{"id":27990,"date":"2023-08-18T13:47:27","date_gmt":"2023-08-18T20:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=27990"},"modified":"2023-08-18T13:47:29","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T20:47:29","slug":"will-socals-barbie-doll-or-norcals-bobby-oppenheimer-destroy-the-world-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/08\/18\/will-socals-barbie-doll-or-norcals-bobby-oppenheimer-destroy-the-world-first\/","title":{"rendered":"WILL SOCAL\u2019S BARBIE DOLL OR NORCAL\u2019S BOBBY OPPENHEIMER DESTROY THE WORLD\u00a0FIRST?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Forget the Big Box Office War of Summer 2023. Barbenheimer Is a Tale of Two Competing California Apocalypses<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The two competing blockbusters of the summer aren\u2019t just entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. Columnist Joe Mathews argues they should also be viewed as apocalyptic documents.\u00a0Courtesy of\u00a0AP Newsroom<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by<\/em> JOE MATHEWS | AUGUST 15, 2023 (zocalopublicsquare.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which region is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the most urgent question raised by 2023\u2019s great cinematic contest between Oppenheimer<\/em> and Barbie.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, these are entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. But both movies are also, in no small part, California-based stories about global nightmares, about the Earth-altering threat of bombs and bombshells alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Embedded in those nightmares are warnings about the damage that Northern and Southern California can do when we send our ideas out into the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oppenheimer<\/em> is the Northern California nightmare. While much of Christopher Nolan\u2019s film takes place in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were built, the most important moments occur at Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor from 1929 to 1943.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s there that he meets the Manhattan Project\u2019s military chief, Leslie Groves, and befriends the physicist Ernest Lawrence (the Lawrence of the Bay Area\u2019s Lawrence Livermore National Lab), who becomes a crucial collaborator in the Manhattan Project. In fact, the lab in New Mexico that produced the nuclear bombs ended up being managed by the University of California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whole endeavor is a quintessential Bay Area enterprise. Very smart people from around the world come together to rapidly create a disruptive technology, without fully appreciating its perils and complications until it\u2019s too late. Oppenheimer has prompted comparisons to how Silicon Valley is now making available artificial intelligence tools available without understanding their consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the nuclear age\u2019s cultural and commercial products was Barbie (born in 1959). She, and the new film about her, are Los Angeles nightmares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The director, Greta Gerwig, is a Sacramento kid who shares her home city\u2019s loathing of all things L.A. So, her film pins most of the damage that Barbie has done on Southern California, where she was invented and manufactured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both movies are also, in no small part, California-based stories about global nightmares, about the Earth-altering threat of bombs and bombshells alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barbie<\/em>, like Los Angeles itself, is a sun-splashed comedy with a dark noir heart. The central joke of the film is that when Barbie, in unexpected existential crisis, leaves the seeming perfection of Barbieland for \u201cReality,\u201d it turns out to be L.A. Amid the city\u2019s most unreal Westside precincts (especially Venice), Barbie learns of the impossible expectations her example places on women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barbie\u2019s would-be boyfriend Ken, who is confined to hanging around the beach in Barbieland, discovers the possibilities of patriarchy after he falls in love with the phallic glass office towers of Century City. And when Ken takes those supposed Southern California values back to Barbieland, that utopia of feminism (with a set design that resembles Palm Springs) collapses. Soon, the various Ken dolls have imposed a bizarro dictatorship of men, who subjugate the various Barbies, who\u2019d previously served as president and controlled the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It might be wrong to think too hard about a movie as addled and antic as Barbie<\/em>, but the film does reflect the Hollywood work realities of the women who made the movie. Gerwig, star-producer Margot Robbie, and their colleagues have had to navigate an entertainment industry dominated by dim-witted Kens. (The rest of L.A., thank goodness, is a bit more egalitarian, as Mayor Karen Bass and the all-female Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors can tell you.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Both films, however, feel more than a little soulless. Barbie<\/em>, for all its righteous feminism, is a corporate vehicle for selling dolls. It misses opportunities to make light of the cynicism of this American moment, when corporations try to talk like social movements, and social movements often behave like corporations. The anxieties of Barbie are firmly upper-middle-class and higher; none of the women or men of the film worry about what worries most Angelenos\u2014scratching out a living in a too-expensive place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oppenheimer<\/em> is even more callous. It\u2019s a film about nuclear weapons that doesn\u2019t show their victims. We never see the human horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is why the film can\u2019t get screened in Japan), or the damage people endured because of their proximity<\/a> to the testing of such weapons, from the South Pacific to Central Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This distance from real-life human concerns is what makes both films so unsettling\u2014and so convincing as apocalyptic documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together, they offer a two-part scenario for the end of humanity. First, we grow divided and isolated from each other because of the unattainable lifestyles and cultural expectations that Southern California creates and promotes. Second, we kill ourselves with the technologies masterminded by Northern California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JOE MATHEWS<\/strong> writes the Connecting California column for Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forget the Big Box Office War of Summer 2023. Barbenheimer Is a Tale of Two Competing California Apocalypses The two competing blockbusters of the summer aren\u2019t just entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. Columnist Joe Mathews argues they should also be viewed as apocalyptic documents.\u00a0Courtesy of\u00a0AP Newsroom. by JOE MATHEWS | AUGUST 15, 2023… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[962],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27991,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27990\/revisions\/27991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}