Some defect in the homo sapiens brain compels us to see everything in terms of competition – all the world grouped by trials of skill and supremacy into a binary of winners and losers. This is of course how we wound up with the concept of sport – and, probably, war – but the internet’s never-ending ticker of discourse is applying this mindset to the arts with increasing frequency, creative expression simplified into a horse race that lets fans prognosticate and claim bragging rights. During the heydays of Game of Thrones and Succession, viewers readjusted their power rankings week by week in an attempt to predict the plotlines’ ultimate victors. In the streets, snapping gangs of Swifties rumble with squadrons of the BTS army. In the replies of any tweet announcing some significant pop-cultural happening, whether it be a greenlit sequel or news of another studio album, it’s not uncommon to see triumphant diehards crowing en masse, “WE WON.”
Over the past few months, this pathology has reached a fever pitch in the lead-up to an epochal box-office showdown slated for this coming Friday. In the red corner, weighing in at seven-and-a-quarter ounces, it’s the foot-tall wrecking ball, Greta Gerwig’s high-fructose feat of pop artistry, Barbie. And in the blue corner, he has become death, destroyer of worlds and possibly per-theater gross records, the bomb-daddy himself, Christopher Nolan’s stolid second world war period piece, Oppenheimer. Can he unleash the firepower to reduce the iconic plaything to an ashen crater? Or will this tenacious little hunk of plastic have what it takes to withstand waves of atomic radiation? Plenty of fence-sitters have withheld their allegiance by booking a double feature, but the impending cineplex Götterdämmerung still speaks to something fundamental about how and why we pit movies against one another.
