I’ve returned from a summer hiatus! With my schedule in flux, I will be shifting my weekly publication date this fall—stay tuned, it will take a few weeks to get up and running again. In the meantime, enjoy being surprised when the newsletter arrives on completely random days this August. And today, enjoy my musings on “Barbenheimer”—a non-Disney phenomenon that remains true to the themes of this newsletter. It contains light spoilers but really leaves most of both films a mystery.
There’s a laying on of hands near the apex of both Oppenheimer and Barbie. In Barbie, this comes with a touch—one of two shots in Barbie that intentionally mimics divine and human hands on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
As Barbie has her Pinocchio moment— could she become a real human, she wonders?—her creator, a little old Jewish lady named Ruth Mosko Handler, takes Barbie’s hands in hers. “Feel,” she says.
Meanwhile, on a different screen in the multiplex, we are in New Mexico. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer (also Jewish) climbs a metal tower and pauses beside his creation: the world’s first atomic bomb, about to be detonated. It too, is going out into the world—to destroy things. It will poison New Mexico, and its siblings will decimate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oppenheimer stands beside the bomb, his head bowed. He leans close to his creation—just as Mosko leans towards Barbie. A breath away, he arches his body over the curve of the metal horror, and touches it. The moment is somehow both tender and terrifying.
“What was I made for?” croons Billie Eilish on the Barbie soundtrack, back in the theater where Barbie rests her hands in Ruth’s.
What were these things made for? What did it mean to create them? What does it mean for all of us to inherit them?
In Barbie, that Billie Eilish song—which is gorgeous, have a listen— plays as Mosko gives Barbie a vision of the world, in all of its messiness.
What was I made for? is the kind of question you might have asked yourself during your freshman year of college. You might have asked it on a college campus in the 1990s while, say, reading Camus and Kierkegaard, wearing oversize button down shirts and listening to the Indigo Girls (whose music is featured in the film). Just hypothetically, of course.
So there I was, in the second half of Barbenheimer day, with tears streaming down my face. Meet Barbie, existential destroyer of worlds. It was the film I’ve been looking for since I started reading Milan Kundera’s Slowness on the plane to my study abroad in Prague, circa 1997 (RIP, Milan Kundera).
Barbie is a love letter to late Gen X (or elder millennial) white upper-middle-class women with ‘tweenage daughters. I am … all of those things. I would see it again. But I did not realize it would be so religious.
Back to creation. Because that, after all, is one thing we think we are made for. It is a capacity we grasp in the midst of existential crisis. Humans create things out of plastic (like Barbie). They create things out of words and musical notes, out of yarn and linen. Out of flour, butter, sugar: cake.
Sometimes, they create things out of cells and sinew, blood and tissue, and call them children. Sometimes, they create things out of plutonium and uranium, hard metals and explosives, and call it a bomb— and it kills other humans and their children.
In creating and destroying, some theologians argue, we imitate divinity. Whether there is or is not a god (anthropomorphically understood), or more abstractly, a sense of divinity and sacrality in the universe, it is still strange to me that a sunflower seed sprouts in the ground. I understand its biology. I still marvel.
Albert Einstein—who drops in throughout Oppenheimer, seeming like a cross between a prophet and the bird-feeding lady from Mary Poppins—wrote that “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” He connected it, too, with religion, but could not “imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation.”
So if not reward and punishment—and I’m with Einstein here, no thanks, theodicy, I’m not playing—what do religions, divinities, and religious people do?
****
What about blessing?
In an interview with Willa Paskin for The New York Times Magazine, Barbie director/co-writer Greta Gerwig spoke about the Jewish practice of blessings—-particularly, blessings over children. I’m going to quote the article at length:
It’s a testament to Gerwig’s singular earnestness — a level of sincerity unavailable to many of us — that using Barbie to affirm the worth of ordinary women feels, to her, quasi religious. She told me that when she was growing up, her Christian family’s closest friends were observant Jews; they vacationed together and constantly tore around each other’s homes. She would also eat with them on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner, where blessings were sung in Hebrew, including over the children at the table. May God bless you and protect you. May God show you favor and be gracious to you. May God show you kindness and grant you peace. Every Friday the family’s father would rest his hand on Gerwig’s head, just as he did on his own children’s, and bless her too.
“I remember feeling the sense of, ‘Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever you did or you didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,’” Gerwig told me. “ ‘You are a child of God. I put my hand over you, and I bless you as a child of God at this table. And that’s your value.’ I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough.” She imagines people going to the temple of the movies to see “Barbie” on a hot summer day, sitting in the air-conditioned dark, feeling transported, laughing, maybe crying, and then coming out into the bright heat. “I want people to feel like I did at Shabbat dinner,” she said. “I want them to get blessed.”
