Would Barbie Drop the Bomb? - Why Barbenheimer Works
Wednesday, 26 Jul 2023, 08:14
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Samuel George Gaze, Wednesday, 26 Jul 2023, 16:46
It’s July 2023.
Schools have broken up for the summer and people are turning
up at the cinema for Barbenheimer; a portmanteau of two films that the internet
has decided must be viewed back-to-back in a 5+ hour extravaganza of bombshells
both blonde and nuclear. Why has the world decided that Barbie and Oppenheimer were
separated at birth?
I can’t speak for everyone, but what attracted me to
Barbenheimer first were the directors. Christopher Nolan’s films (Inception,
Interstellar, The Dark Knight, etc.) are known for their complex narratives
that present the viewer with a maze of mind-bending twists. They often embrace
science fiction and the fantastical but embed those elements in a gravelly
realism that allow the audience to see themselves in the character’s position.
This makes the moral dilemmas his characters face feel profound and immediate,
they must make great personal sacrifices or utilitarian calculations affecting
countless lives. These features seemed
to make him the perfect director for a film about J Robert Oppenheimer,
developer of the first atomic bomb. After Dunkirk, it was clear that Nolan
could also do history; and it made even more sense to let someone like him tell
the story of the most profound moral dilemma of our time.
Greta Gerwig has directed only three films including Barbie,
but I was impressed by her new version of Little Women, which was made with
equal measures of romance and realism and explored the dilemmas of womanhood in
the 19th century that continue to resonate now. However, it was her
acting role in partner Noah Baumbach’s strange, nostalgic film White Noise,
that made my ears prick up when I heard she was directing Barbie. In it, she
plays a 90s suburban Mom who is deeply troubled by her mortality and the
meaning of life. The film presents her and us without easy answers, an
existential quandary that we must answer ourselves. In the Barbie trailer, when
Margot Robbie wonders out loud “if anyone has ever thought about dying?” this
made an instant connection for me, and I knew I would have to see how Gerwig
managed to combine the story of a carefree consumerist toy with unfiltered
existential dread.
At first it seems like the connections between these two
films is entirely arbitrary, perhaps all that they share is their July 21st
release date. Others have pointed out that, behind the scenes, there are
actually several similarities, but I’m not really concerned with what joins
them in the tangled web of Hollywood politics 1. Further, what I
find truly unconvincing is the idea that Barbenheimer has taken hold of
movie-goers because they are fundamentally unalike and incommensurable films.
After all, Nolan’s The Dark Knight released on the same day as Mamma Mia in
2008, but no-one suggested Batma-Mia. There’s definitely something
psychologically or aesthetically compelling about Barbenheimer. And though I
can’t tell you what that is for everyone, I will try to say what it is for me.
Cold War Connections
YouTube is now replete with fan-made Barbenheimer trailers;
and what seems to connect them is just the bizarre postmodern imagery of Barbie
and Ken developing and dropping the atomic bomb 2,3. Perhaps among
Barbie’s many careers, nuclear physicist at the Manhattan Project in 1945 could
have been one. However, Barbie was brought to life 14 years later in 1959,
making this canonically impossible. Still, this makes both her and the bomb
products of a similar age. Their creators also had similar backgrounds, born
within 12 years of each other, children of European Jewish migrants to the USA,
their careers deeply impacted by the second world war – while Oppenheimer was
sucked into the bomb project, Barbie creator Ruth Handler’s husband’s firm,
Mattel, transitioned from producing furniture to toys because of war shortages 4,5.
Coincidentally, both the toy and the bomb derived from work initially
undertaken by Germans; it was German physicists that first demonstrated the
splitting of the atom that spurred the US government to action, and the German
doll ‘Bild Lilli’ that provided the model for Handler’s Barbie6. If
there is a connection between Barbie and the Bomb, it’s here – they are both iconic
Cold War products that stand as symbols of US cultural and military power.
As the second world war began to wind down, with Hitler dead
and the USSR about to join the war against Japan, there has long been a debate
about whether it was necessary or even appropriate to drop the two bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing up to 200,000 casualties7. YouTube
video essayist Shaun has produced an excellent critical history of the decision
worth hearing 8. What is certain is that no other country at the
time was in a position to use such a weapon. Nazi Germany had failed to produce
a bomb, and it turned out, was nowhere close; the USSR was several years
behind, conducting its first successful test in 1949 after significant input
from spies in the US program 9,10. From the beginning, nukes were
powerful tools of propaganda. Emerging unscathed from World War 2, in
possession of bombs and rocketry capable of razing entire cities, the US was
positioned to dominate world politics, and the development of nuclear treaties
reflected the American interest in monopolising their proliferation as much as
possible. But the US never laboured under the impression it was better to be
feared than loved. It combined military propaganda with cultural shock and awe.
