From Paul Fromm: Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator – Oppenheimer

Friday, August 4, 2023

Barbenheimer Meets the Terminator

Just when everyone thought that the combination of two and a half years of bat flu paranoia, online streaming services, and new film releases consisting mostly of the double digit latest installments in series that everyone had grown tired of at least a decade ago had finally killed off the cinema, Barbenheimer – the simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer -brought the teetering industry back from the brink of bankruptcy, as both films broke box office records their opening weekend. The meme itself, which encouraged people to watch both as a double feature, probably had something to do with it. I don’t know who exactly came up with it. There is a well-known phenomenon in which rival film studies release similar films around the same time – think Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998, for one example. This is obviously the exact opposite of that, two movies that could hardly be more different from each other being released at the same. Of course this is not exactly an unusual phenomenon. Arguably, it occurs every weekend. In this case, however, the difference between the two seems to have struck someone, or rather a whole lot of someones as the popularity of the meme attests, as being much larger than is usual. Or maybe it was just the catchiness of the portmanteau. The first is a live action comedy featuring Margot Robbie as the fashion doll upon which Mattel built its toy empire. The second is a three hour biopic starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist from Berkeley who was led the Manhattan Project in uncorking the bottle and releasing the genie of nuclear weapons into the world. With Barbie being only an hour shorter than Oppenheimer, bringing the total running time of the two to five hours, it would have been a long night at the movies for anyone who took the meme literally. Not, “watch the entire Ring cycle in one sitting” long, but a step in that direction.

Barbie proved to be the bigger hit of the two, taking in almost twice as much as Oppenheimer. Since it is a highly politicized movie, a fact the filmmakers made no attempt to hide prior to release, some have jumped on this as debunking the maxim “go woke, go broke”. An op-ed cartoon in the Baltimore Sun, for example, depicts Ron DeSantis as saying “go woke go broke” as he is trampled by a mob rushing into a theatre showing Barbie. Tori Otten wrote an editorial for The New Republic maintaining that the Barbie opening weekend sales debunk the saying that she dubs “far right”. Perhaps she has never heard of the other saying “the exception that proves the rule”. That might be what we are seeing here. Then again, the rule may simply not apply. The implications of “go woke go broke” are that companies that were originally apolitical and sold their products to a general consumer base will lose a lot of customers if they start injecting politics, especially of the obnoxious, preachy, ultra-left kind that is now called “woke”, into their brand. What happened with Bud Light earlier this year is the textbook example. Or, and this is particularly the case when it comes to pop culture, if a story or character originally created to appeal to the kinds of people the woke hate is suddenly given a woke makeover, it is not likely to go over well. If someone were to film a remake of Dirty Harry, for example, telling the story from the perspective of the liberal mayor and police commissioner, with Inspector Callahan breaking down into tears, coming around to their point of view, throwing away his .44 Magnum instead of his star, and hugging Scorpio and begging his forgiveness, then I would expect that movie to do exceptionally poorly in the box office. A movie, on the other hand, about the doll that has been associated with the Helen Gurley Brown “you can have it all, girl” type feminism from pretty much the day Ruth Handler ripped her off from a more risqué German doll marketed for adult males and repackaged her in a pink box for girls, is not likely to be harmed at the box office by its having a feminist message.

