I did not watch either Barbie or Oppenheimer. To understand them, I don’t need to watch them (and for my well-being I decidedly avoid them).
The American mainstream is about one thing: marketing America as a deserving and unavoidable ruler of earth and humanity. Nothing made in America is an authentic expression: everything is conceived and made for profit and power.
The atomic bomb is the pinnacle of military destruction. A plastic doll marketing a plastic psychology, a plastic culture, and plastic waste as a desired way of life is the mass-consumption equivalent of the atomic bomb. Manhattan Project and Mattel continue one another and stem from each other. They are rooted in the same worldview: domination via annihilation (or the threat thereof).
Essential to American marketing/propaganda: a strategy of constantly, deceptively repackaging old obscene ideas and archetypes. This way inhumane crimes can be justified by adding a layer of fake complexity or supposed irony when, in truth, the core ideas remain uncontested, which is to say perpetuated.
By placing Oppenheimer (the character) against artsy color schemes and cliché lugubrious surroundings (can anything visual not be a cliché these days?) Nolan’s American propaganda piece masquerading as cinema purports to revisit history. But it does so only to reaffirm America as a country deserving of global domination because it places its heroes against artsy color schemes and cliché lugubrious surroundings.
Similarly, Barbie purports to revisit the eponymous doll, but the only thing that will remain in the viewer’s consciousness once the pink subsides is that Barbie (the doll and the plastic American existential essence it manifests) is relevant, and therefore legitimate. Similarly, the morality and philosophical justice of atom-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remain the sole meaningful lesson from Oppenheimer.
In both propaganda pieces, an ability to fabricate a higher, more advanced point of view serves to justify obvious evils. Morality (or a quest for truth and justice, to employ less ominous terms) and athletics can never be truly united, and it is both unfair and dangerous to demand such unity from creators. But when aesthetics is used to convey and legitimize the opposite of morality (as mass murder and the destruction of the self and the planet surely are), a boding sense of rotten decadence takes hold. This is why people will endlessly opine about ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’, but no one will admit having enjoyed them: we are made to instinctively reject a marriage of elaborate artsysm and sinister content.
Oppenheimer was a scientist and America needs to pretend to take mass-exterminating human beings seriously, and so Oppenheimer is made to look elaborate and complex cinematically, and painstakingly morally self-aware as a character and so on and so forth (I bet you won’t be frowned upon anywhere in polite society claiming he’s a Shakespearean figure, which you can surely yada yada 5 minutes about just for sport). Barbie, on the other hand, is a pop-culture icon, and therefore it will be treated with carefully planned, pretend (and therefore depressing and lifeless) frivolity. The former as the latter are nothing but marketing. It’s all marketing, there’s nothing else. Marketing of domination, marketing as domination, domination by marketing, marketing for, by and of domination, all the while pretending to be human.
American mainstream culture is dead, and at a dead end. Please consume none of it.