Barbie, one among hundreds of US consumer products, emerged
under the nuclear umbrella in regions of US hegemony (she did not appear in the
USSR until the perestroika of the 1980s.11) The fashion model doll
who encouraged girls to buy her new outfits was well oriented to succeed in the
blooming consumerism of the 1960s, in which people began to experiment with
expressing individualist identities, standing out from the crowd in a way that
was not possible in the more dutiful 1940s and 50s. How strong was Barbie as a
tool of socialisation for girls growing up in the market economy? It’s hard to
say, but she definitely played her part. She made it possible for girls in the ‘free
world’ to imagine life in the American dream, living in a spacious modern home,
driving a big car, owning a perfectly coiffed man, and wearing something new
every day. She presented the consumerist, American way of life as the most
fulfilling and enjoyable for women and was part of the charm offensive that
made the US such an attractive global hegemon in contrast to the moralizing,
secret policing USSR.
The advent of Barbenheimer reminds us that the US ultimately
won the Cold War, leaving a Russian rump of the USSR, still armed to the teeth
but without the heart to keep fighting (at least for a few decades). And it
continues the tradition of essentially pro-US propaganda that such products
constitute. The propaganda of Barbie is that although the US is flawed as a
democracy and as an egalitarian society, it still provides a foothold for the
possibility of feminism and liberation – freedom is possible under the
Washington Consensus, if women had equal access to power and employment. The propaganda
of Oppenheimer is essentially, thank God that the ‘free world’ got to the bomb
first. But the films are more than just victory laps for the continued
supremacy of the US, Hollywood, and capitalism.
People don’t have ideas, ideas have people
There is some genuine unease that this is all somewhat
precarious. Barbie is almost obsessively self-critical, by the second half of
the film it begins to feel like a gender studies lecture. In the theatre I felt
a big divide in the audience between people who had and had not been to
university yet – many jokes and references just didn’t land with the part of
the audience who were just too young to be even first year undergrads. Millennials
were laughing, Gen Z shrugged. It’s kind of amazing that Robbie and Gerwig got
away with so much, and it’s not clear by the end that Barbie the brand actually
redeems itself – but apparently Mattel are still expecting the movie to boost
Barbie doll sales for the next decade. The aesthetic of female empowerment has
been an effective marketing tool since at least Bernay's feminist cigarette campaign.
Oppenheimer is not a feminist film – it takes 30 minutes
before one line is spoken by a woman, and there are no Bechdel test-passing
conversations in the whole three hours. This is likely more reflective of the
world of mid-century STEM research than a choice by Nolan, but worth mentioning
given their odd juxtaposition; in Barbie, it is Ken who has to wait for his
delayed introduction. However, Oppenheimer is just as conflicted about its hero
and his creation. The final scene shows Cillian Murphy again gazing into the
near distance, imagining the trails of rocket powered nukes raining a fiery
death upon the world – maybe not now, but someday. The movie makes much of his
fate to be the man who made our self-annihilation possible, leaving us to
wonder if one day, Oppenheimer’s name will not be used as a curse by
post-apocalyptic cavemen. Given it was Cristopher Nolan, I was surprised to see
that a time-travelling Leonardo Di Caprio did not at some point appear from the
distant future to assassinate Oppenheimer on his way to Los Alamos. It might
have been a bit more entertaining than the dry third act.
The point that both films make about their products is that
they are first of all ideas, and that ideas have the power to change the world.
Barbie appears like the Monolith from Space Odyssey in her film’s first scene,
changing history for little girls everywhere and allowing them to dream big and
reach for their destiny. In Oppenheimer, the possibility of an atomic bomb
simultaneously confronts all of the pre-war eggheads smart enough to recognise
it as a revelation. It doesn’t have one inventor, but many – in this sense,
Oppenheimer himself is just a conduit for the idea to find a physical form,
without him, sooner or later, there would have been a bomb. Though I hate to
quote Carl Jung: “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” As far as I
know, the Barbie movie doesn’t reference Bild Lilli, but in identifying the gap
in the market for an adult doll, it can be argued that Ruth Handler too was a
person overtaken by an idea, rather than the reverse. Apparently, the Barbie
movie was also an idea in search of a person – first mooted in 2009, it was only
taken up by Margot Robbie in 2018.
