I saw Oppenheimer so you don't have to.

Also, Barbie.

Really, I should be working on the new book I just sold to HarperOne (!!!!!), a sort of follow-up to Modern Tarot, essays and spells about that DIY witch lyfe. But I simply must expel all this anger and rage about how phenomenally shitty Oppenheimer is while my pee is still green from the nutritional yeast on my popcorn and my fingers are still gummy with the stinking, cheesy glory of it. ANYWAY.

I really did want to see Barbenhiemer, to pay for Barbie and then sneak into a screening of Oppenheimer at my local multi-plex, a victimless crime I haven’t pulled since I was a tween lying about my age to hunky ushers at the Showcase Cinemas (Showcase Enemas?) in Revere, Massachusetts. But who has like six continuous hours to waste? Not I! I saw Barbie at 9:30am Saturday morning and I fucking loved it. Listen, haters, I would like your reviews to be broadcast from the world we actually live in, not the fantasy dream world where feminism is such a normal part of our normal cinematic experience that we can grumble about the philosophies expunged in Barbie being so 101 and, like, capitalist. I mean – duh. But friends, do you go to the movies? I go to the movies. All. The. Time. I see not feminism at the movies. In my own little experience I generally have to check much of who I am / what I care about / my perspective of life on earth at the door to get through the next two and half hours in the dark. Did I have to do the same to get through Barbie? Naturally. But I had to do it considerably less.

Goddammit

I generally go to the movies for the pleasure of all the shit Nicole Kidman won’t stop talking about in those fucking AMC ads. Heartache does feel better with a bin of popcorn on your lap! I had a good time recently at a birthday bash for my old friend Bucky Sinister (read his excellent piece about Eileen Myles here, and follow his Substack, why don’t you?), where he rented an entire theater so that he and his friends could turn Fast X into a quasi-Rocky Horror experience, hollering “Family!” every time to atrocious Vin Diesel says something intense about family while looking like he has to take a crap. I freaking loved seeing Fast X – it was stupid and fast, as promised, and so over-the-top I was in chortles the whole time. It was not feminist. Did I feel compelled to offer some hot takes on the internet about how not feminist Fast X was? Of course not. No one expected it to be feminist. Everyone did expect Barbie to be feminist, and it arguably was. I am pretty certain it was way fucking harder for Greta Gerwig to get anything made, let alone Barbie, than it was for whatever dude made Fast X, as well as the Fasts I – IX, so why the glee in taking it down? Internet commentators, we already know. We know that you are feminist, and the sort of feminist who, like, didn’t wear the pink pussy hat to the feminist marches post-2016. We know that you would love the live in a world where the sort of feminism espoused in Barbie is so, like, insultingly obvious. I bristle at the predictable critiques that every vaguely feminist or queer movie just didn’t go hard enough. Probably it goes as hard as it can, and would like to go farther, but makes dumb compromised, just like all of us so often are forced to do, more often than we’d like and frequently without even realizing it, under patriarchy. Is Barbie perhaps the first movie I’ve actually ever seen that attempts to locate, define and lampoon patriarchy by name? My memory is pretty shitty plus I actually forget 80% of every movie I see twenty minutes after leaving the theater, but I think it is. It gave me a feeling similar to how I felt after listening to a really fucking cheesy comedian do a freshman orientation schtick at Salem State College circa 1990. She advised the females in the room, presumably on the threshold of serious promiscuity, to get familiar with their clitorises (clitori?) before slutting it up. I realized I’d never heard the word clitoris used in such a fashion; like, in public. like, if you have one, you should probably familiarize yourself with it? MIND BLOWN. Why aren’t we educated about our clits, our bodies, our masturbatory potential? I came home and promptly yelled at my mother. I was young then. I am now old, and cynical enough that I am beyond giddy at the stupid feminism in Barbie. Perhaps I should admire the folks ranting about how simpleminded it is – they still believe a toy corporation in league with a film corporation would give us more! As for me, I loved the Greased Lightening vibes of Ryan Gosling’s epic dance performance, and enjoyed on reflecting on how varied his career has been since I first fell in love with him and a cracked-out, cat-neglecting teacher in Half Nelson; I thought about how I unfairly victim-blamed Margot Robbie for her dumb role in The Wolf of Wall Street. As if any of it were her fault! Before I depart Barbieland for the patriarchy of Oppenheimer, can we have a minute with Rhea Perlman as Geppetto to Barbie’s Pinocchio? I loved it. Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler is my new higher power. If this makes me a simpleton, oh well. I’m not unhappy.

