Barbenheimer Style

Hollywood's Memetic Hail Mary.

So - The Barbie Movie.

You know it came out. I know it came out. Advertising executives in SoCal spent the GDP of a mid-size African country to make sure we all knew it was coming out. I mean, if you go on Google and search Barbie, everything turns pink.

I’m not sure if that was necessary, though.

The Barbie Movie, rightly or wrongly, feels like the first movie that people have actually been legitimately, genuinely excited for in quite some time. Even if I’d never seen a single ad for it, I’d know it was coming just from chatter and buzz alone.

I think some of that stems from the fact that The Barbie Movie released the same day as Nolan’s visually-impressive but meandering biopic Oppenheimer - which has had a similar level of excitement surrounding its impending release, as the latest entry into Nolan’s vaunted and impressive filmography. The two unlikely box-office competitors found bizarre memetic synchronicity. 4chan’s /tv/ board - outsized in it’s memetic influence, reach, and staying power - has been churning out Oppenheimer funnies since the first trailer, which, like the leaky septic tank of the internet 4chan is, has gradually filtered out into the broader internet. The content itself, though… well, let’s just say My… le bomb… it… le killed people? has been living in my head rent free since I saw this.

My biggest disappointment with Oppenheimer was that the end wasn't a giant dance party at Los Alamos to a cover of Gangnam Style called Oppenheimer Style. I’d pay to watch it several times over just to see Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon doing this on the bomb test platform’s elevator.

Now, if 4chan is a septic tank, then Twitter is the internet’s open air latrine, where homosexuals and middle aged, childless white women who talk in AAVE had fired up their own memetic content factories for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. While the content was, in my opinion, significantly less funny for the most part, it did seize the imagination of Twitter, who began to put out some pretty impressive artwork and memes in their own right.

It also reminds me the art of the truly great movie poster is dead in the water.

Of course, the two would meet and mix in what has been dubbed the Barbehneimer phenomenon in a rare, bewildering, and somewhat beautifulmoment of cross-culture overlap in which two disparate internet subcultures that would often have no desire to interact with each other did.

And the result? Well, it’s been quite… explosive. Kind of like… a certain… le bomb?

Now, what’s truly spectacular about all the resulting artwork, memes, even t-shirts, with numerous posts on Twitter and Reddit of goony manchildren and Twitterinas going into their local theaters with shirts made for the occasion for a nice double-feature, is not really the fact is exists, which in and of itself is pretty incredible, but it also shows how creatively bankrupt Hollywood really is. Each and every one of the fan-made posters above are better than any actual movie poster or advertisement made in the past twenty years, I’d say. If Barbenheimer was a movie, just one of these would be enough to get my ass in a theatre. Hollywood, being as risk-averse in its own way, would never allow such creativity in their marketing departments.

Which is why the sudden interest in Barbenheimer from them seems particularly pathetic and cynical.

Before the hype for Oppenheimer and Barbie began to co-mingle (perhaps like electrons in a certain le bomb), the Hollywood trade papers weren’t talking about Barbenheimer - they were talking about whether or not the two movies coming out at the same time would have deleterious effects on their box office hauls. Now, call me crazy, but before Barbenheimer caught on, I don’t think they really had to worry about the target audience of Barbie going to buy a ticket for Oppenheimer, or vice versa.

But, now that overlapping interest in the two has organically sprung from nothing but the creativity of the internet, the Hollywood regime is all for it. They even trotted out Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphey to do last-minute press junkets and make the claim that they even want to see Barbie. Maybe they do, but, I doubt they’d have a need to express as much in public interviews if they weren’t having a check waved in front of their faces.

Notice how Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie haven’t been wheeled out to say similar things about Oppenheimer. Wonder why that might be?

The point is, Hollywood is riding high on the Barbenheimer wave, while the soulless advertising and marketing ghouls are doing their best to both claim credit for it, co-opt it, and ruin it so they can shake out a few more dimes before the hype-cycle rolls over to… er… wait - what is the next big movie coming out? What is everyone excited for next?

Hm… oh, that might be troublesome for Hollywood.

Even more troublesome is that pesky strike going on.

While I think we can all agree the Writer’s Guild Strike has been a net positive for society. Not only has production on pretty much everything in Hollywood ground to a halt, but all the wretchedly unfunny late night talk shows and other such dreck been off the air since it started. Now, since I have a functioning brain, I don’t watch losers like Jimmy Kimmel or gaggle of morons currently filling out the Saturday Night Live roster, but it wasn’t until someone pointed out that we weren’t hearing about them in the news was when I noticed that, holy shit - we actually aren’t. And that is a very, very good thing, because I don’t think I could have taken a Saturday Night Live sketch about the Titan submarine disaster. Or worse…

It also spared us from the latest nu-Star Wars dreck and may end up killing off some of the Marvel television productions currently gestating in the wicked womb of the Magic Kingdom before they ever see the light of day, which, again, would be nothing but a boone for society.