However, such idealism means that focus of Oppenheimer is
confusing. Making a movie about the leader of the Manhattan Project positions
him, the man, with his unique qualities, talents, and foibles as a genius, a
“great man of history,” but the story suggests the opposite. Instead, he puts
himself in the way of the bomb, seizing upon his unique position in the mid-century
physics world to be the man to lead the project. He doesn’t demure, leaving it say, to Teller (who went on the produce the H-Bomb). He thrusts himself upon
greatness, and we end up agreeing with his wife that it’s hard to feel sorry
for him. Yet, if such breakthroughs as nuclear weapons or plastic dolls are
inevitable, this makes it look like we as people are just being swept along by
forces much greater than our own wills.
Power and Plastic Waste
Spoliers ahead – at the end of Barbie, she abandons the
perfect immortality of plastic Platonic idealism to embrace real humanity with
its ageing, gynaecologist visits, and eventual death. She chooses to be a person,
make meaningful choices, and make a life for herself. Somehow, Gerwig did manage
to sneak in some trademark existentialism into a feature length toy commercial.
But Oppenheimer suggests that such a sense of agency is an illusion – for all
of your intentions, plans, and goals, you will be attracted and repulsed,
fissioned and fused, by forces both determinate and indeterminate, like a
single atom in a rippling cascade of forces which transfer energy through
spacetime; and on all levels, nuclear, chemical, psychological and social.
It's Oppenheimer’s wife, played by Emily Blunt, that most severely criticizes our ability to resist the flow of history. She explains to the panel investigating her
husband as a potential threat to national security, that she had once been a
communist in the 1920s handing out “The Daily Worker” to people at the factory
gates; but became disillusioned with the party after coming to believe it was operating
as an agent of a foreign power, the USSR. She had been well-intentioned but
felt that her efforts to bring class equality would be overshadowed by the national struggle between America and Russia. That both Barbie
and Oppenheimer were conscripted into this struggle demonstrates that perhaps Kitty
Oppenheimer had a point, and it made little sense to her to taunt the power
that had the most immediate influence on her life.
Power, where it can be harnessed and concentrated, can shape
people’s lives whether they have moral scruples about it or not. Barbie’s
feminism flies in the face of the brutal reality of business – her dolls are
being built by underpaid women in terrible conditions, a doll that costs three
times her body weight in carbon emissions, and whose plastic waste will not
disappear in our lifetimes12,13. This film, thoughtful though it is,
is broadly uncritical of this reality, and ultimately pivots from politics to
focus on making the most of your own limited lifespan. Oppenheimer’s bombs have
loomed over every war zone in the past 80 years, with Russia embroiled in
Ukraine and the US squaring up to China, we reignite the fuse on nuclear
obliteration. What can someone troubled by this reality do after watching
Nolan’s film? Groups against the bomb have been active since its inception, but
they have never been close to having the influence to actually have them
disarmed, and Nolan’s film absolutely does not advocate for CND. He just leaves
us hoping we are in capable hands.
Finally, I think that though Barbie is funny, entertaining,
and visually spectacular and Oppenheimer is an incredible piece of acting and cinematography,
they aren’t really going to be remembered as their director’s greatest films.
Barbie suffers from “telling” rather than “showing”- perhaps because its internal
contradictions make it a case of “do as I say not as I do.” Oppenheimer is at
least an hour too long; it lacks the snappy pacing of Inception, Tenet, even
Dunkirk. If I was giving out Oscars for 2023, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City
would be my current top choice; it deals with similar themes, being
simultaneously more profound and entertaining. If you do Barbenheimer, I
recommend watching Barbie first, because after Oppenheimer’s 3 hours I did not
want to spend anymore time in a cinema seat, and you would be entering Barbie
in an introspective melancholy only to be greeted by blasting bubblegum pop
songs and expected to laugh at an unyielding barrage of self-aware in-jokes
(not to say any of this is a bad thing.)
As for the question, would Barbie drop the bomb, well… It’s
hard to imagine President Barbie doing anything less than what her country
expects.
Would Barbie Drop the Bomb? - Why Barbenheimer Works
It’s July 2023.
