky).
I saw the two films in Westwood, in two beautiful old Regency movie houses across the street from each other. I may have gone pretty hard on the brunch mimosas before walking into Barbie too…so I’m not sure how that impacts my perspective here. But anyway, it made for a good time. As did following Oppenheimer with a weirdly satisfying evening at…CPK. (Surely Nolan would approve of a BBQ chicken pizza after an atomic bomb?) All of which is to say: Tell me about what really matters, Chris. Tell me about your Barbenheimer day around Barbenheimer.