Amusingly, the film preaches feminism in such a way as to completely undermine its message. spoiler alert The title character, a feminist of the Cosmo type her brand has long represented, lives in a world inhabited by her multiple versions, and the other characters of the franchise. That world is a complete gynocracy. Most people would probably call it a matriarchy but none of the females who rule the place seem to have any maternal instincts – except discontinued pregnant Midge – so gynocracy makes more sense. To “stereotypical Barbie” this is a utopia. It is also a mirror-image parody of what feminists think the world looked like before feminism and would still look like without feminism. Barbie thinks that due to her influence the real world is like hers. Then she has to visit it and discovers that it is not. In the real world she is verbally dressed down by a young girl who spouts the extra crazy version of feminism that thinks that women are all oppressed “A Handmaid’s Tale” style in the Western world today and that Barbie is the “fascist” enabler of said oppression. This girl and her mother end up going back with Barbie to Barbieland, where they discover that it has been taken over by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who had gone to the real world with Barbie, read about “patriarchy” in a library, went home and easily replaced the gynocracy with what he thought “patriarchy” was. Note that patriarchy is the term feminists use for a society ruled by men qua men, who oppress women qua women, basically the Marxist concept of haves oppressing have nots, with the sexes taking the place of the economic classes. The same objection that I made to matriarchy earlier apply to this usage of patriarchy. The term logically suggests the traditional authority belonging to fathers which is a good thing not a bad thing. Androcracy would be a better word for what the feminists are talking about. It is not likely to catch on, but then as the thing it would denote only exists – and only ever has existed – in the fevered brains of feminists, it is not really needed.

Now, and this is the point, nobody with an IQ over ten who watches this movie is going to think that the actual world around them either a) resembles Barbieland with the sex/gender roles reversed or b) resembles Kendom, the weird caricature that the idea of “patriarchy” inspired Ken to create. Especially since in the movie, Barbie herself, after restoring her world to the way it was, sort of, opts to leave Barbieland for the real world and become a real girl with the help of the ghost of Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, who for some unexplained reason has the same powers as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.

Something similar can be said about the movie’s man-bashing, which Piers Morgan and others have criticized. (1) Yes, the movie does depict its male characters as stupid, incompetent, clumsy and boorish. I can’t imagine anyone, however, who has not already been thoroughly brainwashed by feminism, watching the movie, and thinking that this is an accurate depiction of men. Nor, I suspect, are many likely to be persuaded to think that the film’s portrayal of men accurately depicts how men see women, which is obviously the point it is, at least on the surface, trying to make. It is simply too much of a caricature to be taken seriously. The film comes across as pretending to promote feminism while actually satirizing it. Except that this does not mesh well with anything else I have ever heard about filmmaker Greta Gerwig, I would be inclined to say this must be intentional.

Many have criticized Barbie as being far too political for a children’s movie and this criticism would be accurate regardless of whether it is the woke, feminist, propaganda that on the surface it can be read as or whether it is actually the most brilliant, satirical, takedown of the same ever made. Except, of course, that it is obviously not a children’s movie as ought to be evident from the rating. Like G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and its sequel, and the more successful Transformers film series, also based on children’s toys, this film’s target audience is not children playing with the toys today, but the children who played with the toys decades ago and are today adults, if only in the sense of having passed the age of majority.

Oppenheimer seems set to become Christopher Nolan’s most successful film yet. It would probably have done even better if he had not insisted on shooting it only in IMAX, forcing moviegoers to either pay the steep price of an IMAX ticket or watch it in a theatre for which it is not really formatted. It is a very timely film. I suspect that a lot of people would agree with that statement because, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in said conflict on Ukraine’s side, we are closer to nuclear war than we have been since the Cold War ended. That is certainly a valid reason for thinking the film to be timely It is not the reason behind my statement, however. Before looking at that reason a few remarks about the movie are in order.

The film does not just cover the period in which the atomic bomb was being developed. It also looks at Oppenheimer’s revulsion at the destructive fruit that his efforts produced, his unsuccessful attempts to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and the ensuing falling away between him and his former colleagues. The movie zig-zags between this latter part of Oppenheimer’s life, the period in which he led the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and an even earlier, pre-war period of his career. In this earlier period he apparently identified as Snow White’s evil stepmother. Or, at any rate, he tried to dispatch his tutor, Lord Patrick Blackett, played in the film by James D’Arcy, in the same manner employed by the witch in her final attempt on Snow White’s life. Since the apple went uneaten, neither dwarves nor prince were needed. Pity. They would have been available for the movie since Disney kicked them out of its new ultra-woke live action remake of Snow White.