Schools have broken up for the summer and people are turning up at the cinema for Barbenheimer; a portmanteau of two films that the internet has decided must be viewed back-to-back in a 5+ hour extravaganza of bombshells both blonde and nuclear. Why has the world decided that Barbie and Oppenheimer were separated at birth?
I can’t speak for everyone, but what attracted me to Barbenheimer first were the directors. Christopher Nolan’s films (Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, etc.) are known for their complex narratives that present the viewer with a maze of mind-bending twists. They often embrace science fiction and the fantastical but embed those elements in a gravelly realism that allow the audience to see themselves in the character’s position. This makes the moral dilemmas his characters face feel profound and immediate, they must make great personal sacrifices or utilitarian calculations affecting countless lives. These features seemed to make him the perfect director for a film about J Robert Oppenheimer, developer of the first atomic bomb. After Dunkirk, it was clear that Nolan could also do history; and it made even more sense to let someone like him tell the story of the most profound moral dilemma of our time.
Greta Gerwig has directed only three films including Barbie, but I was impressed by her new version of Little Women, which was made with equal measures of romance and realism and explored the dilemmas of womanhood in the 19th century that continue to resonate now. However, it was her acting role in partner Noah Baumbach’s strange, nostalgic film White Noise, that made my ears prick up when I heard she was directing Barbie. In it, she plays a 90s suburban Mom who is deeply troubled by her mortality and the meaning of life. The film presents her and us without easy answers, an existential quandary that we must answer ourselves. In the Barbie trailer, when Margot Robbie wonders out loud “if anyone has ever thought about dying?” this made an instant connection for me, and I knew I would have to see how Gerwig managed to combine the story of a carefree consumerist toy with unfiltered existential dread.
At first it seems like the connections between these two films is entirely arbitrary, perhaps all that they share is their July 21st release date. Others have pointed out that, behind the scenes, there are actually several similarities, but I’m not really concerned with what joins them in the tangled web of Hollywood politics 1. Further, what I find truly unconvincing is the idea that Barbenheimer has taken hold of movie-goers because they are fundamentally unalike and incommensurable films. After all, Nolan’s The Dark Knight released on the same day as Mamma Mia in 2008, but no-one suggested Batma-Mia. There’s definitely something psychologically or aesthetically compelling about Barbenheimer. And though I can’t tell you what that is for everyone, I will try to say what it is for me.
Cold War Connections
YouTube is now replete with fan-made Barbenheimer trailers; and what seems to connect them is just the bizarre postmodern imagery of Barbie and Ken developing and dropping the atomic bomb 2,3. Perhaps among Barbie’s many careers, nuclear physicist at the Manhattan Project in 1945 could have been one. However, Barbie was brought to life 14 years later in 1959, making this canonically impossible. Still, this makes both her and the bomb products of a similar age. Their creators also had similar backgrounds, born within 12 years of each other, children of European Jewish migrants to the USA, their careers deeply impacted by the second world war – while Oppenheimer was sucked into the bomb project, Barbie creator Ruth Handler’s husband’s firm, Mattel, transitioned from producing furniture to toys because of war shortages 4,5. Coincidentally, both the toy and the bomb derived from work initially undertaken by Germans; it was German physicists that first demonstrated the splitting of the atom that spurred the US government to action, and the German doll ‘Bild Lilli’ that provided the model for Handler’s Barbie6. If there is a connection between Barbie and the Bomb, it’s here – they are both iconic Cold War products that stand as symbols of US cultural and military power.
As the second world war began to wind down, with Hitler dead and the USSR about to join the war against Japan, there has long been a debate about whether it was necessary or even appropriate to drop the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing up to 200,000 casualties7. YouTube video essayist Shaun has produced an excellent critical history of the decision worth hearing 8. What is certain is that no other country at the time was in a position to use such a weapon. Nazi Germany had failed to produce a bomb, and it turned out, was nowhere close; the USSR was several years behind, conducting its first successful test in 1949 after significant input from spies in the US program 9,10. From the beginning, nukes were powerful tools of propaganda. Emerging unscathed from World War 2, in possession of bombs and rocketry capable of razing entire cities, the US was positioned to dominate world politics, and the development of nuclear treaties reflected the American interest in monopolising their proliferation as much as possible. But the US never laboured under the impression it was better to be feared than loved. It combined military propaganda with cultural shock and awe.
