Public History: Introducing Barbenheimer

Abstract

• Public History:Introducing Barbenheimer
• Ruth Oldenziel

The summer of 2023 marked the surprising blockbuster season of two films: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project, and Greta Gerwig's Barbie, a fantasy comedy about the American doll who conquered the world. Released on the same day, July 21, the cultural phenomenon also created a portmanteau of the films' titles. The portmanteau Barbenheimer was first coined as a joke to place the two films in the same analytical frame precisely because they seemed like such polar opposites—one about a serious and recognized scientific subject, the other about a frivolous fashion doll. The two films, now joined at the hip, provoked much public comment. Technology and Culture invited two prominent historians of technology to offer their perspectives on the public history point of view of technology.

In Aimee Slaughter's essay on Oppenheimer, she critiques the film for its conspicuous omission of crucial perspectives, noting the absence of the perspective of the people of New Mexico, whose land was occupied during the Manhattan Project and who have been affected by its aftermath ever since, as well as the oversight of the contributions of women scientists during the Manhattan Project. Equally important is her critique of the film's failure to address the profound suffering of the Japanese people in Hiroshima as a result of the atomic bombing, weaving her personal and local reception of the film into her reading of it.

Nolan's Oppenheimer, according to Slaughter, is instead "in awe of physics and the power it can bestow." The film is less interested in science than in power, pitting Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director, against Lewis Strauss, a man who worked for the U.S. military, managing and rewarding munitions production, and who went on to become a major figure in nuclear weapons development, energy policy, and U.S. nuclear power after the war. She finds the figure of Strauss particularly noteworthy as the counterpoint to Oppenheimer "because it highlights the relationship between scientists and government, which is often ignored in popular images of science." Moreover, [End Page 315] "federal and military involvement in science is not portrayed in a particularly positive light."¹

At the same time, Oppenheimer offers an all-too-familiar public image of science and technology as the "individualized work of masculine genius," despite scholarship to the contrary.² Barbie is Oppenheimer's photographic negative. Since the 1950s, Barbie has represented a universe for girls in which the serious business is to catch a husband, raise a family with him, and thriftily outfit the growing children—with the products of the needle and the home sewing machine, as Rachel Maines puts it.³ Born under the atomic cloud, the creators of the Barbie doll never referenced Oppenheimer's atomic world. Ken is not a nuclear physicist—even as a fantasy.

In her own peculiar way, Barbie was subtly subversive in the 1950s. Unusually for a doll, she had prominent, pointy breasts. Equally disturbing was the doll's commercialism: Maines explores the connection between feminism and capitalism and finds that, despite her anti-materialist parents' warnings, they can work together. Mattel's profits were in the clothes, not the doll. The American company's designers employed its largest workforce in Japan, a country firmly in the U.S. military and economic orbit during the Cold War, to sew the miniature clothes inspired by Parisian haute couture at the Kokusai Boeki factory, where over five thousand women sewed the labor-intensive, intricate trousseaus for Barbie and her friends, combining craftmanship with the demands of mass production for mass consumption. In the real world of girls and their mothers, the expensive clothing and accessories spawned a rich subculture of designing and creating entire Barbie wardrobes from paper patterns, fashion magazine clippings, and samples from their own closets.⁴ Maines, like many other girls with their Barbie dolls, turned to sewing skills to create outfits "with scrounged fabric scraps and large-eyed needles, folding and fastening strapless and sleeveless dresses for my blonde prize." Sewing garments like sleeve hemming is not only "tricky"; it requires technical skills that...