​This article contains spoilers for Barbie and Asteroid City. 

The newly coined term “Barbenheimer” made waves after Barbie and Oppenheimer, two movies that couldn’t be more different in tone, were set to be released on the same day in the United States, launching to a tremendous effect at the box office that rippled out beyond the confines of the film industry. Some people have even changed into pink clothes for Barbie and a sciencey outfit for Oppenheimer to see them together as a double feature. Those of us in countries where the movies were released on different days see all this and can’t help but wonder how much fun it must be. It makes me wonder if theatrically-released movies have now become something that needs such enticing “events” to draw people. It ties into something that dawned on me and my fellow film critics when we were blown away by the top-notch action sequences in movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Perhaps now the only way to probably exhibit the beauty of traditional action movies is when they can attract big-name stars and have enough money to back them. If that’s the case, how many action flicks, outside of Hollywood, can even bring big enough audiences into theaters?

Barbie, released in Korea in July and well ahead of Oppenheimer, is directed by Greta Gerwig—who rose to prominence with her films Lady Bird and Little Women—and stars Margot Robbie, who also produced the film. Gerwig wrote the screenplay along with her partner, Noah Baumbach. It’s clear how much Mattel, the company behind the Barbie doll franchise, has to gain from the film’s release. Through the hands of Gerwig, a feminist and successful artist, the film waved away the dark clouds that have marred the image of the 64-year-old property with accusations of imposing unrealistic beauty standards on women, and breathed new life into the Barbie name. (Mattel management are portrayed as the villains in the movie—a blow they were willing to sustain as a cost of good marketing.) Of course, Barbie isn’t simply some doll spawn of Satan that’s only out to suppress women. True, Barbie is a commercial product, but she was already the proud owner of her home, the Barbie Dreamhouse, in 1962—a time when American women weren’t issued credit cards—and made it to both the Moon and the White House before any women did in real life. Gerwig revealed that her mother had given her young, white daughter a then recently launched Black Barbie, offering us a glimpse of the mindset guiding progressive mothers from that time. So what’s in it for Gerwig, a budding writer-director, to make Barbie? All other reasons aside, the main thing she has to gain is the experience of running a big-budget production. Under the veneer of Barbie’s pink plastic packaging are Gerwig’s many allusions to cinema history, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Playtime, for which the director now has the control and finances to pull off. The movie also uses special effects lifted almost straight from theater to portray an “authentically artificial” and “really fake” world, as when Barbie (Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) leave Barbieland behind for the real world. Seeing as the movie set a new record—a film, directed by a woman, raking in $336 million at the box office in its three-day opening weekend—it looks like Gerwig’s made it into the club of Hollywood movers and shakers. Before you accuse Gerwig of selling out from her indie roots, keep in mind that she was always making commercially friendly—and at the same time, honest and distinctive from her perspective—films with star-studded casts told from the perspective of a cisgender straight woman.

Audiences who go into Barbie expecting Gerwig to use her powers as an artist to solve the contradictory social background behind the doll or the dilemmas facing modern-day women will leave the theater disappointed. The titular character in the film is meant to mirror the lives of real women, not serve as a heroic role model with all the answers. When Barbie leaves a matriarchal land where neither sickness nor old age ever come for anyone, what she finds is a world where women have to fight every single day of their lives just to survive, and ultimately chooses a less-than-ideal life so that she can be in control of her own destiny. Within the fantasy of the film, there are no rigid rules for the ways in which Barbieland and the real world interact with one another. Barbie, despite her perfect life, suddenly finds herself thinking about death in the middle of a party. This seems to be the influence of her real-life owner feeling weighed down by life and lost in dark thoughts. But it turns out that it’s not actually the young girl who owns Barbie but the girl’s mother, Gloria (America Ferrara)—a Mattel employee—who feels so distraught. Ferrara’s character essentially represents people who create the dolls and who are influenced by them in turn.

Barbie’s message is purely common sense and it gets it across very straightforwardly. The epic climax of the film comes in the form of an operation to block the Kens from turning back the clock on the constitution after they’ve learned all about the concept of patriarchy. Anyone who was paying attention to the US Supreme Court’s recent overturning of abortion rights will spot the connection. Now that Gerwig has directed three films, we can see a pattern has emerged where the soul of each is encapsulated in a speech given by one of the characters. At the end of Lady Bird, the protagonist sends her mother a voicemail, while Jo and Amy rant about the social and economic realities faced by women in Little Women. For Barbie, Gerwig entrusts its defining speech to Gloria. In this long proclamation that’s been quoted time and time again in the media, she laments how women today are expected to be thin but not too thin, and that they can never admit to wanting to be. They need money but aren’t allowed to say they want it, have to take charge without ever disregarding others’ opinions, and have to love being a mom—without talking about their kids too much. I can’t have been alone in thinking while listening to her speech that the same applies to the movie itself: that meeting expectations for Barbie was always going to be a nearly impossible tightrope walk in itself.

Barbie’s success in the English-speaking world may largely hinge on playing to an audience absorbed in Instagram, constantly putting their best face—a character of themselves—forward. But the way I remember it, girls (including me) weren’t so precious about Marlene, Princess Mimi, Secret Jouju, Barbie—whatever her name happened to be. When we grew tired with just changing our dolls’ clothes, we cut their hair, drew tears on their faces, and pushed the joints in their limbs to their limits to have them go off on rugged adventures. Obviously, girls don’t have their heads in a field of flowers. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who seems to have been played with in just the same fashion, provides the breakthrough Barbieland needs when it reaches an unforeseen and unpredictable singularity of trouble. The same will be said of girls in life in the future.

