Can you feel the Ken-ergy?
Dominic Green
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The battle of the blockbusters between Barbie and Oppenheimer is the last stand for traditional moviegoing. It was almost nostalgic to sit through months of trailers as the studios ginned up an imaginary rivalry between Barbie and Bobby. Reading about the payoff, the fourth-most lucrative weekend in box office history, felt like a collective triumph. This was how show business used to work, and how mass entertainment once united a nation.
Older readers may remember the 20th century. In that distant and benighted age, young people were expected to get married. They would test prospective partners by going to the movies. It’s more liberated and progressive to send photos of your genitals via an app which allows you to filter the recipients by sex, race, and sexual orientation. The same digital technology streams movies to your couch, so you can binge-watch in your dirty underwear on a bed of takeout cartons. It’s a mystery why so many young Americans are miserable and not having sex.
THE MIXED MESSAGES OF BIDENOMICS
The nuclear fission of publicity happened, as it always does these days, on social media. The mid-century female and male fused in a flash of memes about Barbenheimer. In one image of what men and women can achieve when they work together, Barbie (Margot Robbie) rides on the shoulders of Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) while an atomic mushroom cloud explodes behind them. “It’s going to be a summer to remember,” Warner Bros.’ U.S. Twitter poster quipped in response. Warner Bros. subsequently offered a “sincere apology” to the entire Japanese nation — for the tweet, not the bomb.
The power of mid-20th century America is symbolized by unnaturally natural eruptions from the American West, a dual creation (Barbie’s pointy breasts) and a dual destruction (the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The yin-yang balance and Dr. Frankenstein force-multiplying fusion of Barbenheimer are now an impossible dream. The reality, even in the dreamhouse of the movies, is as Manichaean as the rest of American life.
Barbie is female, pink, and cheerful. Oppenheimer is male, dark, and existential. The personal is political for both Barbie and Oppenheimer, but Barbie is a consumer and Oppenheimer is a communist. Sex is difficult for Oppenheimer, though not as difficult as it is for Barbie, who lacks genitals until her consciousness is raised. Both films are about biting the core of the apple of knowledge, biological fate. Barbie meets her creator, Ruth Handler, reports to the gynecologist, and chooses life. When Oppenheimer realized that the bomb could send us all to meet our creator, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
This polarization is not a plot device. It is a political reality. The Brookings Institution found that Donald Trump lost the 2020 elections because he lost the suburbs, especially “white suburban women,” in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Center for American Women and Politics reported that men consistently polled in favor of Trump in the months before the election, and women consistently polled in favor of Biden. Several polls showed women preferring Biden over Trump by margins of over 20%.
The Survey Center on American Life finds that political affiliation among young men has barely shifted in two decades: about a third are “conservative,” a quarter “liberal,” and the rest “moderate.” Women, however, have become much more liberal. The next generation of male voters is catching up. The University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey finds that 12th grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative rather than liberal. Meanwhile, liberal identification among 12th grade girls has risen from 19% in 2012 to 30% in 2022.
The Republicans are becoming the party of men, the Democrats the party of women. Barbie has her mother, but Ken has no father. He didn’t go to college but he’s “great at doing stuff.” He resents Barbie’s lack of appreciation (“Anywhere else I’d be a 10”) and forms a fraternal dude-bond with all the other Kens: “Can you feel the Ken-ergy?” they demand, like an army of Andrew Tates.
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The Ken-ergy is strong in America today. A man who boycotts Bud Light is a righteous bro, but a woman who finds Trump repulsive is a “wine mom.” A man who stands on his rights is a patriot, but a woman who stands on hers is a “Karen.” You could feel the Ken-ergy when family-values man Ben Shapiro called Barbie “a flaming piece of dogs***,” threw a Barbie doll into a trash can, and set fire to it. Everyone’s a critic.
This is a bipartisan affliction, but it’s strongest on the Right because men lean right and the Republicans are, at least theoretically, the party of tradition. The further right you go, the deeper into the online “Manosphere” you get. The self-pitying yowls of thwarted masculinity get sicker, the criticism more unhinged. Ken’s sex-based fraternity turns into the racial collectivism of Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson takes his socks off to interview Andrew Tate and rides around the hood with Ice Cube. The decent, the sane, and the law-abiding are mocked as “cucks,” but players, pimps, and Putin are admired for their Ken-ergy. And we wonder why women lean left.