Warner Bros. Japan apologizes after the U.S. Twitter account for the movie promotes posts that appear to make light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is one of the reasons it’s so weird and toxic to have brands posting on social media as if they were just “fellow users”.
If a random user posts some Barbenheimer content, I can grant that person the dignity of being a full human who probably has complex, conflicting feelings about the Manhattan Project, and some kind of ironic detachment yet fascination with the existence of the Barbie movie.
If WB posts (or comments on) it, there’s really no room for nuance. They want engagement, they want money. If there is (or was) irony or self-criticism embedded in the content, that fact is only incidental.
So then WB gets rightfully scorned for casually dismissing war crimes to get more attention to their properties.
But where does that leave the rest of us?
Cuz the implication is that individuals shouldn’t be posting Barbenheimer stuff, either… but that doesn’t feel right.
There’s something culturally meaningful to this meme, that we probably shouldn’t quash — but it also shouldn’t be crudely leveraged for profit.
Some of the backlash cited in the article seems out of touch, this in particular:
User @akishmz tweeted: “Summer to remember that to the Barbie film team and to Hollywood more than 200,000 death by the end of 1945 (and half a million so far) by two atrocious bombs are something they feel comfortable joking about to promote their precious summer blockbuster.”
I must have missed the part where these memes are making jokes about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I must have missed the part where these memes are making jokes about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Simple: It doesn’t.
Barbenheimer, also known as Barbie Heimer, is a portmanteau of the words “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in reference to the 2023 movies Barbie and Oppenheimer, which were released on the same date (July 21st, 2023), causing a slew of Barbie vs. Oppenheimer memes that humorously combined the contrasting aesthetics and themes of both films. In turn, the word “Barbenheimer” spawned on social media and gained its own traction in memes and viral discourse, mostly in reference to the act of doing a double feature of both films. Many Barbenheimer memes and fan art used images that were both pink and black (correlating with the color palettes of both films), as well as images that involved both explosions and girly aesthetics.
It’s just a typical case of taking a thing and getting riled up about it, without making a simple Google search, what the thing you don’t like is even about.
Seeing they made 9/11 memes to retaliate against Americans already, why not keep barbenheimer? Tea is already spilled on both ends, everybody is unhappy, that’s a compromise for ya
I give them permission to make one 9/11 joke.
My apology on this matter is scheduled for the same press conference where Japan apologizes for what Imperial Japan did.
They’re in it too deep now. It’d be weird to suddenly apologize for events that happened 80 years ago, even though they should.
Apparently they already did; the article doesn’t include an image but in my imagination it’s hilarious.
Twitter user @mankodaisuki58 replied to the apology with a picture of Barbie sitting on the shoulders of Osama Bin Laden in front of burning buildings in the same style as one of the original posts. It is captioned “visiting the places from movie scenes” in Japanese and “It’s going to be a summer to remember” in English.
It’s … peculiar to me that Japan doesn’t think they need to teach the history of or ackowledge the war crimes they enacted on the Chinese, Koreans, etc.
But how dare Americans make a movie about the doom of nuclear war.
I kinda felt the same way, I went to see it with some friends and as a joke they wore some beachwear. It felt tasteless but I didn’t want to sour the mood by commenting on it