In the storyline about the post-war part of his life the dominant theme is the growing animosity between him and US Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss, portrayed in the film by Robert Downey Jr. The film is shot partly in black and white, partly in colour, with the colour parts depicting when the story is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the black and white depicting when it is told from Strauss’ point of view. It is best to know that going into the theatre because otherwise the natural assumption would be to think it had something to do with the different timeframes the movie keeps switching between. The contest between Oppenheimer and Strauss culminated in the 1954 AEC hearings in which Oppenheimer was asked about his Communist associations (before the war his social circle included several Communists, including his pre-war girlfriend Jean Tatlock, portrayed by Florence Pugh in the movie, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, portrayed by Emily Blunt in the movie, who became his wife, and his younger brother Frank, portrayed by Dylan Arnold) and stripped of his security clearance. Strauss’s purpose in these hearings was more to publicly humiliate Oppenheimer than to harm him professionally – the clearance was set to expire the day after he was stripped of it. Ultimately, it cost Strauss his own appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce when the US Senate voted against confirmation of the appointment in part because of the lobbying of scientists looking to avenge Oppenheimer. In depicting these events Nolan does not stray from the Hollywood party-line on “McCarthyism”, which is not surprising since if any film since John Wayne starred in Big Jim McLain in 1952, two years before the Oppenheimer hearings, has dared to tell the other side of the story I am not aware of it. Accordingly the film’s precise historical accuracy fails somewhat on this point. That Strauss in hauling Oppenheimer before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board was carrying out a personal vendetta is accurate enough. That the charges against him were bogus, well, that is not as clear as the film suggests and as many people think. That J. Brandon Magoo took it upon himself, last December, to indulge in the empty gesture of voiding the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, suggests there might have been more to the charges than meets the eye.

The reason, however, that I said that Oppenheimer is a very timely film, is not the Russia-Ukrainian War and the renewed threat of nuclear annihilation that the repentant Oppenheimer felt to be the inevitable outcome of his work nor does it have anything to do with Communism. A notable moment in the film is when the title character quotes “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” upon his realization of just what he had unleashed, a line which earlier he had translated upon request from his pre-war Commie girlfriend during an, ahem, intimate moment. The classical Sanskrit original of the quote comes from the Bhagavad Gita, an important section of the sixth parva or book of the Mahabharata, the longest epic poem still extent and one of the principal Hindu scriptures. In its original context, the line is spoken by Krishna, avatar of the Hindu supreme deity Vishnu, to Prince Arjuna, the hero of the epic, and its intent is to convince Arjuna to go to war. When Oppenheimer took to quoting this line in his post-war life it was rather to the opposite effect of this. Another contrast, however, jumps out. Oppenheimer in his testimony before the USAEC Personnel Security Board in 1954 said:

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

George Grant, the greatest thinker my country, the Dominion of Canada, has ever produced, was as fond of quoting these words, especially the first part up to the words “do it”, as Oppenheimer himself was of quoting the line from the Gita. Grant believed that in these words Oppenheimer had captured the spirit that animates Modern technological progress and had also expressed in the same words, the very thing that was objectionable, or at the very least problematic from a Christian, ethical, and philosophical point of view, in said progress. The question of whether or not something should be done is made subordinate to the question of whether or not something can be done and postponed until it is too late to ask the question because the damage has already been done. Given what has already been noted about Oppenheimer’s thoughts, later in life, towards the atomic bomb, his words have the force of a mea maxima culpa.

As the trailers for Barbie and Oppenheimer were released and the hype for these movies grew we began to hear story after story about another technological genie in the process of being released from its bottle. That is the genie of artificial intelligence or AI.

That AI poses a threat to mankind as great or greater than that of the Manhattan Project’s invention is something that even Elon Musk, the last person on earth one would suspect harboured technoskeptical sentiments, suggested that the brakes be applied. Indeed, the man behind Tesla has been issuing these warnings for quite some time. The AI threat that he has been talking about is a lot more serious than the threat to their careers that the striking Hollywood actors began to perceive about the time AI channels began to flood Youtube offering us artificially generated covers of every song ever written by every artist that never covered it. About five years ago he warned that AI was like “summoning the devil”, that it needed to be proactively regulated, because “By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it will be too late”, that it could produce an “immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and posed “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”.

