“Barbenheimer,” Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the dearth of original ideas

I cannot be the only one increasingly tired with critics hailing recycled ideas packaged in slick ways as modern masterpieces, nor do I think anyone should be impressed that a movie made by a small army at a cost of at least a hundred million dollars looks good. 

Unless you are a recent arrival from another planet, you’ve probably heard of the cultural juggernaut that is “Barbenheimer,” a one-two punch of movies about a doll first released in 1959 and a biopic about a man made famous for inventing the atomic bomb 15 years earlier.  The two films premiered to rave reviews and box office records last weekend, combining for an astounding $245 million.  Critics have variously hailed and harangued Barbie as a watershed in feminist filmmaking, helmed by a female director, Greta Gerwig, masterfully focusing on “the contradictions and constraints that make being a woman so impossible” to quote The San Francisco Chronicle, showcasing how “women [are] bending over backwards to fit into the increasingly tiny space between ‘not enough’ and ‘too much’ when it comes to gender performance, beauty, confidence and motherhood.”  “With buckets of pink paint and a 64-year-old archive of dolls at its disposal, the Barbie movie takes a crack at healing everyone who struggles with the gender binary, whether it’s cis men craving human connection, women feeling trapped by unrealistic expectations, or nonbinary people wanting to be seen and understood.”  Not surprisingly, conservatives have a different take, either claiming the film is morally bankrupt, “like a serial killer dressed in a Pikachu outfit” to quote Critical Drinker, or completely misunderstood, “What it all appears to suggest is that Barbieland is not merely a superficial construct but an entirely satirical one: a kind of post-feminist satire of what feminists imagine a perfect world looking like and of what they imagine male dominance is like,” according to National Review.  Who knew a doll that appeared before most of us were born had so much intellectual heft?  What we do know:  Apparently, none of them has read or seen Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, where the most famous woman in the world struggles to find her place between competing emotions and power structures.  “If he please To give me conquered Egypt for my son, He gives me so much of mine own as I Will kneel to him in thanks,” and “Pray you tell him I am his fortune’s vassal and I send him The greatness he has got. I hourly learn A doctrine of obedience, and would gladly Look him i’ th’ face,” she declares once she realizes there is no escaping the will of the more powerful Caesar, a woman trapped if ever there was one.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is being described by some as a “horror” film for reasons I personally cannot understand given that at least part of the story is one of absolute triumph.  We did beat the Nazi’s to the punch as many feared and ultimately won the greatest, most destructive war ever fought through a combination of America’s ability to attract brilliant minds, the bomb was originally recommended in a famous letter by the German expatriate Albert Einstein, and to organize and fund skilled teams that get the job done no matter the cost.  Regardless, according to Rex Reed it is “a film with intelligence, purpose, and historic value.”  Peter Howell called it a “movie like no other other, dragging us into the collective guilt of history.”  Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson said it “barely qualifies as a biopic…Instead, it’s a movie investigating the nature of power: how it is created, how it is kept in balance, how it leads people into murky quandaries that refuse simplistic answers.”  Jeffrey Harris hailed actor Cillian Murphy in particular for bringing the titular scientist to life, “a powerfully acted, believable, and compassionate performance as the real-life scientist who must grapple with the reality of what he brought into the world.”  Between the two, it’s enough to make me wonder whether it is these critics that have recently arrived from another planet. To be sure, I have not actually seen either, but based on the reviews, one doesn’t really need to:  The only conclusion that can safely be drawn is that there’s nothing new to see here aside from the technical wizardry of a modern, big budget movie.  It doesn’t take a budget of some $145 million to determine that women face unique challenges in life, as mothers and professionals in a world of limited resources, as we saw with Cleopatra.  Outside of art, even the most obtuse observer sees this in the women in their own lives, from their parents to their siblings, friends, and loved ones.  All of us, both women and men included, are subject to competing demands, the difference between the expectation of what we can be and the reality of what we are, the choices we make when time is limited and we cannot accomplish everything we want in life, and all the rest of the oppressive vagaries of human existence.  This is not new.  Beyond Shakespeare, it was said far more succinctly almost two hundred years ago:  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, wrote the brilliant Henry David Thoreau.  In my humble opinion, the world might be better off staring at that insightful quote for two hours and contemplating its meaning then and now as few statements so succinctly capture the timelessness of the struggle to simply be human.

