It’s beginning to look a lot like the 1950s. No two films recall that era more than Barbie and Oppenheimer, both opening this weekend. Despite these films being completely different in every way imaginable, they have captivated the internet as a reach back in time to a forgotten world, just as the sci-fi movies of the 1950s reached forward to a world they could never know.
There is something about the two of them as Romeo and Juliet on the eve of the apocalypse that has inspired the internet to reimagine a whole different movie called Barbenheimer:
There is sexual tension in these mashups, a world of opposites that we humans find alluring. Yet, don’t go looking for that in the Barbie movie. It is an example of not just “woke capitalism,” Mattel attempting to rebrand for the socially conscious Gen-Z, but adheres to the strict rules of the New Woke Order, that is, to reverse the social hierarchy.
No feminist icon would be caught dead in a typical rom-com now. Writer/director Greta Gerwig has already built a name on strong female characters with complicated relationships with men. It wasn’t too far of a leap to imagine a Barbie without a Ken. Oh, there are Kens. But these Kens are not what one would call heteronormative.
Here, men — straight men, mostly white men — are at the very bottom of the pyramid. At the top are the marginalized Barbies. Poor stereotypical Barbie, a thin, pretty blonde amid a culture war, must find her way through this new power structure. Awash in confusion, Barbie is hit with an existential crisis. Who is she? What is she? Where does she belong?
She must escape to the world of humans to find out. There, she discovers the old hierarchy — the dreaded patriarchy — wherein men have all of the power, and not only that, somehow, in the wokiest of progressive cities, Los Angeles, all of the men behave as though they’ve been spit out of the 1980s, long before the Me Too movement scared the living daylights out of them.
It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek and not taken literally, but all the same, it reflects the alignment of power across all cultural, educational, corporate and political institutions hoping to not just hold onto their utopian society built under Obama, but force all of America to go along with it. In its own way, Barbie is merely a delivery device for the status quo.
That brings us back to the 1950s. Coming out of World War II was traumatic for the entire world. It’s not surprising that America would shore up its patriotism, nuclear families, and shared reality. Television was the delivery device for most people, but that easily recognizable Americana was reflected in movies too.
By the 1960s, the utopia of the 1950s would not exist as the counter-culture revolution would fracture the cohesive whole. Too many people were left behind. Too many people were suffering. Too many people wanted a different kind of America, a freer one. The Conservative Eisenhower administration would give way to the liberal Kennedy administration. The Kennedys in government, so young, so handsome, so charismatic would help ignite a revolution.
It wouldn’t be until 2008, when Obama rose to power, that another alignment across all major institutions would begin to take shape. Once that alignment was threatened, however, that’s when things took a darker turn. They would have to fight for their survival. And when utopias have to fight against unseen existential threats, that’s when they become authoritarian.
That’s why Barbie is getting not just a massive publicity push, but is also wormed into politics and media — because now it’s been rebranded as “feminist.” Here is the set of The View turning into Barbie:
And here is Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer getting in on it:
Barbie would be genuinely funny, instead of just kind of funny, had the filmmakers been allowed to satirize the Left. But of course, it is verboten. So they aim most of their jokes at the only safe and available targets: men.
The unintended consequence is that the men steal the show because they are allowed to be complex, imperfect, and, therefore, funny. They can be failures. They can be mean. They can speak hard truths without fear of judgment. They’re already on the lowest rung. How much worse can it get? By contrast, the women shrink into the background because they do have to be perfect. And, therefore, boring.
Despite their continued implementation of self-aware jokes, they know they can’t touch the elephant in the room because no one can. It isn’t for lack of material. No group in my lifetime is more deserving of mockery than the self-righteous, sanctimonious, uptight Left.
The “plus-sized Barbie,” the “trans-Barbie,” the “Black President Barbie,” The “disabled Barbie…” all should be making jokes about their specific “types” like the Kens do and how that traps them for all time. It is another unintended commentary on the Left, where people are defined only by their cultural or gender identity.
