For months, the looming box office war between “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” has provided endless social media fodder. The flood of jokes, which have taken the form of Twitter threads and movie poster mash-ups, cash in on the supposedly radical difference between these two films: One is a grave, highly stylized biopic of the man who helped invent nuclear weapons, while the other is a whimsical live-action movie about a child’s toy. “Barbenheimer,” as the internet phenomenon has been dubbed, has generated its own Wikipedia page, not to mention an entire cottage industry of merchandise.
As an unabashed enthusiast of all things lowbrow, I’ve delighted in the campy, mindless confection of Mattel-meets-mushroom-cloud content that this nuclear meet-cute has produced. As an environmental studies professor who has spent a lot of time studying the history of science and technology, however, I’ve found “Barbenheimer” strikes a darker chord.
The underlying premise of all the jokes — that these films come out on the same day but are about hilariously different subjects and have wildly different tones — is misguided. The two movies actually have a fundamental, and disturbing, common ground. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind our nuclear age, and Barbie — a toy that takes more than three cups of oil to produce before it lingers in landfills around the world — both tell the story of the dawn of our imperiled era.
“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” each offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene, the suggested term for our present geological epoch, in which human beings have become the most significant influence on the natural environment at a planetary scale.
That story began 4.5 billion years ago, when Earth formed into a rocky mass from a swirling mixture of dust and gas. Those rocks now hold important markers of our planet’s history.
But we don’t need to go that far back. The Cambrian period, when multicellular life started to proliferate, began only a few hundred million years ago. The start of the Cambrian — or any geological time frame — is decided when there’s a clear change in the physical characteristics of rock layers. This change is called a stratigraphic marker.
