Barbenheimer and Science Talks
Oppenheimer and Barbie are great examples of how (not) to tell a story. But what really intrigued me was how it parallels the world of scientific discourse. In my opinion, contrary to what I expected, Barbie makes for a better scientist.

I grew up around physicists and the story of Oppenheimer intrigued me. I didn’t expect anything special, just a good movie with a chance of being great. I was disappointed. The storytelling in Oppenheimer is so bad that it undermines the whole movie.
Barbie also shattered my expectations, but in a different way. I am not a Barbie fan, or a fan of any dolls for that matter. The only doll I ever enjoyed playing with was one that you could “feed” with water and it would “pee”. I figured out how to apply pressure to it, which was a fun way to make a fountain. Not so much fun for my mother and her precious wooden floor though, which put an abrupt end to my experiments in fluid dynamics and my interest in playing with this doll. So I wouldn’t have seen Barbie if I hadn’t been intrigued by the premise, that it wasn’t what you’d expect, and by the fact that the filmmakers are women, which at least holds the promise of freshness. Still, I was worried that I wouldn’t like it. I was wrong. Very wrong. The storytelling in Barbie is excellent. So good, in fact, that they get away with casually mentioning “cognitive dissonance” without defining it. And that’s a small thing compared to what they get away with.
But how can two movies created by two Hollywood experts, with a huge amount of money at their disposal, end up being miles apart in terms of the quality of their storytelling? Let’s dive in.
Spoiler Alert: I tried not to include spoilers, but there is (meta) information in here that will probably ruin the movies for you, so go ahead and watch them first if you plan on watching them at all.
Disclaimer: Everything I say here is based on my own opinion. If you like Oppenheimer, that’s great. I’d like to like it, but for now let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps you’d like to email me your opinion, I’m always keen to learn.
Hook your Audience
Oppenheimer started with… with what? I can’t remember. It was probably a scene in that fake court. Or Einstein. Or… no, I don’t know. What I do remember about the beginning of Oppenheimer is confusion. I had no idea what was going on, what people were talking about or why. Not even when. This confusion lasted for about 20 minutes before I managed to grasp some of the content. In total, I missed half of the movie dialogue because the sound wasn’t good enough for me to understand what the actors were saying and I could not guess much from the context because the context was unclear. It annoyed me, but at some point I stopped caring.
Barbie opened with a brilliant parody of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and tossed in social criticism, humour and charm. In other words, it set up the whole movie in a way that already had the audience laughing and thinking at the same time. To achieve something like this at all is an impressive balancing act. To keep on going through two hours of screenplay is awe-inspiring. Comedy is the toughest genre out there and Barbie is a brilliant example of how to get it right. Watching it, I missed a few lines that were spoken too fast for me to catch them and I’m definitely going for a rewatch because every one of those lines was probably a joke or a line loaded with meaning.
Good storytelling picks up the audience where they are and takes them to another world. Oppenheimer never picked me up. The movie assumes that the audience already knows the background story (which I did not). Barbie not only picks up the audience, but gets away with a voice-over at the beginning (usually a sign of bad filmmaking, as you’re telling the audience something you should be showing) that’s as memorable as the Lord of the Rings prologue.
Carry your Audience Along
Oppenheimer then went on with a jumble of content. I’m sorry, I can’t describe it any other way. There were flashbacks and flashforwards all over the place (and I’m still not sure I figured out when each scene happened). Sol Stein writes in his books that you shouldn’t use flashbacks (which are essentially the same as flashforwards, so I won’t distinguish them from now on) because they rip the audience away from the place they are at and drop them in the unknown. The only way to use them, and only when absolutely necessary, is to have a person recount what happened, or to make the flashback relevant to the moment in such a way that it doesn’t really feel like a flashback at all, but like a piece of the puzzle falling into place. Nowadays, flashbacks are used far too often because they are an “easy” way to increase the pace. To me, they just show that the writers were too lazy to cut out the irrelevancies and write an exciting story that moves linearly through time, sticking only to the flashbacks that are necessary.