“Whatever you did or you didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that… I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough.”
This is what is most radical about Barbie. The inherent value of a human being. Not their creations. Nor their quest for effortless perfection. Just them. (This is also why Weird Barbie, a key ally in the reconquest of Barbieland, is one of the best parts of the film).
Oppenheimer is a mirror universe. In that world—which is our world, of course—it is doing and making that gives you value. (As an academic, I couldn’t help being envious every time Oppenheimer met someone who had actually read his academic papers).
There’s an excitement in creation. And I value that. I was surprised by how easily I was drawn in by the can-do spirit of the film, the boys (and one or two girls) in the proverbial garage with their toys, building something new. The scientists who stopped to ask—should we? should we do this? should we use this thing we built?— didn’t get very far. No one makes a film about a bomb just sitting there and not exploding.
Ruth Handler blesses Barbie and sends her out into the world.
There is no such blessing for an atomic bomb.
Ruth Mosko Handler, creator of Barbie
Einstein’s fame came as a scientist, but he was also, profoundly, a humanist. “Man is here for the sake of other men—above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy,” he wrote in the same essay.
Blessing is about humans as much as the divine. A blessing makes wine taste more vivid, a rainbow brighter, a blossom even more impossibly delicate. Blessings make us more real to one another.
In her poem “The Art of Blessing the Day,” Marge Piercy writes:
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.
Dolls, I think are a technology of both newness and oldness. I am thinking of my friend Laura Levitt’s meditations on dolls as I write this—what they hold, what they don’t hold, what they carry. ““For little girls, dolls are safe. They are socially acceptable ways to play with all kinds of emotions,” she writes (American Jewish Loss After the Holocaust, 167), but she also cautions that the psychological “working through” dolls promise is not always simple or complete.
I did not, intentionally, save any of my Barbie dolls, though some other toys remained. Yet my memories of Barbie run deep. Her smell, her hair texture, the brightness of her eyes. The way most Barbie play among older girls inevitably devolved into some sort of giant Barbie orgy.
I loved dolls, but dolls also terrified me. Playing with emotions is like playing with a bomb. There is so much potential fallout.
Someone might not want to play anymore. Someone might steal or dismember your Barbie. The storyline of playtime might not go the way you want to write it.
What Barbenheimer weekend and the unlikely appearance of Shabbat blessings in Gerwig’s interview gave me was a memory of the grace that comes with not striving.
It’s there in Gerwig’s quote, of course—the image of safety and enough-ness (and I notice, too, how her experience was at someone else’s family table, and I think of how Ruth first appears at a table in Barbie—what do they mean, these fantasies of other people’s safe kitchen tables?).
It is there in the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” I learned the song—you can all laugh now—on a Reform movement summer trip in Israel, a few years after its 1989 release. One of my friends wanted me to sing the alto part in a version of the song he had adapted for our closing night dinner.
“Wait, so you’re telling me you learned this song about not seeking ‘your source for some definitive’ in Israel?” my husband laughed, when I relayed this on the car ride home from the movies.
“The irony did appeal to me, even then,” I replied.
The moment I didn’t strive on that summer was in the Negev desert, a desert quite different from and the same as Los Alamos—hot space, contested space, old space. It was when the counselors took our watches away and all we did was hike. All we did was move. Pause. Drink from our canteens. Move again. Pause again. Listen.
Barbie suggests a hope for not doing, just being— for women, especially, to pause with a cup of tea and maybe hold hands and… breathe.
But Piercy reminds us that we are also given tools for a reason. That we need to make Barbie—and what we think about the bomb—new again, or changed, or dismantled.
How, though?
The morning after Barbenheimer, I went for a run in my neighborhood. When I got to the top of its tallest hill, A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera were singing “Fall On Me” on my playlist. “I want to believe in a world we can’t see,” she sang in the second verse. “Millions of particles passing through me.”
And I saw the empty spaces that are and aren’t empty, all at once. Cells, deserts, pages of holy books.
“I can’t see the future, but I know that it’s there,” was the lyric a few beats later.
We don’t know if our future is Hiroshima or Barbie’s welcome vision of a beautiful old woman on a bench in Los Angeles.
This song, like “What Was I Made For,” is one of stumbling faith. A “might as well try” kind of keeping on, not a “And you shall know that my name is the Lord!” sort of situation.
It’s hard in either event. A seat on that bench sounds swell right now.
But time—for the moment—runs forward. So we might as well keep blessing it.
Even when blessings mean change.