TOM EATON: Hold tight Barbie, Rail Fright will scare off even the bomb
We can answer the ANC call to help the government by sending it to the movies to learn about self-destruction
This week, hundreds of thousands of cinemagoers will be doing a Barbenheimer — watching Barbie and Oppenheimer back-to-back — but I will not be joining them: if I wanted to hurt myself by enduring a five-hour marathon of lurchingly incongruous stories featuring plastic idiots and government employees inventing new ways of destroying everything, I’d just listen to a speech by Fikile Mbalula.
Not that the Barbenheimer ordeal isn’t edifying in its own way, capturing, as it has, a revealing picture of our current moment. Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan clearly wants us to think about our penchant for self-destruction, but until we live in a world in which a film about nuclear devastation doesn’t instantly get transformed into a hashtag and a fun evening out dressed in pink, I’m afraid such introspection might remain beyond us. ..
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