Consider the ending of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, when Frodo remembers the Shire. It’s essentially a dialogue-driven flashback, and it’s an amazing scene.
Barbie followed a linear plot. In fact, it follows the “Hero’s Journey”, which in my opinion is not a good blueprint for every story, but that does not mean that a story is bad or clichéd if it follows this structure. Far from it.
The Lord of the Rings follows the same structure and both Barbie and The Lord of the Rings end with a twist on the worlds. Only I like the Barbie twist better, because for me the Lord of the Rings ending feels too much like giving up and not like getting a reward for hardship, while the Barbie ending embraces change, even if it comes with pain. What a beautiful message.
Twist Expectations, Not Logic
To make matters worse, the most recent time in Oppenheimer (as I understood it) was the only one shot in black and white. This is visual storytelling gone wrong. The audience will always assume that black and white is something that happens before the colour part because that is the comparison history provides. Confusing the audience like that is not a technique, it’s bad storytelling. It’s a cultural cue used incorrectly. Instead, they should have avoided the flashbacks altogether. Or at least reduce them drastically and make sure that the audience immediately understands that a change in time has just happened and in which direction it changed. A lazy way of doing this would be to write dates and places on the screen. A more sophisticated way is to use changes in fashion, shots of newspapers with dates, dialogue, etc.
The visual storytelling in Barbie is on a different level. Just look at the scene in which the FBI calls Mattel. The booths are perfectly aligned, as if they were the same company, even in the same room. But they look so different that you know at your second glance, that they’re not. This sets up Mattel as some kind of FBI-like place with agents that are going to go after Barbie. And guess what happens next. Only, in a twisted way from what you’d expect, which is basically the script for the whole movie and what makes it so brilliant.
I don’t remember a twist in Oppenheimer. Of course, you don’t need a twist for good storytelling, it only goes a long way if you have one (or many, like Barbie). But in retrospect, Oppenheimer feels more like a stereotypical movie with some artistic gimmicks and a storyboard that was messed up by a gust of wind and never put back in order. There is not much I remember except the feeling of annoyance and the waste of time and money. I looked at my watch several times during the movie. Halfway through I was waiting for it to end. I remember that more clearly than the content.
During Barbie, I wasn’t even thrown out of the story by their break through the forth wall (yet another thing they got away with even though it would have been more in place in a Youtube video than a movie). I just sat there, wanting more, and marveling at how they managed to turn every stereotype on its head, shake it up and empty its pockets.
Develop your Characters
Oppenheimer, as the name suggests, was about a person. Of course, if you’re trying to be historically accurate, you don’t have a lot of leeway to develop that person’s character. Writers usually solve this problem by adding some fictional characters to liven up the story, or by bringing the character to life as best they can, based on the information they have and people they know who share the character’s traits. It was just that for me there was not a single memorable character in this movie, with the exception of Einstein. I’m pretty sure that Oppenheimer changes over the course of the movie. The revelation just got lost in the messed up story.
Barbie, on the other hand, develops several characters in a setting in which most of them even have the same name! You clearly see the character development in the brilliant performances of the entire cast, and it never ends. It is an ongoing development that feels a lot more human than a lot of movies do (think of Disney, where everything goes from all hell breaking loose to everyone being happy with a single conversation or action). Barbie ends with the characters becoming aware of their shortcomings and beginning a journey of change. That feels deeply real and human. And it’s so much better than the stereotypical ending I feared.