Barbie, one among hundreds of US consumer products, emerged under the nuclear umbrella in regions of US hegemony (she did not appear in the USSR until the perestroika of the 1980s.11) The fashion model doll who encouraged girls to buy her new outfits was well oriented to succeed in the blooming consumerism of the 1960s, in which people began to experiment with expressing individualist identities, standing out from the crowd in a way that was not possible in the more dutiful 1940s and 50s. How strong was Barbie as a tool of socialisation for girls growing up in the market economy? It’s hard to say, but she definitely played her part. She made it possible for girls in the ‘free world’ to imagine life in the American dream, living in a spacious modern home, driving a big car, owning a perfectly coiffed man, and wearing something new every day. She presented the consumerist, American way of life as the most fulfilling and enjoyable for women and was part of the charm offensive that made the US such an attractive global hegemon in contrast to the moralizing, secret policing USSR.
The advent of Barbenheimer reminds us that the US ultimately won the Cold War, leaving a Russian rump of the USSR, still armed to the teeth but without the heart to keep fighting (at least for a few decades). And it continues the tradition of essentially pro-US propaganda that such products constitute. The propaganda of Barbie is that although the US is flawed as a democracy and as an egalitarian society, it still provides a foothold for the possibility of feminism and liberation – freedom is possible under the Washington Consensus, if women had equal access to power and employment. The propaganda of Oppenheimer is essentially, thank God that the ‘free world’ got to the bomb first. But the films are more than just victory laps for the continued supremacy of the US, Hollywood, and capitalism.
People don’t have ideas, ideas have people
There is some genuine unease that this is all somewhat precarious. Barbie is almost obsessively self-critical, by the second half of the film it begins to feel like a gender studies lecture. In the theatre I felt a big divide in the audience between people who had and had not been to university yet – many jokes and references just didn’t land with the part of the audience who were just too young to be even first year undergrads. Millennials were laughing, Gen Z shrugged. It’s kind of amazing that Robbie and Gerwig got away with so much, and it’s not clear by the end that Barbie the brand actually redeems itself – but apparently Mattel are still expecting the movie to boost Barbie doll sales for the next decade. The aesthetic of female empowerment has been an effective marketing tool since at least Bernay's feminist cigarette campaign.
Oppenheimer is not a feminist film – it takes 30 minutes before one line is spoken by a woman, and there are no Bechdel test-passing conversations in the whole three hours. This is likely more reflective of the world of mid-century STEM research than a choice by Nolan, but worth mentioning given their odd juxtaposition; in Barbie, it is Ken who has to wait for his delayed introduction. However, Oppenheimer is just as conflicted about its hero and his creation. The final scene shows Cillian Murphy again gazing into the near distance, imagining the trails of rocket powered nukes raining a fiery death upon the world – maybe not now, but someday. The movie makes much of his fate to be the man who made our self-annihilation possible, leaving us to wonder if one day, Oppenheimer’s name will not be used as a curse by post-apocalyptic cavemen. Given it was Cristopher Nolan, I was surprised to see that a time-travelling Leonardo Di Caprio did not at some point appear from the distant future to assassinate Oppenheimer on his way to Los Alamos. It might have been a bit more entertaining than the dry third act.
The point that both films make about their products is that they are first of all ideas, and that ideas have the power to change the world. Barbie appears like the Monolith from Space Odyssey in her film’s first scene, changing history for little girls everywhere and allowing them to dream big and reach for their destiny. In Oppenheimer, the possibility of an atomic bomb simultaneously confronts all of the pre-war eggheads smart enough to recognise it as a revelation. It doesn’t have one inventor, but many – in this sense, Oppenheimer himself is just a conduit for the idea to find a physical form, without him, sooner or later, there would have been a bomb. Though I hate to quote Carl Jung: “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” As far as I know, the Barbie movie doesn’t reference Bild Lilli, but in identifying the gap in the market for an adult doll, it can be argued that Ruth Handler too was a person overtaken by an idea, rather than the reverse. Apparently, the Barbie movie was also an idea in search of a person – first mooted in 2009, it was only taken up by Margot Robbie in 2018.
However, such idealism means that focus of Oppenheimer is confusing. Making a movie about the leader of the Manhattan Project positions him, the man, with his unique qualities, talents, and foibles as a genius, a “great man of history,” but the story suggests the opposite. Instead, he puts himself in the way of the bomb, seizing upon his unique position in the mid-century physics world to be the man to lead the project. He doesn’t demure, leaving it say, to Teller (who went on the produce the H-Bomb). He thrusts himself upon greatness, and we end up agreeing with his wife that it’s hard to feel sorry for him. Yet, if such breakthroughs as nuclear weapons or plastic dolls are inevitable, this makes it look like we as people are just being swept along by forces much greater than our own wills.
