I didn’t realise that people weren’t all fully serious about doing Barbenheimer double features until I started asking my friends if they would do one with me. “I am almost thirty, I am not sitting in a cinema for five hours on a single day,” one said. “Are you insane? I hate opening weekends,” said another. Here I was, thinking that everybody wanted to do this with me, like some kind of fool.
I was sullenly committed to shepherding myself through this experience alone, till one kind friend enthusiastically agreed to spend a Friday night in theatres with me. She bought us matching Barbenheimer shirts and sorted tickets. It was a fantastic idea – despite the double feature being somewhat of a meme, I saw plenty of people in the cinema clearly intending to watch them one after another. We all had the right idea.
Here’s the ideal Barbenheimer schedule: Oppenheimer, dinner break, potentially a drink or two, then Barbie, then party. I skipped the drinks, but my watch was still very enjoyable. If you swap these around, you may have to go home after your double feature to have a cry – Oppenheimer is a thoroughly harrowing experience that left me sobbing in the back row of the cinema. (To be fair, I’m very sensitive.) The film is full of spectacle, heartstopping sound design, and pain.
Much of the film revolves around J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work on the atomic bomb, but more importantly, it portrays his grappling with the magnitude of the horror he’s abetted after the weapon was used. He’s unable to forgive himself, and the audience is forced to reckon with whether it’s even possible or morally right to forgive something so deeply evil and unforgivable. It’s an astonishing work of cinema from Christopher Nolan, and my new favourite movie of his, but this is definitely not the movie to watch last.
I say this because Barbie is similar, but obviously, significantly different. Barbie is a spectacle in an entirely different way, portraying a world filled with colour. Barbie has an existential crisis when she starts thinking about death, but the difference here is that Greta Gerwig does a wonderful job of resolving this. Barbie realises the human world is full of strife and terrible to women, and struggles to come to terms with it. Despite this, she sees beauty in the world, so much that it brings her to tears.
I cried at this, too, finding myself extremely moved by the shared experience of knowing that the world can suck for people like me, but that it's filled with love nonetheless. I thought of Oppenheimer’s visualisation of the universe as I watched Barbie notice light filtering gorgeously through the leaves of a tree, as she watched a couple arguing on a bench, as she told an old woman she was beautiful and got the reply, “I know it.” The world is full of wonder, despite also being full of true horror. What a beautiful, tragic thought, to know that the two coexist in this way and we have to navigate that every day.
The humour of Barbenheimer lies in the juxtaposition of two movies with very different themes and aesthetics, but after watching them both, I’ve found that they’re not that different after all. One’s about the horror of war and the other is about a doll discovering the real world, but like many good films, they get at the heart of what it means to be human. Living in this world means pain and confronting the evil in the world, but also finding reasons to persist and find joy in living as well. So if you don’t want to spend five hours in the cinema, that’s fair – but you should still watch both movies. You might even have a little sniffle like I did.