As we watch the “stereotypical typical Barbie” played by Margot Robbie, refashioned as “self-hating Barbie,” lose herself in Barbie's world, her former empire, it’s hard not to see it as a parallel with what is happening in American culture now.
Gerwig has made a movie about herself but has no place for herself in the story. Her protagonist, Barbie, is sidelined at the end and “de-centered” from the narrative just to ensure the marginalized Barbies save themselves. No wonder Barbie is a teary-eyed mess.
As with most things on the Left, Barbie isn’t really for kids; if it is, it is rushing them toward something they, yet again, aren’t ready for.
Have You No Decency?
It’s hard not to watch what happens in our government every day, not in the Barbie Land America, but on the outside, where the dissidents and abandoned citizens fight for the country they love, just as J. Robert Oppenheimer had to fight in 1954 for the country he loved, a country that had turned its back on him, accused him of being a traitor and revoking his security clearance.
The fear of dissent now seems to revolve mostly around the unseen menace of racism that the Left sees everywhere and in everything. But when you boil it down, it really just means what being a Communist sympathizer meant in 1954 — wrong think at the wrong time.
1947-Truman issues the "Truman Doctrine," committing the U.S. to contain world communism.
1949-U.S. begins prosecution of Communist Party leaders for conspiracy to overthrow the government. They were found guilty of violating the Smith Act, which criminalized plans to overthrow the government.
Early 1950s—McCarthyism at high tide—hundreds of actors, teachers, and government officials lose their jobs; Increased military spending as U.S. fights Korean War.
1953—Ethel and Julius Rosenberg executed for selling atomic secrets to USSR; Korean War ends.
1954-Eisenhower signs the Communist Control Act.
”The American people are determined to protect themselves and their institutions against any organization in their midst which, purporting to be a political party within the normally accepted meaning, is actually a conspiracy dedicated to the violent overthrow of our entire form of government.”1954-Oppenheimer is persecuted by the government and stripped of his security clearance.
1954—Four Puerto Rican nationalists open fire on the floor of the House of Representatives from the spectators' gallery, injuring five members, one seriously. They were convicted of “seditious conspiracy,” but were freed by Jimmy Carter in 1979.
1954-Edward R. Murrow publicly humiliates Senator McCarthy.
1954--Joseph Welch says to McCarthy, “Have you no decency?”
1954--President Eisenhower quietly begins campaign to discredit McCarthy.
1954—Army-McCarthy hearings lead the Senate to strip McCarthy of his power.
1956—The liberal-leaning Warren Court’s 1956 ruling that mere advocacy of revolution was insufficient grounds to convict, the U.S. government ended their prosecution of Communists for Party membership alone.
When power aligns across all major institutions, as it did in post-WW2 America, and as it has done now, censorship becomes a widely accepted practice across those same institutions to preserve unity.
For example, at the same time as the campaign launch to rebrand Barbie as a “feminist icon” and give every woman a voice, Eventbrite canceled a Let Women Speak event, calling it “hate speech”:
No media outlets will report on this, that’s nothing new. We’ve become numb to their deafening silence whenever a story breaks that is inconvenient for them, just like they will ignore yet another horrifying Congressional hearing wherein the Democrats yet again embarrass themselves on camera.
Every time we’ve reached our “have you no decency” moment with the Democrats, they somehow find a whole new bottom. Ben Shapiro’s analysis of the RFK Jr. testimony is spot-on.
“There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer wasn’t thinking about what kinds of people he could be friends with, what kinds of women he could have relationships with, what kinds of books he could read or causes he could support as he came of age in a free country.
It’s not that different from how so many of us lived our lives freely having no idea our government and so many institutions would go along with interrogating our past to punish us now.
Yet cultural alignment often means there is nowhere to turn, which is what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954. He had to live with their punishment to revoke his security clearance, charges they did not vacate until 2022.