Power and Plastic Waste
Spoliers ahead – at the end of Barbie, she abandons the perfect immortality of plastic Platonic idealism to embrace real humanity with its ageing, gynaecologist visits, and eventual death. She chooses to be a person, make meaningful choices, and make a life for herself. Somehow, Gerwig did manage to sneak in some trademark existentialism into a feature length toy commercial. But Oppenheimer suggests that such a sense of agency is an illusion – for all of your intentions, plans, and goals, you will be attracted and repulsed, fissioned and fused, by forces both determinate and indeterminate, like a single atom in a rippling cascade of forces which transfer energy through spacetime; and on all levels, nuclear, chemical, psychological and social.
It's Oppenheimer’s wife, played by Emily Blunt, that most severely criticizes our ability to resist the flow of history. She explains to the panel investigating her husband as a potential threat to national security, that she had once been a communist in the 1920s handing out “The Daily Worker” to people at the factory gates; but became disillusioned with the party after coming to believe it was operating as an agent of a foreign power, the USSR. She had been well-intentioned but felt that her efforts to bring class equality would be overshadowed by the national struggle between America and Russia. That both Barbie and Oppenheimer were conscripted into this struggle demonstrates that perhaps Kitty Oppenheimer had a point, and it made little sense to her to taunt the power that had the most immediate influence on her life.
Power, where it can be harnessed and concentrated, can shape people’s lives whether they have moral scruples about it or not. Barbie’s feminism flies in the face of the brutal reality of business – her dolls are being built by underpaid women in terrible conditions, a doll that costs three times her body weight in carbon emissions, and whose plastic waste will not disappear in our lifetimes12,13. This film, thoughtful though it is, is broadly uncritical of this reality, and ultimately pivots from politics to focus on making the most of your own limited lifespan. Oppenheimer’s bombs have loomed over every war zone in the past 80 years, with Russia embroiled in Ukraine and the US squaring up to China, we reignite the fuse on nuclear obliteration. What can someone troubled by this reality do after watching Nolan’s film? Groups against the bomb have been active since its inception, but they have never been close to having the influence to actually have them disarmed, and Nolan’s film absolutely does not advocate for CND. He just leaves us hoping we are in capable hands.
Finally, I think that though Barbie is funny, entertaining, and visually spectacular and Oppenheimer is an incredible piece of acting and cinematography, they aren’t really going to be remembered as their director’s greatest films. Barbie suffers from “telling” rather than “showing”- perhaps because its internal contradictions make it a case of “do as I say not as I do.” Oppenheimer is at least an hour too long; it lacks the snappy pacing of Inception, Tenet, even Dunkirk. If I was giving out Oscars for 2023, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City would be my current top choice; it deals with similar themes, being simultaneously more profound and entertaining. If you do Barbenheimer, I recommend watching Barbie first, because after Oppenheimer’s 3 hours I did not want to spend anymore time in a cinema seat, and you would be entering Barbie in an introspective melancholy only to be greeted by blasting bubblegum pop songs and expected to laugh at an unyielding barrage of self-aware in-jokes (not to say any of this is a bad thing.)
As for the question, would Barbie drop the bomb, well… It’s hard to imagine President Barbie doing anything less than what her country expects.
Sources
1 BARBENHEIMER is More Than a Meme - Pentex Productions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTT-q_wVyz8
2 BARBENHEIMER — THE TRAILER (4K) - Silver Screen Edits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA6l2d_Z2v8
3 Barbenheimer | Movie Trailer - Curious Refuge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrpPMsD6sCE
4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Handler
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer
6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild_Lilli_doll
7 The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp10.html
8 Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki - Shaun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
9 How Close Did the Nazis Actually Come to Building an Atomic Bomb? - Today I Found Out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcJSBy5m-0s
10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
11 When Barbie Conquered the Soviet Union
https://www.rferl.org/a/When_Barbie_Conquered_The_Soviet_Union/1506690.html
12 The Plastic Feminism of Barbie - verilybitchie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RToUZJ0l7Pk
13 Commentary: Barbie movie could spark doll sales and all that plastic is not fantastic
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/barbie-movie-ken-doll-toys-plastic-waste-3636391