Of course when it comes to warning about AI, Musk was beaten to the punch by decades by a film maker. As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay I am talking about James Cameron. In Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, when he was asked by CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos to comment about recent warnings regarding AI he said “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”

1984, in addition to being the title of George Orwell’s novel warning about a totalitarian dystopia, was the year that Cameron released The Terminator. Directed and co-written by Cameron, this film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role as a cyborg assassin, sent back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor, the character played by Linda Hamilton. The Terminator was sent by Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence designed by Cyberdyne Systems and placed in charge of nuclear defences that would declare war on humanity in the future and eventually be defeated by a resistance led by Sarah Connor’s son John. The future John Connor, to protect his mother and his own existence from the Terminator, sends one of his men, Kyle Reese, portrayed by Michael Biehn back in time to protect Sarah. Reese, over the course of the movie, becomes John Connor’s father, and he and Sarah eventually defeat the Terminator at the cost of his own life. Before the Terminator is destroyed it loses an arm, however, which in the first of many sequels it is revealed falls into the hands of the creators of the future AI enemy of mankind, becoming the means by which they learn how to develop that technology in the first place.

Throughout the Terminator movie franchise both sides are constantly struggling to prevent an outcome that proves to be inevitable. Skynet is constantly fighting against its own future defeat at the hands of the resistance, the Connors and their allies are constantly trying to prevent the rise of Skynet. The fatality both are fighting a losing battle against arises out of the dilemma attached to the concept of time travel, that if you go back in time to change something, after having changed it you lose the motive to have gone back in time to begin with. The present attempt to prevent AI from becoming the threat already visible on the horizon of the future often seems similarly futile but it is not. The battle is not against a future that cannot be changed because it is the fixed reference point for everyone working to change it in the past as in the movies. It is against a future that is only inevitable if we continue to accept the idea that when it comes to science and technology, we must first find out if something can be done, and, after having done it, only then ask the question whether we should have done it or not. We must reject, in other words, the Oppenheimer ethic, and in its place firmly establish – or re-establish – the idea that we must first ask the question of whether or not something should be done, and not bother at all with the question of whether it can be done unless the answer to the first question is firmly determined to be yes.

If we don’t, we are at risk of unleashing a technological threat that would render the “battle of the sexes” type controversy surrounding the first of the movies discussed here moot. For if soulless, sexless, machines take over the world, this would indeed be an end to any sort of “patriarchy”, real or imagined, but it would also be “Hasta la vista, Barbie”.

(1) I find it hilarious that Piers Morgan has been taking this both personally and far more seriously than I have. Morgan is liberal on most social and moral issues, albeit liberal in the sense of thirty years ago rather than today. Indeed, the question he posed in ranting about Barbie’s man-bashing was “why does empowering women have to be about trashing men?” He framed it in that way to indicate his support for “empowering women”. Frankly, I think there is far too much “empowering” going on in this day and age. While people who talk about empowerment generally conceive of it in terms of self-fulfillment, in reality power is the ability to coerce others to do your will. It is something that is very dangerous and needs to be constantly held in check and under control. What is sorely needed today is not for more people of more types to have more power, as the left thinks, but a restoration and revival of authority, the respected right to lead, vested by prescription – the quality of having been tested and proven since time immemorial – in traditional institutions, the only thing capable of containing power and bending it to serve the ends of civilization, rather than unleashing it in a destructive manner. The terms “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” if they were used to mean what their component parts suggest, which neither of them is, would denote fatherly and motherly authority respectively, both good things, -archy being the suffix corresponding to authority as –cracy is the suffix corresponding to power. As far as “empowering women” specifically goes, I am unapologetically of the same mind as Dr. Johnson, “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, and Stephen Leacock, “women need not more freedom but less”, and think that every wave of feminism, including the first, was based on a fundamentally erroneous miscalculation of how little power women already had in the world, but did not take offense at this movie the way Morgan did. — Gerry T. Neal