Antonio Navalón
The capacity for astonishment is one of the most obvious proofs that one is still alive and still sensitive enough to reflect on the facts and circumstances that created our lives. In movie theaters, you can read the abbreviations of the two films that rule the box office: Barbie and Oppenheimer, unleashing a curious phenomenon among moviegoers that has received the name “Barbenheimer”.
Record-breaking films that are contemporary to their respective eras are a reflection of the common and deep feelings of the societies that are spectators of them. On the one hand, we have a film like Oppenheimer’s that represents the lengths to which human beings will go to overcome others. Despite the fact that we have had the atomic bomb and its destructive capacity for almost a century, human beings are still incapable of being aware of the seriousness of what it means to have a device that is capable of literally pulverizing human life. It used to be believed that the door to hell was within oneself, but after the use of this lethal weaponry it was proven that it is also possible to unleash hell on Earth. But, above all, it was shown how fragile the survival of mankind is and that we are in the hands of those who have access to and control over these weapons.
After August 6, 1945, the gates of hell were unmistakably marked. When Commander Paul Tibbets dropped the atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” aboard the Enola Gay on Hiroshima and three days later the one nicknamed “Fat Man” fell on Nagasaki, the world witnessed how the lives of more than two hundred thousand people could be ended immediately, breaking all the limits of our capacity for self-destruction.
Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most brilliant physicists ever to walk the Earth. An endearing figure who, using all his knowledge of the theory of relativity, the study of the atom, physics and other subjects, created something that seemed impossible to the human eye. The Manhattan Project had a primary objective: to defeat the Nazis before they discovered the magical final solution. The only good thing about the whole outcome of this story was the fact that it was us, the good guys – I was going to say Westerners, but so were the Nazis – who won the race.
There are not many accounts – either in the figures of Harry Hopkins or Eleanor Roosevelt – as to whether or not Franklin Delano Roosevelt regretted authorizing the mythical Manhattan Project. Although Roosevelt did not authorize the dropping of the bomb, his successor Harry S. Truman – as a good Kansas shirtmaker – with no more sensitivity than was necessary to end the war, was the one who made the decision to carry out the project led by Major General Leslie Groves and executed by Robert Oppenheimer to its ultimate consequences. Roosevelt was one of the last great political legends to have stepped into the Oval Office. Truman went down in history as the one who unleashed total destruction and ended World War II.
Neither Albert Einstein nor Roosevelt nor Truman nor all those directly or indirectly involved in the decision-making had any idea what they were approving. If they had known, they would probably have sought an alternative to defeat a part of the evil that was Adolf Hitler and company. However, it is necessary to analyze the question of who the good guys – if there were any – of history really were. And I put the question into the discussion because although the figure of Hitler is the very incarnation of evil, the counterpart was also able to create and use a device with a destructive capacity as never seen before. Were there any good guys, or were they all really the bad guys of history?
It was until the 1960s, specifically in 1961, when the thirty-fourth president of the United States of America, Dwight David Eisenhower, moments before handing over the presidency to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, unveiled the military-industrial complex. He did so with the intention of promulgating the message that the world and the United States had to prepare to face the consequences of this complex. At first, his statement seemed very outrageous, but looking back at what happened later in the world, what he said was even prophetic and highlighted the fact that we had failed to create effective mechanisms to guarantee peace.
We have reached a point where the limits to the use or possession of armaments have simply disappeared and where we do not know how far this impudence of the absolute dominion of all our data will go, and, in the end, we do not know how much information it has about us or what use it is being put to. So long living with nuclear devices has made us accustomed to the latent threat – as the Ukraine crisis has reminded us – posed by the danger of these armaments. A sword of Damocles hangs over humanity and is capable of ending – although probably not everything, as the Chernobyl accident showed – a large part of the harmony and development of mankind.
All the circumstances described above, together with the formal installation of the Eisenhower military-industrial complex, mark the panorama that surrounds us today. A panorama in which the conditions for guaranteeing security are based on and depend on the balance of terror. Although there is also always latent the possibility of a collective suicide that is better not to think about.
At the same time that Eisenhower was at the head of the U.S. government, specifically in 1959, Ruth Handler created a doll that broke the paradigms and stereotypes, introducing the image of a woman, I do not know if she was modern, but she did live in a rose-colored world. The image, as the script of the movie Barbie says, of women who “could do whatever they wanted” and that opened the real possibility that the matriarchy ruled the world, although it also raised a figure that was enough to be surrounded by luxuries and her beloved Ken to be happy. Nothing could be further and, at the same time, closer, to the struggle driven by feminists. Before the film, I would never have imagined that Barbie – who represented anti-feminism and the struggle of women to gain a place in society – could have been the beginning of a latent social revolution. A revolution that was forged with every mother and daughter who knew that despite the patriarchy and all the existing inequalities simply because they were women, in reality, deep down, those who ruled – which I personally believe – were and still are women.
Curious film. Without understanding why, there are those who interpret this film as a way of asking for forgiveness from Mattel. What it is, however, is an explanation of why for a time, the feminine and majority part of society needed to wear pink and play that nothing was happening and there was nothing to worry about. It is a game that, as we now witness all the consequences of women’s liberation, the revolution of identities, and the proliferation of the rainbow flag, there is a basic component and question, which is: during all this time, what did men achieve and what did women achieve? Perhaps that explains the various variations of identity that have emerged in recent years, creating absolute confusion in the new generations about what and how they identify themselves. Today heterosexuals, married and with children, are suspected of having produced the greatest generational backwardness and delay of intimate and collective freedoms in the history of mankind.
Two films that curiously, place the gates of hell while the other shows the door of the explanation of how with the creation of Barbie, we were founding an intelligence system to establish the sexual revolution and the role of women without us realizing it. The first one who did not realize it was Barbie.
Further Reading: