When “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” premiered on the same weekend, fans coined the term “Barbenheimer,” creating memes that combined Barbie images with images of the atomic bomb. In one, Margot Robbie, who played Barbie, sat on the shoulders of Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer, as she appeared to cheer in front of an explosion. In another, the two characters watched a Barbie-pink mushroom cloud rise over a desert landscape.
The Warner Brothers’ official Barbie account didn’t just “like” the memes; it used them to promote its movie. “It’s going to be a summer to remember” @barbiethemovie posted in response to one. Under a meme of Barbie with a mushroom cloud hairdo, it quipped, “This Ken is a stylist.”
The resulting backlash in Japan prompted Warner Brothers Japan to condemn the images and Warner Brother U.S. to issue a public apology. But less than a year later, the joke seems to be back on, and with an audience of millions.
On a recent episode of “Saturday Night Live,” Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt performed a Taylor Swift-inspired take on “Barbenheimer” by singing a duet about their respective characters, Ken and Kitty Oppenheimer. The goal was to promote their new movie, “The Fall Guy.”
After all the controversy and so many apologies, why is Barbenheimer still being used for laughs?
Would an SNL skit, or the original “Barbenheimer” portmanteau, ever have been made if it referenced something closer to home? Something with more painful images in American minds? Imagine a joke involving, say, Nazi Party propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the “Trolls” movie. It just doesn’t sit right.
For many in the Japanese American community, and for the families of American service members who saw the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic bomb and the memories of war are still very much a part of our lives.
Victoria’s grandfather, Carmine Gerardi, was a 23-year-old medic assigned to a Navy hospital ship in the Pacific, LST-464. Exactly one month after Japan’s surrender, LST-464 was assigned to perform occupation duty in Nagasaki. With more than half of Nagasaki’s doctors and nurses killed or injured in the blast, Carmine’s task was to provide medical care to the thousands of survivors. He would have arrived to see the very peak of radiation sickness, which took about 30 to 60 days to take its victims’ lives. He would have seen countless Japanese men, women and children hemorrhaging from under the skin, not understanding what was happening to them.
Carmine never spoke a word about his experiences. Instead, he turned to alcohol and died of kidney damage at the age of 42.
Karin’s father, Kunio Francis Tanabe, was born in Japan during the war. His first memory was running with his mother into the breakwater off Honmoku Beach to escape the firebombing that destroyed his neighborhood. A little boy near them, caught in flames, wailed “Itaiyo, itaiyo!” — It hurts, it hurts, something that haunted Karin’s father in childhood nightmares. But later, in the rubble of post-war Japan, it seemed like so little compared to what the bomb survivors went through. Kunio met survivors in Japan, and Karin did as well on a recent visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
The atomic bombs had far, far more casualties than the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 who died in the blasts or in the months afterward. Those who were “lucky” enough to survive were branded “hibakusha”and essentially cast out of society, unable to secure jobs or marriages because they were thought to be contagious.
The Target Committee who selected the bomb targets based their decisions on the psychological impact the bombs would have, even more so than the casualties (which Oppenheimer estimated at only 20,000 per bomb). “It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance,” minutes from a May 12, 1945 Target Committee meeting states.
They did not account for the fact that the psychological impact of the bombs would destroy American families, too. Claude Eatherly, the pilot who gave the go-ahead to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, was haunted by his involvement for the rest of his life. Victoria’s grandfather, Carmine Gerardi left behind three young children, a wife who never remarried, and a web of secrets linked to his trauma. Kunio Tanabe didn’t share his memories of the firebombing for more than 40 years.
We know a lot about the aftermath of the war in Japan and the atomic bombs because of our families. But what have most people seen regarding the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A mushroom cloud. Maybe a proud picture of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first bomb. They cannot close their eyes and picture the horrors that came next. To stop history from repeating itself, we should all be able to.
Hollywood, SNL — we love you most of the time, but make us love you more. You are better than Barbenheimer. By making light of the controversy to sell movie tickets, to get more viewers, you’re making “jokes” that tarnish the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who died and the American service members who gave their lives to the war, both during and afterward. Let’s make the legacy of Barbenheimer a lesson, not a laugh.
Karin Tanabe (www.karintanabe.com) is the author of seven novels, including “The Diplomat’s Daughter” and “The Sunset Crowd.” Victoria Kelly (victoria-kelly.com) is the author of “Homefront” and “When the Men Go Off to War” and is the spouse of a Marine veteran.