Character Revelation Carries Theme
I think Oppenheimer wanted to convey the horror of the atomic bomb. I’m really trying to scramble my memory here as to what was in the film, because I’ve forgotten most of it (always a bad sign). There was an impressive scene that showed the aftermath of an atomic bomb in Oppenheimer’s imagination. But to be impressed is an outsider’s feeling in such a situation, not an emphatic one. The feeling you’d want to convey is horror, or at least a deep disturbance. And then there was the theory that an existing bomb will always be used, which was left to linger in the audience’s mind. There was no hint on what to do. No resolution. What remained was a feeling of helplessness, and so in the end it didn’t really matter. Maybe that is what they wanted to convey. But along with the poor storytelling it made the whole movie forgettable and I have no desire to watch it again, not even to understand the mess they presented as art. Don’t get me wrong. I like experimentation. But in my opinion, this movie experiment just ended up with a bad result.
Barbie, on the other hand, throws so much social criticism into one pot that it should be indigestible, but instead turns out to be a well-balanced dish with countless flavours. The most obvious, of course, is feminism, balanced by a good dose of masculinism. It’s a movie about dolls that manages to be human through and through, from the refusal to change and the preference for returning to life as it was, to the inevitability of change, its harshness, and yet the undiminished need to face it and act to avoid suffering. It’s a perfect reflection of our problems in responding to climate change. And there’s so much more going on. Like old people being called beautiful. Like a mother allowing herself to be weird, crazy and dark in front of her daughter, rather than suppressing her character because she feels she has to be a different role model. Like a woman in a wheelchair dancing with everyone else. And on. And on. And on. It’s not too much once you’ve seen it all. It’s amazing. Even if you choke on some of it; and for good reason.
Satisfy your Audience
After our group left the cinema, we spent a little time trying to work out what the Oppenheimer story actually was. I’m still not sure. There was a general feeling of, okay, that was… well… not sure… what’s next? I ended up annoyed, as you may have noticed by now.
After we left Barbie, we traded quotes back and forth, laughed and discussed the depths of the movie.
From these two reactions, I know what I’d like my audience to experience.
Barbie should not be compared to Oppenheimer. It is much closer to The Lord of the Rings - in story, filmmaking and quality - but it includes a lot more women and social criticism.
Credit to the filmmakers for making this movie close enough to perfect that they can happily forget their cognitive dissonance for the time being (a vain hope, I suppose, since I know what it’s like to be a woman and an artist).
So let’s leave it at that and see what all this has to do with science talks.
Barbie is the Better Scientist
Oppenheimer assumes that the audience already knows the background story and those who don’t are lost. This is the premise of almost every single talk by scientists that I have attended.
Scientists tend to forget to explain the context and motivation and jump straight into the content. Worse, they may think that too much explanation is harmful and that simplification means dumbing down (which it does not). Even when they do have a motivation, it often feels disconnected from the rest of the story, present only for the sake of having a motivation, but not for the sake of motivating the audience to listen. Most of my lectures were the same, with a few exceptions, mainly in psychology and not computer science. Essentially, scientists are going for a deep dive without pressure adjustment. This is how you deaden your audience to what you have to say.
A fellow doctoral student once told me that in mathematics, two out of 100 people in a room understand what the speaker is saying.
That is bad communication.
Some scientists seem to believe that the relevant people in the room are those two, because everyone else can’t contribute anyway. I think they are wrong for two reasons. First, scientific articles exist to communicate the details and people who are very close to your research will read them anyway and want to get in touch with you. Talks exist to promote your research, discuss it with a wider audience and make new contacts. This is why there are 100 people in the room in the first place. Second, because amateurs give different and often relevant feedback. Feedback from experts can be worse than from people who at least know a little about what you’re doing.
You’re missing out on a lot of potentially valuable information if you fail to do the simple thing of providing context, leaving most of your audience needlessly bored. And you’re wasting thousands of (insert currency here) by wasting the time of almost everyone in front of you.
Be more like the Barbie movie in the way you communicate. Be clear, be linear, be entertaining and profound. Add thoughtful humour. Break stereotypes. To put it in the words of Sascha (a character in Barbie): You don’t have to be perfect. Just better.
Your audience will thank you.
Photo by lo lindo on Unsplash.