#oppenheimer

I remember meeting a guy at a bar a year or so ago who told me he worked at the international consortium that does the porn parodies of all the top-grossing film releases. He said that the whole Barbenheimer situation presented his combine with some spectacular highs and lows. Because he said that with Barbie, right, the thing about Barbie is that there's already kind of a three-way ideatic, structural parallel between the curated artificiality of Barbie as a children's toy, the curated artificiality of Barbie as a mass market film, and the curated artificiality of pornography as a genre. Add on top of that that Barbie as a film is already feeling this tension, right where it's trying to be about a character graduating from the platonic sexlessness of a children's franchise to the functional-and-frank sexuality of being a living human woman, but it's also being bogged down in the "Everyone-is-beautiful-no-one-is-horny" aesthetic restrictions of any contemporary big-budget mass-market film so the two states end up looking pretty similar, he said. I mean the film itself is very aware of that tension, right, with that joke about how "casting Margot Robbie is the wrong move if you want to make that point," all that jazz. So, all that in mind, Barbie-themed pornography, he said, is in a weird way actually kind of complementary to the extant project, gesturing at unaddressed tensions and ideas, a dark mirror, the shadow self it wants to deny but can't, there's a lot of room to play in the space. He used the adjective "Lynchian" a couple of times, he seemed super stoked, he was talking with his hands. Oppenheimer, on the other hand. Oppenheimer he said presented a problem. Because obviously you can eroticize the detonation of an atomic bomb, we're all probably three mutuals removed from someone on this site who does exactly that, but obviously that's a niche market, and moreover it's a market that has a ton of overlap with high-minded thinkers who treat the historical use of atomic weapons against Japan with the level of gravity that atrocity demands. So they were stuck. They were really stuck. He told me that they'd been pulling their hair out for months trying to square the circle and all they had to show for it was a big whiteboard with the phrase "Grope-nheimer" written on it

The Barbie movie reminded me about how when I was little my parents were upset that I kept making my Barbie dolls kiss, so they bought me a Ken doll. The next day they found me having a funeral for poor Ken in the garden, he had died of tuberculosis. All the Barbies were in attendance and I buried him under our rose bush. The Barbies were too poor to afford a headstone (it was 1875) so I didn’t mark where the grave was and I never could find him again. He’s probably still there.