Barbie at Los Alamos

 I finally saw Barbie this weekend (spoiler alert: I don’t know the last time I laughed so often or so loud or so knowingly at the movies) so I have to jump into the Barbenheimer pool, not (just) as a zeitgeist coattail grabber, but because looking at my bookshelves, I saw some of my key book-collecting interests - kids lit, dolls and ephemera - have intersected with this moment in pop culture history. Welcome to “Barbie and Friends” vs the “Los Alamos Rolodex”.

First up, this series of Barbie books “Barbie and Friends Book Club”, published in 1999 featuring the real fashion doll posed in a variety of landscapes and scenarios.

Photographically illustrated books have a long history, including in the world of children’s books but the Dare Wright books about The Lonely Doll remain the high water mark for me. Read more about Dare Wright here and here, but let’s be clear: the Barbie books are not Lonely Doll quality. I found the whole series in a thrift store but I only bought the most intriguing titles because true to the doll, Barbie holds a number of jobs in these books: camp leader, Broadway producer, elementary teacher, textile art appreciator, and above all, a Nancy-Drew style mystery solver.

A Stitch in Time: When Barbie visits her friend Mary on a historic island…Mary shows her an old family quilt filled with clues to the past. Barbie as a textile artist!

The Class Act: Being the new kid isn’t easy. But Jane has Barbie as her fifth-grade teacher…

Clawman’s Warning: Camping with Barbie in scenic Wyoming is an adventure for Stacie and her friends. But when rumors of the legendary Clawman creature start making everyone jittery, it’s up to Barbie and park ranger Ken to get to the bottom of the spooky legend. 

Miniature library sets! Replica fabric stores! Barbie in practical teachers' wear! You see why I had to buy them. The photographers must have had the most fun on this hack job.

Now for the -Enhemier portion of our post. 

Los Alamos Rolodex: Doing Business with the National Lab 1967-1978 was a souvenir from the one time I visited Los Alamos and their History Museum, a winding mountainous drive from Albuquerque with my in-laws. I was most struck by the remoteness of the town and the way the scientists and their families had to construct a community away from their own cities and countries and any semblance of normal life, trading it for changing the world in a top-secret atmosphere. I hope the movie addresses the building of the community, but fear it won’t. In the museum, I was glad to see there was one small corner that allowed for a dissenting POV, from Peace activists or anti-nuclear groups, handmade posters vs the glossy paraphernalia of the US Government.

In the gift shop, I bought this book, published by The Center for Land Use Interpretation (their mission is so good) and it is exactly what it says it is: the photographed contents of seven rolodexes collecting the business cards and the “record of the companies and people that supplied goods and services to the nuclear industry”(p.8). They hold quotidian details of phone numbers and people’s names next to the Atomic Age elegance of the logos and designs, all engaged in ensuring we could blow things up real good and make a buck doing it.

What did “VacuBlast Corporation” do, anyway? Or Pulverizing Machines?

The photo business cards of the Eastman Kodak corporation remind us how influential and wealthy Kodak once was.

The photos of the cards are published one to a page, no commentary, allowing us to read our own meaning into the assemblage and the quotidian strangeness of the nuclear economy. As I said, I haven’t seen the movie yet but I suspect the Oppenheimer makers won’t afford us quite the same space and respect for our own conclusions.

Update Bonus Oppenheimer You-Won’t Like-This- Review: On a rainy night in Wellington, NZ, we went to see Oppenheimer at the Lighthouse Cinema and maybe it was just being North Americans in another country, one that has been nuclear-free for many years, but this movie felt so AMERICAN [who cares about a Cabinet appointment hearing when politics has become a total joke in the US], so MALE [what were those sex scenes with Florence Pugh about??] and so NOT NEW MEXICAN, and it was melodramatic bordering on farce to me. Left so grumpy and embarrassed that this is the dross people in the rest of the world are forced to absorb about the USA. Barbie is a better ambassador.