Likewise, I am equally unsure why I am supposed to be impressed by a film that tells me what I already know, both from fiction and fact.  A scientist is appalled by his creation, who ultimately comes to regret it?  The story has been known since at least the Greek myths, when Daedalus and his son Icarus were trapped in the Labyrinth he created for Minos, the King of Crete.  Even the designer could not figure a way out of the maze, and so he conceived a new invention:  Wings that would enable father and son to fly from the island to safety, only the son was reckless and flew too high, melting the wax that bound the wings together, and crashing into the sea.  Thus, Daedalus’ genius led directly to the death of his own son, something he surely regretted.  Similarly, everyone knows that Dr. Victor Frankenstein created a monster he could not control that led to his own death.  Most should also know the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, having been told before in multiple movies including The Manhattan Project and Fat Man and Little Boy.  Nor should it be surprising that the man who unlocked the power of the atom that ultimately prompted the worldwide nuclear arms race regretted his own invention.  He’d be a monster if it was otherwise, but that doesn’t mean any of us should be “dragged into the collective guilt of history,” whatever that precisely means.  One can imagine he is referring to America’s “guilt” in using atomic weapons for the first and (thankfully) only time, but why would anyone alive today have any guilt at all over doing what needed to be done to end a war that had claimed some 70 to 85 million lives, about 3% of all the people that were on Earth at that time?  Guilt is not inheritable, or collective, whatever self-evidently progressive critics might claim, and here we get to what might be considered the crux of our moral morass.  I cannot possibly feel guilty for what Oppenheimer did or didn’t do more than three decades before I was born.  Oppenheimer himself can of course, feel guilty, and he can do so even if his invention ultimately saved millions of lives that likely would have been lost in a battle for Japan.  The tension between the reality that dropping the bomb was the right choice – morally, ethically, and strategically – and the negative impact on the man who actually built it is the interesting part, at least in my opinion.  Contrary to the critics, I think most Americans are proud of what their country accomplished during World War II, not guilty about it. Further, one cannot help but think that “collective guilt” leads directly to “social justice” and reparations.  Forgive me for being cynical, but the underlying impulse seems to be the same.

If it sounds like I am being too hard on two films I haven’t actually seen, that’s because I am, though I do not think it’s without good reason.  I cannot be the only one increasingly tired with critics hailing recycled ideas packaged in slick ways as modern masterpieces, nor do I think anyone should be impressed that a movie made by a small army at a cost of at least a hundred million dollars looks good.  A film with high production values is the bare minimum of competence, not some grand artistic achievement.  Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig are supposed to be premiere filmmakers, one in the prime of his career, another entering their prime, and yet both in their own ways are trapped in the past, looking back more than half a century in an attempt to…do what I am not precisely sure.  This does not mean that either film is without merit or not entertaining.  There is an argument to be made that entertainment is enough; surely, the continued popularity of the horror and action genres is based purely on entertainment value alone.  At the same time, one cannot help but feel something is missing, that we are out of ideas or at least lack the energy to find new ones.  It’s not like there aren’t stories waiting to be told, whether fact or fiction.  Previously, I urged people to consider the saga of Leonardo da Vinci, the flamboyantly gay artist in 15th century Italy, whose artistic nemesis was the equally gay yet repressed Michelangelo.  The two hated each other, but were forced to work side by side in a sort of competition on masterpieces planned for the same building that were ultimately abandoned for various reasons.  If ever a saga of creative genius, the struggle to create, the impact of guilt and repression, the plight of the disadvantaged, and the failure of even the greatest who ever lived to fulfill all their dreams was waiting to be told, that is it.  Or consider Ludwig van Beethoven, who was heterosexual, but never able to consummate relationships with any of the women he loved, battling the continued loss of his hearing with a near paranoia resulting from his auditory isolation as he struggled to find a family while crafting some of the greatest music ever heard.  The entire world is also waiting on the biopics of Teddy Roosevelt, a man who did more in 60 years than most do in ten lifetimes, and Thomas Edison, who invented the modern world including the art of filmmaking, and yet Hollywood insists on telling us all what we already know, and calling it genius.

This point can only be more clear in comparison to the great films of the past.  Last weekend, my wife and I watched Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic science fiction masterpiece, Metropolis.  It might be difficult to believe in an era of computer generated imagery that can take us from the depths of space to the bowels of a planet, but Metropolis the blueprint for the modern science film, long before the computer was even invented and when all films were silent.  With the exception of aliens, I am hard pressed to name anything that has truly been added since.  Robots?  Check.  Roberts impersonating humans?  Check.  An inventor that regrets his role in building a new society?  Check.  Futuristic cities with skyscrapers and flying cars?  Check.  Video calls?  Check.  A class struggle?  Check.  A love story?  Check.  Religious overtones?  Check.  Surrealistic, avant garde sequences and dreams?  Check.  Special effects combining miniatures, mirrors, projection screens, and imagery created for the purpose? Check.  That Metropolis was made almost a hundred years ago is astounding.  That little has been added since is depressing.  As if to prove my point, highly acclaimed television producer, director, and writer Sam Esmail of Mr. Robot and Homecoming fame was planning a remake of all things, until it was killed by Apple just last month.  Personally, I probably would’ve watched it, while wondering why there seems to be nothing new under the sun.  I can’t say precisely why this is the case in a world of infinite possibilities, except it seems to be partially driven by money and partially by a failure to think big dramatically.  Hollywood thinks big when it comes to budgets and grosses, but they like their films to fit into neat little boxes, so the critics can label them appropriately as they have done with Barbie and Oppenheimer.  Truly great works, however, defy easy explanations because people themselves can rarely be explained so simply.  Hamlet is Hamlet at least partially because there is no clear answer why he refuses to act in his justified revenge.  Is he scared an evil spirit tricked him?  Is he too cerebral?  Too Christian?  Too something else?  We can never know for sure, and any idea we propose seems possible, as if we saw it through a mist, until we move onto the next one.  Otherwise, I’m damn sure there are new stories out there just waiting to be told, and I can’t help but think that a part of our cultural malaise is our inability, collective or otherwise, to find them.  Instead, we insist on self-flagellating our collective selves with the ghost of a past that produced the subject matter we dissect through the lens of our own miseries.