Real men can laugh at themselves

     My mother laid the trap.
     “So what are you doing today?” she asked.
     I fell in, telling her, in my naive, Lucy-and-the-football fashion.
     “We’re going to see the ‘Barbie’ movie,” I said.
     “Not ‘Oppenheimer?’” my mother replied.
     “No,” I said. “We’ll see that later.”
     “Oh,” my mother said. My blood ran cold.
     That afternoon, my brother told me that, in their conversation, our mother was perplexed as to why I, the son of a nuclear physicist, presented with the choice between a movie about the father of the atomic bomb and a movie about a plastic doll for girls, would choose the latter.
     I was not surprised. All that meaning had been compressed within her single syllable: “Oh.”
     In my defense, I’ve already lived “Oppenheimer.” Among my earliest memories is being held over a bubble chamber in my father’s lab to see the subatomic particles flitting around. I’ve watched people use real manipulators — those robots arms at Homer’s nuclear plant in “The Simpsons” — to handle radioactive material at NASA. The linear particle accelerator at Fermilab? I’ve been inside it.
     “Barbie” was my call because ... the movie sounded fun. I wanted to do something fun. To celebrate finally giving COVID the boot.
     And “Barbie” is fun. It reminded me why people go to the movies in the first place. For two hours, I really was somewhere else, Barbie Land (though not so fully as to fail to notice the movie also spells it “Barbieland.”)
     Margot Robbie should win the Academy Award. And Ryan Gosling is Ken. Barbie’s neglected boyfriend, exiled to the periphery of the endless girl’s night dance party. This buff, superfluous figure sadly flexing on the beach for his fellow Kens. I felt for him. As someone who, in my day, has looked into the eyes of my share of Barbie types and realized they were just not into me, I could relate to Ken.

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