Eisenhower had the good sense, and the courage, to see that Senator McCarthy was weakening America’s unity in the America of the 1950s. Paranoia was everywhere. Even I Love Lucy, whose early associations with the Communist party meant her career would have gone up in smoke had J. Edgar Hoover not called her on air to tell Americans she wasn’t a Communist.
Eisenhower’s efforts to bring down McCarthy helped end the hysteria in 1954. But who will rescue us today? When does any of it end? How bad will it have to get? Or worse, what has become of us in the meantime?
What would we do if confronted with not just an Adolf Hitler, but an entire Nazi army ready to overtake the world while flying high on meth? Who could have predicted such a thing? Who could have prepared for it? Lucky for us, and our allies, we had prepared because we raised men like the generals of WWII, Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower, and scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer.
We were a country that rewarded strength and masculinity. Our country always encouraged the best and the brightest to rise to the top. It’s hard now to look at ourselves as anything other than a nation in decline.
In attempting to cling to the utopian vision of the Obama coalition, there has been a united effort to push for equity, not high achievement. Yet that ideology, even with the best of intentions, exists in a world free of fascist dictators like Hitler. We have an administration now that has been at war with its own people going on seven years now, all because they dared to challenge their power.
Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Oppenheimer, based on the book American Prometheus, is not an easy sit. Many people call it a “slog” and too confusing. It isn’t like Sound of Freedom, which is a film I could recommend to anyone. Oppenheimer is only for those interested in filmmaking and the subject.
Clocking in at three hours, Nolan never slows down to explain to the audience who and what is what. He moves quickly through the dense plot, building up the suspense as it goes along. He fills it with beautifully surreal images to reflect what Oppenheimer can see in his mind’s eye.
The film centers around the relationship between Oppie and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), who are both involved in building the bomb, but their relationship fractures when Oppie wants to stop further development of the hydrogen bomb and to slow or stop the arms race, and Strauss wants to push forward with it. Strauss, who always resented Oppenheimer, orchestrates his demise.
This is not a story with a happy ending. Oppenheimer’s life is a tragedy. His personal life and his career were filled with chaos and disappointments, one after the other. And yet, somehow, in the pages of the book about him and in this film, we have rediscovered an American hero at exactly the right time, at least those of us who live as he did, as an outsider.
It is not just the reminder of the abundance of nukes we’re all sitting on as tensions heat up around the world, but also of what fear and paranoia can do when power is aligned at the top across so many institutions at once.
Nolan films the scenes from Strauss’ POV in black and white and Oppie’s in color. Imagine seeing that on real film and on IMAX. It doesn’t get better than that.
Many tweets have said, “Wait until the right-wingers find out Oppenheimer was a Communist, then they’ll attack the movie.” Their lack of self-awareness is breathtaking. Do they not see what they have become?
And all for what? Because they couldn’t stand sharing this country with a guy like Trump who broke all of their rules? Trump, like Oppenheimer, like RFK, Jr. is a man out of time, someone whose brash personality was rewarded in the 1980s but now is caught in the spider web of authoritarianism.
How many more dissenters will they have to purge, how many fine minds will they have to destroy, and how many reputations will they have to discredit before they’re finally exhausted by all of it like so many of us already are?
But just as the 1960s shattered the utopia of the 1950s, the backlash is coming, not from the Left, but from the Right. A counter-culture revolution will lead the way, and the government is bound to follow sooner or later.
One need only look at the success of Sound of Freedom, crossing the $100 million mark, to feel the drumbeat underfoot of a new world trying to break through the old one.
Nolan might not realize he has made a film that is a commentary on our world now, just as Greta Gerwig might not realize that the film she made says more about the Left than she’ll ever know. But that’s the funny thing about art or science or truth. You never know where it will land or how it will play over time.
The Politics of Barbie and Oppenheimer