Double feature: Of bombs, Barbie™, and blockbusters
Two films with two UTM researchers: Oppenheimer and Barbie face off with a UTM physicist’s perspective and a cinema studies’ expert viewpoint
Whether you donned pink for Barbie or a lab coat to see Oppenheimer – or vice versa, because scientists and Barbies™ come in all styles and types – this past summer, going to the cinema was an event. And, for the most part, the buzz primarily surrounded Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig's Barbie. (Sorry Haunted Mansion.)
On the latest episode of VIEW to the U podcast, UTM Professors Andreas Hilfinger from the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences (CPS) and Meghan Sutherland from the Department of Visual Studies (DVS) give their respective take on these films.
In July, Hilfinger saw Oppenheimer with a group from his lab, and Sutherland did “Barbenheimer,” watching both films back-to-back on the same day in late August.
Not surprisingly, one similar observation by both researchers about each film is that there definitely had to be some creative liberties to move the narrative along and away from a certain level of reality, otherwise these films would not be as entertaining.
For example, while he thinks the portrayal of how scientists work was fairly accurate in Oppenheimer, referencing all the discussion of formulas as a group and working theories out on a blackboard collaboratively, Hilfinger said that the scientific outcomes were accelerated, which was obviously done to move the narrative at a faster pace.
“It took them years to figure out these things, and scientists are essentially always stuck because once you figure something out, then it's not doing new research anymore,” says Hilfinger.
“When you don't understand something, it's very difficult to make progress, so basically, it's a constant stabbing in the dark. I tell my grad students it's a very difficult position when you start doing research because it's so frustrating and your ideas are actually not going to work every now and then…A movie like this would be incredibly dull.”
Similarly, Sutherland says that Barbie does not portray any true account of the kind of real discrimination that many women face in daily life.
“Barbie never experiences sexism beyond just some construction guys ogling her,” says Sutherland.
“And why? Because she doesn't work – she's not a lawyer-Barbie or a doctor-Barbie. She doesn't get sexually harassed at work, or denied promotions, or talked down to by all the men. Her senior, white male colleagues don't band together and try and destroy her career, because that film would be a bummer. Barbie has this really chunky, two-worlds logic of the “ideal” realm and the “real” realm, but the real realm is also totally idealized in some fashion. So, we just don't see anything about sexism at all in this film.”
Hilfinger is a physicist who studies complex systems, such as cellular processes, using theoretical physics approaches. He trained as a mathematician and theoretical physicist at Imperial College and Cambridge University in the UK, before pursuing work as a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Prior to joining the faculty in CPS at UTM in 2017, Hilfinger was in the Department of Systems biology as a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts.
Sutherland is an expert in film and media philosophy, the history of American TV and popular entertainment, and political theory. She completed a BFA and an MA at New York University before going on to do her PhD at Northwestern University in Illinois.
She joined the DVS faculty at UTM in 2011, but prior to that Sutherland was an assistant professor of screen studies in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University. She is a founding co-editor of the online journal world picture.
For a deeper dive into these films and also get to know these UTM researchers a bit better, hear the full VIEW to the U interview. On this episode, they speak more about their work, as well as some of the other diversions they have recently consumed – on the reading, watching, and/or listening front – over the last few months.