Oppenheimer Beats Barbie in India. Why?

IN HIS 2005 BOOK, Steven Johnson argued that every­thing bad is good for you. The book had the same title and its subtitle was: ‘How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.’ His argument was that the multiple threads and social networks inherent in TV and cinema, as well as the reduced number of flashing arrows (audio-visual cues), were forcing people to become cognitively wiser.

It may well be one of the explanations for why Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has done so well in India, `67 crore and counting in less than a week, and more than double the business of the week’s other global release Barbie, which made `25.55 crore in India. India is Oppenheimer’s third-biggest market, after the US and the UK. Even if it doesn’t actually make you smarter, Nolan’s film about the physicist, Robert J Oppenheimer who built the atomic bomb which killed 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, makes you feel more intelligent. It’s what media scholar Vamsee K Juluri calls the STEM cinema phenomenon, where entertainment around science, technology, engineer­ing, and mathematics has a following. While Nolan’s movies with their complex concepts of time and space have a huge fan base in India, India is also building this genre with movies such as Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran (2018) and Rocketry: The Nambi Effect (2022), as well as the digital series such as Rocket Boys doing well.

Says Juluri: “And then there’s Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism. The other angle which may be emerging is also the split between the technocrats and traditionalists in the Hindutva side around this movie. While the rightwing technocrats are probably fine or even thrilled with the creative liberty taken by Nolan with the Bhagavad Gita in the sex scene, the others are perhaps more outraged, or at least disappointed, by the gratuitous concoction of an intimate context for the introduction of the Gita.”

Nolan has long been an admirer of the Indian mind, whether scientific or entrepreneurial. In Interstellar (2014), Matthew McConaughey’s engineer-turned-farmer recycles a 10-year-old surveillance drone, with “outstanding solar cells”, made in India. In Tenet (2020), Dimple Kapadia plays Priya, the brain behind a future war on the present via nine bombs hidden away with nine nuclear powers. She is introduced in the film as the occupant of an Antilia-like apartment which our heroes, the Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) bungee jump into even as the Mera Saaya (1966) song ‘Jhumka gira re’ plays in the background. Priya also references the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s change of heart, probably the first in-film promotion of a forthcoming film.

Vivek Agnihotri, a man familiar with the phenomenon of surprise hits with The Kashmir Files (2022), ascribes the success to Nolan’s fan base in India which devours his complex and multi-layered storytelling, the controversy around the Gita which always helps a movie stand out, as well as the strategic and consistent marketing of the movie which began a year ago: “They clearly used data to target young, IT youth. They must have figured out that young professional Indians like to see such movies, like to be part of international events,” he says.

And Oppenheimer was an event, much like a FIFA World Cup or the Olympics, which cuts across cultures and classes. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, with its close identification with Ameri­can girlhood in a pink paradise, did not have the same resonance in India, where the Mattel doll has never been too popular.

Hindi filmmakers have long been speaking of a new-generation audience that is more comfortable watching movies from the Marvel Universe with their complex Easter eggs that improve audience engagement, or finding the real-life, death-defying stunts of Tom Cruise more compelling than the CGI-enhanced action of Indian stars. I remember filmmaker Anurag Kashyap telling me in 2020, at the height of Covid-19, that Indian filmmakers have just a two-to-three-year window to prove themselves worthy of interest, otherwise young India will move on to other forms of entertainment.

Young Indians want to be part of a global conversation, adds filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. “And sometimes the more colloquial it is, like Korean cinema or shows, the more intense is the conversation,” he says. “There was a time when James Bond was the only international film most Indians recognised,” he says.

Not anymore. The numbers bear witness to the transforma­tion. There are three Hollywood movies in the top 20 movies at the box office so far this year, Fast X at number 10, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One at number 12, and Oppenheimer at number 20. There is another change. Nine of the top 20 were non-Hindi and non-Hollywood movies, sug­gesting a sea change among audiences.

The move towards diversity in Hollywood has meant wider casting choices and location selections. Nolan, for instance, shot Dark Knight Rises (2012) at Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, and there were reports of how much he relished Indian food. As the American box-office share shrinks and the non-American share rises, especially post-Covid-19, Hol­lywood has realised inclusiveness is no longer a choice, it is a matter of survival. The close connection between Silicon Valley and Hollywood has also meant a deeper appreciation of the Indian/subcontinental intellect. Inception, Nolan’s masterpiece from 2010, was possibly one of the movies where an Indian was not playing a taxi driver. As Yusuf, a chemist in Mombasa who creates a complex compound that enables Leonardo Di Caprio’s attempt to steal information for his redemption, Dileep Rao was one of the first to represent the global rise of Indian-origin scientists.

Oppenheimer’s famous quotation from the Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” is uttered twice in the movie. Cillian Murphy, the actor who immersed himself in the life of the physicist, also said in interviews that he read the Gita to get into character. Few things excite Indians as much as the West’s acceptance of their civilisational ideas.

Oppenheimer has performed well at the global box office, with $220 million in its first week, but it is still much less than Barbie, which made $470 million. Barbie is a clever film, which repositions notions of femininity and masculinity, all in the garb of song and dance, and in the choices it makes, to be a Birkenstock girl or a Barbie girl. But it is not a dichotomy most Indian women relate to, where there has never been any pres­sure to choose only one way of being.

There are many Easter eggs in Barbie, too, but not all of them will be familiar to Indians, so it doesn’t necessarily work as well with the YouTube explainer culture. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, with its storyline of a discredited scientist getting a medal and a pat on the back late in life, along with “salmon and potato salad” follows the template of Nambi and the fictional lead of Mission Mangal (2019), based on ISRO’s mission to Mars. Redemption is a sentiment the world understands, especially when it is accompanied by a reading of the Gita.

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