ANYWAY. The moment my husband and son pulled away from the curb for their epic camping trip, I Fandangoed myself a cheap $7 matinee ticket from my local indie movie house, stuffed my purse with nutritional yeast and a shaker of Trader Joe’s Everything But the Elote seasoning, and took my seat amongst the octogenarians on a budget. A three-hour movie occasioned the selection of a large popcorn, which does come with a free refill but, eh gads. A report from the previews: three-ways are hot. Now, in 2023, when you can’t swing a furry without hitting a throuple, films are being made about tortured individuals getting sexed-up and angsty in a love triangle. I’ll probably see both of them. Challengers had me at the get-go, with Zendaya (love) seemingly signing on to a romp with a couple of nerdy bros, then it IMMEDIATELY LOST ME with the introduction of TENNIS. Man, I hate a sports movie. Fucking kills it for me. Of all the sports there are to hate I do actually hate tennis less, for the thwack of the balls is so satisfying, and the Williams sisters so fantastic, but still. Thought it was a sex movie, learned it was a sports movie, I’m out. Seeing the trailer a second time, the Rhianna song umphing in the background, the fact that it’s by Luca Guadagnino, plus Zendaya’s bob has me grumblingly planning to purchase a $7 bargain matinee for it at some point in the future. Likewise for Passages, which looks European and faggy – a bit of a change, no, having dude in a cis gay male relationship want to get with a girl? I feel like that rarely happens in movies. And I’m still roughed-up by how homophobically I Will Destroy You (also love) handled Kwame’s bisexuality/queerness/fucking a woman/whatever you want to call it. As a girl who has been hot for fags, you know, it's nice. Lezzes are always taking boycations but we don’t see the reverse quite as much. From the drama of the trailer, it perhaps looks like no one in the film has ever heard of ethical polyamory, but I guess there would be no movie if they did, right?

But – Oppenheimer. Even though I know it is bad form to talk about bodies I have to say that watching Cillian Murphy on the big screen and thinking about how the camera adds ten pounds left me shook. Regardless, he is easy on the eye, at least to start, but as the one-notey-ness of his performance become more and more one-notey, I began to fear he was making the studio’s case for simply using an actor’s AI likeness in film. Same goes for everyone, actually. Did Florence Pugh, who I adore, really need to be there? Couldn’t you have spray-tanned a doll, propped her on a chair and called it a day? This is not the wonderful Florence Pugh’s fault, any more than Margot Robbie was to blame for Wolf of Wall Street. Sometimes I find myself caught in a total reverie of her performance of Midsommar, just lost in a deep daydream of her trapped by flowers and opting to burn her boyfriend alive. I love her.

All things atomic, all things nuclear, are the very most scariest thing to me, and so when I saw the trailer for Oppenheim some months ago, all ominous and inflamed with that creepy Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds quote layered through, Murphy’s insane eyeballs, both totally dead and supernaturally alive, radiating out above his sunken cheeks, I was like, fucking yes, I cannot wait for this. So I am sorry to tell you it is like three hours of bureaucracy – government bureaucracy, academic bureaucracy – delivered by a bunch of dudes cosplaying the 40s. I mean, it is borrrrrrrrrrrrring. I couldn’t believe how bored I was. Next to sports, war movies and movies with mostly men in them make me want to die. There are always exceptions, and I’d assumed this would be one of them. The man who made the fucking atomic bomb! How terrifying, how interesting and dark! But Oppenheimer comes off as a mostly inscrutable nothingburger. Who would have thought that a ‘sex’ scene between Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh would be so soulless, so void, so silly? Like, really, she jumps off his dick and runs over to a book and randomly pulls out the fucking Bhagavad Gita, in Sanskrit, which – in one of five million moments crafted to drive home how, like, smart he was! – Oppenheimer admits yes, he can read, because he’s so smart, and she dares him to read it and, whaddaya know, it happens to be the phrase NOW I AM BECOME DEATH THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS – like, really? You guys, I’ve dabbled my tiniest baby toe in ‘Hollywood’ and I happen to know for a fact that’s bad writing. You’re fired.