Given the quality of the material these striking writers have been putting out for a decade and some change, I don’t really give a fuck what happens to them. They kvetch about the dreaded artificial intelligence boogie man coming for their jobs, but, at this point, I’m honestly not sure if the machine learning programs (since they aren’t actual artificial intelligence) could do a worse job.

I also don’t really give a fuck about the actors striking, either. On one hand, I like watching the fat cats and big wigs and corporate ghouls writhe in agony as the proles stick it to them, but, on the other hand, these actors are, by and large, the ones who have spent the past ten or so years talking down to Middle America, lecturing us on politics and everything else as the self-appointed anointed ones of our society. It’s hilarious to watch them make the claim that they’re striking for working people across America, and fighting for all our rights, when I don’t remember a damn one of them speaking up in support of the striking rail workers during that fiasco a couple months ago. I remember a few actively against the Warrior Met Coal Strike, when miners in Alabama walked off the job in protest for the better part of two years.

I wonder why?

Oh… weird.

Well, I just think it’s funny that, suddenly, it’s totally cool to go on strike when they do it, and, of course, being the unfailing narcissists they are, they’re doing it for us. The little people. Truly, they are Christ-like in their martyrdom.

As a brief aside, I think it’s equally comical that much of the coalition is currently breaking apart because of SAG-AFTRA’s president, Fran Drescher’s - you remember The Nanny, right? - stance on the Fauci Ouchie and the resulting vaccine mandates, which, er…

Well, let’s just say I’m actually fucking shocked she’s still allowed to walk free in Los Angeles county, let alone serve as SAG-AFTRA’s president, since she was critical of the quote-unquote vaccines from the beginning.

There’s a saying I once heard that, apparently, was something of a credo among striking laborers - if you like everyone you’re striking with, your strike ain’t big enough. This is, of course, just saying that it takes a lot of people from a lot of varying backgrounds to stage a successful strike. Naturally, the egotists in SAG-AFTRA and the rest of the various Hollywood trades either never heard this line, or can’t bring themselves to swallow their pride and stick it out alongside icky, dumb, knuckle-dragging science deniers like Drescher. Even though Drescher claims to have taken the shot herself, she was unambiguously against forcing it as a job requirement, which for the good boys and girls of Hollywood, puts her in the same league as Trump, Alex Jones, and Satan himself.

Of course, Drescher’s comments are being blasted across the media on outfits like CNN, ABC, NBC, and their ilk, who are exactly the people who need this strike to end. And fast. You think the striking actors would realize this is just a classic divide-and-conquer tactic so obvious that Machiavelli would deduct points for a lack of subtlety, but time and time again it has been made explicitly clear that critical thinking really isn’t these people’s strong suits.

This brings us back to Barbenheimer. Over the next weeks, you’ll see Hollywood and their media mouthpieces really pushing this whole thing, even more than they already have been. Why did they go from touting it as a silly fad to a “box office miracle”? Why did every entertainment trade paper suddenly, inexplicably, and in complete unison, start talking about Barbenheimer, all at once? Well, Barbenehimer is an organic hype movement that just happens to be pushing the last two big films Hollywood has on their docket for the foreseeable future. This is it - the last two bullets in their cylinder. If these don’t hit, and pay out big… things don't look rosy for tinsle town. 2023 has already been unkind to some of Hollywood’s biggest hitters and largest names.

Legacy properties are no longer the safe bets they have been. Tentpoles are growing frail and wavering under pressure. Hollywood is bleeding billions of dollars, and now, they can’t even get these movies off the ground as the people who make them possible refuse to work long, grueling hours of production for pitiful pay. For as critical as I’ve been about the writers and actors striking, I understand why they’re doing it. I don't fault them for it, not at all. There aren’t many Tom Cruises or Brad Pitts raking in the big bucks. For most actors, its feast or famine. And that plate is empty more often than its not. This is to say nothing of the VFX artists, lighting gaffers, make-up artists, and other, more labor intensive trades in Hollywood, who are infamously underpaid, overworked, and criminally under-appreciated. They’re all talking about striking now, as well. And, honestly? I hope they do.

I hope the whole decrepit, rotten structure falls to pieces.

But before it does?

Hollywood has one last play. One last desperate card up their sleeve before they wade into an uncertain latter half of 2023. This may be the winter of Los Angeles’ discontent, but there's one last pass to the in-zone they can throw

They have Barbenheimer.