Barbie follows a similar trajectory as seen with the protagonists of Frances Ha—portrayed by Gerwig—and Lady Bird. When including Little Women, these three Gerwig-touched films dealing with personal growth all show women tossing idealism out the window to go off in search of their own Mojo Dojo Cases Houses—the name Ken gives to the place he creates in Barbie—to the extent that the world allows and they can reasonably handle. And this movie finishes right before what might have been the most cruel and disappointing part of Barbie’s story. How will she live out her days now that she’s a human named Barbara? That could be where the real drama lies.

I’ve talked a lot about director Greta Gerwig, but it was also thanks to producer Margot Robbie starring as the main character who made Barbie possible by bringing the entire movie to life. The emotional core of the film can be seen in her pained response to a teen girl chewing Barbie out to her face, calling her a sexualized symbol of capitalism. Whereas Robbie appears in every scene in Barbie, she’s in just the one in Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, but she nevertheless becomes the heart of the movie. In her scene, Robbie plays a theater actor whose part has been cut from the show-within-a-show. She recites her lines in front of who would have been her opposite (Jason Schwartzman): words of consolation to a man deep in grief coming from his deceased wife. 

The movie takes place in the American West in 1955 during the Cold War. A young astronomers convention is being held in the motel-dotted Asteroid City, a place so named for having been built on the site where a meteor had crashed into the Earth thousands of years earlier. In a place where pained adults, like widowed war photographer Augie Steenback (Schwartzman) and lonely actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), as well as soon-to-be suffering children have gathered, everyone soon finds themselves forming an unlikely temporary community after aliens land abruptly and everyone is kept under quarantine by government orders. In typical Wes Anderson fashion, Augie and Midge, the emotional core of the group, betray no sign of experiencing trauma or stress. But whereas in other films from Anderson people with pain in their hearts form some kind of club, here Augie and Midge are stuck in the middle of the desert, utterly alone. The two are stationed in bungalows directly opposite one another and talk about their photos and acting through their windows—like the famous balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

Given Anderson’s characters often speak like wind-up toys—restrained in their manner of speaking and in their gestures—it makes me wonder how exactly he directs the many fantastic actors who end up working with him and whether it results in any conflicts. Anderson’s 11th film gives the puppet-show impression as his others. With more characters than ever and the dense script whizzing by, it feels like it’s forcing audiences not to fully comprehend the lines but rather to focus on the color and movement. At the same time, Asteroid City places the acting and the emotions it reveals closer to the forefront than the set pieces, at least when compared to the remainder of the director’s filmography, and feels like a kind of confessional piece. It seems like Anderson was freed somewhat from the burden of constantly having to create colorful backdrops and perfect symmetry thanks to the minimalist desert setting.
 

Anderson’s previous film, The French Dispatch, was an anthology: stories collected together like in the magazines from which he drew inspiration. In Asteroid City, the director returns to the layered framing device he used in The Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s set up like this: First there’s the outermost shell, a black-and-white TV show talking about a play called Asteroid City. Next comes the egg white: a behind-the-scenes documentary on the play, shown within the TV show and also shot in black and white. Finally—forming what we might call the yolk—is a film adaptation of the play, this time in color. Like a proscenium arch that opens up to infinite more arches, the people from the shell can enter the world of the egg white and the actors from there become characters in the yolk, but there’s no direct connection between this innermost place and the shell. To prove how strict this concept is, Anderson briefly sneaks the host of the TV show shell (Bryan Cranston) into the film yolk and has him leave just as quickly.

Whereas The French Dispatch was all about writing, Asteroid City is a movie that’s about, and simultaneously wrapped up in the production of, theater, focusing especially on the actor’s craft. Jones Hall (Schwartzman) is the actor in the world of the egg white who portrays photographer Augie Steenbeck within the yolk. Augie helps actress Midge practice her lines but breaks down when she suggests he “use” his “grief” over losing his wife when he’s acting. Jones is the former lover of deceased Asteroid City playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who died before the play’s run is finished. In other words, the “real” actor has lost his loved one, and is also playing a man who’s lost his wife. In the scene, Jones, overcome by the stiflingly chaotic, triple-layered reality of portraying a non-actor who’s trying to act, breaks the almighty fourth wall and runs offstage to complain to Schubert Green (Adrian Brody), the director. When he makes it to a balcony outside the theater, he finds himself face to face—at a distance—with his character’s dead wife (Margot Robbie), the actress currently appearing in a different play at the theater directly next to his own. The two balconies hang in the air, separated like somewhere in this world and the next, reinforcing the sense of loss. Yet when the actress recites the wife’s lines—for a role ultimately omitted from the final version of the play—the chaos within Jones is strangely calmed, as though the words were coming from his own real-life dearly departed. In the world of Asteroid City, the illusory is no longer something that exists separate from the real world. In fact, some people can only grapple with reality by going through what isn’t real. The words, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” are repeated throughout the movie: a hypnotic mantra that captures the same meaning. Wes Anderson seems to be acknowledging that there are people in the world who survive by making up stories, and that the craft he and the people he works closely with engage in ultimately serves that very purpose. But it’s all wrapped up in layer after dazzling layer to keep it from being cracked open with too much ease, of course.