There are lots of moments like that – the movie is essentially a garland of them, a three-hour garland of doofusy, expository dialogue I thought they kicked you out of the Writers Guild for. There are tribunals upon tribunals and I left my body so thoroughly I got confused about what man was mad at what man and for what – and I didn’t care. That was the thing. As Christopher Nolan changes the palette and goes from black and white to color I know I’m supposed to think ooooh that MEANS SOMETHING, but, like, I couldn’t get it up to figure it out. It was so boring. Emily Blunt, who I will forever love for the line ‘I’m just one bout of food poisoning away from my ideal weight’ in The Devil Wears Prada, is also a horrible cliché, burst fully-formed from the thigh of the woman-hating director. She just, like, keeps her lips in a thin little grimace and stands by her man and is totally, utterly boring. She’s an alcoholic mom who doesn’t like her kids - and she’s boring. She gets exactly one good moment, a Don’t fuck with me, fellas! diva moment whilst being interrogated, but it was over quickly. No surprise here, but, I would have much preferred a more magical realism biopic about Kitty Oppenheimer and Pugh’s character, the Berkeley radical Jean Tatlock, a la’ Ann Rower’s great novel Lee & Elaine, wherein the art wives are brought back from the dead and made lesbians. It’s my blog, I can dream.

Nolan’s adherence to ‘truth’ actually gets so incredibly tedious, the will-they-or-won’t-they bomb test scene is interminable, lasting nearly as long as the storm that delayed the explosion. As I sit, my empty large popcorn bin on my lap, I consider leaving the theater for the refill I was promised. I have so many feelings to eat! Should I do it? I’ve suffered through two hours at this point, watched Tatlock portrayed as a simpering codependent goober who offs herself when android Oppenheimer acknowledges he can’t ‘be there’ for her now that he’s married (no proof he was ever ‘there for her,’ btw) – the romantically-filmed suicide getting as much or more air time as the rest of Pugh’s performance combined, barf. It is time to reckon with fact that I came here to see the extravagant horror of an atomic bomb being exploded, and as there really is nothing else to this movie (I did rather like the trippy visuals used to portray Oppie’s deep thoughts about the universe), the need to see the big kaboom feels stronger than ever. Do I want to risk missing it to grab more popcorn?

I did the math (picture it scrawled on a chalkboard, i.e. every movie about a smart guy ever) and realized there is NO WAY Nolan is going to get to the bomb in the time it takes for me to get my bin re-popcorned. I ran out of the theater. I should have kept going. I made it back for the – surprise – rather uneventful explosion. I kept almost leaving, but I stuck around to watch Oppenheimer’s moral legacy as – what? A guy who just wasn’t sure about shit? – get cemented in cinematic history. His conscience comes through as weird hallucinations of, like, background earthquakes, a white lady whose skin is peeling off her face in a nuclear flash, and – yes – getting his brogues caught in an imaginary charred corpse.

Upon finally leaving the fucking theater I did a quick Oppenheimer search to satisfy a need for schadenfreude – certainly, this movie was shitcanned, no? No! It was not! People seem to like it. Well, I’ve never been too in synch with the dominant paradigm, the dominant paradigm being patriarchy and all. Plus, I’m an Aquarius. I wondered, at points, if Oppenheimer was as well, but NO he is a fucking TAURUS, with a Gemini rising. Moon in Cancer! Whoa. Chew on that for a while; I know I will. I did have a moment thinking about Oppenheimer as qualifying for a membership in al-anon, and that was interesting, but I don’t want my mind to be the most interesting thing in the theater. Sigh. Like Oppenheimer, I’m oppressed by my own genius.

If, like me, you are chillingly fascinated by the bomb and all things nuke, there is much better content out there. May I recommend some? The Day After is a 1980s made-for-tv movie that my little sister was not allowed to watch, because it was the 80s and she was already having nightmares about nuclear war. I got to see it, and remember everyone pasty with nuclear fallout, rotting away under the ash, peace-offering the last tangerine known to man to one another in a way-too-little-too-late gesture of humanity. My husband recently saw it and said it was fucking terrifying, so maybe it stands the test of time – unlike Sting’s cold war hit Russians in which he ominously hopes ‘the Russians love their children, too.’ The 80s – what a time to be alive! Chernobyl on HBO is really good, even if that female scientist was too perfect to be true. If you want to make yourself sick you can follow it up with Meltdown: Three Mile Island on Netflix, like I did.

I’ve been haunted by the book American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War ever since finding it in a bookstore in the early 90s. A collection of photos and interviews with everyone impacted by the decades of above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada – military personnel, civilian laborer, and folks downwind (they only dropped the bombs when it was going away from Vegas and towards self-sustaining Mormon communities who went on to drink radioactive milk from their radioactive cows with government approval) – this chilling book was the soundtrack to my Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown, an intense era of my early 20s wherein I came out, learned my stepfather was a peeping tom, became estranged from my family, had a feminist awakening, and, soon thereafter, a revelatory awakening about the interconnectedness of all forms of oppression, from fascism to food production and everything in between. I became unable to eat most foods a la Chris Kraus in the incredible Angels and Anorexia. I sold all my clothing to Buffalo Exchange, as all items save roomy shirts and roomy jeans, were made by the patriarchy to objectify my body and prime me for rape. I made a vague plan to live off the land so I could do no harm. All the while, slowly reading this book about the real horrors the government and American science unleashed upon its citizens. I recently found it online and bought it again. It’s sickening and sad and terrifying; if you’re ever feeling too happy and think you might need to be reminded of the evils that lurk, like, a state away, pick it up. I do like supporting the journalist who did the work; as you could imagine, she had a hard time getting it published. Through this book I learned of the 1989 made-for-tv-movie Nightbreaker, which tells the story of one man employed by the test site, what he saw, what happened to him. It’s been a while, but if I recall it’s waaaaaay better than Oppenheimer, even if you have to exchange Cillian Murphy for Emilio Estevez.

There is one more important bit of Oppenheimer-related content I want to share, and I found it inside the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977 – 1997, edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian. Early in the collection is some memoir by a writer, Edith A Jenkins, excerpts from her book Against a Field Sinister. Jenkins was friends with Jean Tatlock, good friends, and writes about the scene at Berkeley when everyone was gathering to support the Spanish loyalists and considering Communism. In just a smattering of tiny vignettes Jean the person comes alive way more than in Oppenheimer’s one-dimensional, suicidal-woman-scorned portrayal. Reading, I learn that she was private about her despair. That she went to medical school, became a psychiatrist. She had great compassion for Oppenheimer; apparently, he never had a childhood, his wealthy family caught onto his smarts early and had him lecturing at the tender age of 7. Jean loved poetry, in particular John Donne, who she turned Oppie onto, and he then named the atomic bomb Trinity after Donne’s Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three person’d god. Jean drove a convertible and took her friends driving up the Mendocino coast with the top down, singing all the way up highway 1. Her mother died during this time, and she was mad at her dad for holding on to her past her time to go. She had a droopy eye from a childhood accident. She was probably queer, seemed to be lovers with Mary Ellen Washburn, a married woman who held socialist salons at her home in Berkeley; in Against a Field Sinister, Jenkins writes about popping over to the Washburns’ home on a weekend morning and finding Jean and Mary Ellen in bed together, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Mary Ellen’s husband slept in his own room.

Jean Tatlock

When Jean comes to visit Jenkins after she has her first baby, Jenkins asks her if she regrets not marrying Oppenheimer (don’t recall him asking her in the movie – could have been out of my body by then – but he did IRL). She did regret it, and Jenkins then suggested Jean experienced the scientist as ‘essentially non-sexual.’ Well done, Christopher Nolan, maybe it was a better scene than I realized.

Jean was a Marxist, a Freudian analyst, and, according to Jenkins, ‘wanted to die.’ She died in her apartment in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, found there by her father, a professor at Berkeley. She seemed like an exceptional woman, who struggled in life; not the hysterical, lovelorn Oppenheimer groupie. Edith Jenkins’ excerpt ends too quickly in the collection – which is really epic and gorgeous, independent of this gem. When I finish the anthology, I’ll probably get her memoir.

Additional thoughts I’m too hot and sweaty to elaborate: Barbie gave me much more existential realness than Oppenheimer; it took me like an hour to recognize Matt Damon as Matt Damon and I did appreciate his blustering, aliveness in relation to Murphy’s cool coma. It was like straight man/funny man, but who was who? Also, I feel like every time Rami Malek showed up it was, LOOK, IT’S RAMI MALEK. I always love Robert Downey Jr. That’s all. Goodnight.

It me.