Almost everything you think you know about Barbenheimer is wrong. A person reading this will with a high probability know what I am talking about: the phenomenon has been covered not only by film magazines but also by mainstream newspaper. There is even a dedicated and strangely detailed Wikipedia page!
Although most of those articles refers to Know Your Meme, since its archive nature, all analysis are seldom contextualized in a broader lens of Internet culture. In fact the most important aspect of all is often missed: Barbenheimer is a mass meme, an kind event that in the general silence has become rare and it is going to be always more.
Since memes passed the test of marketing, mainstream media and even generation elder than millennials, someone will surely ask in what way mass memes are becoming always rarer. First of all it is needed to be addressed the ambiguity of the term meme: with this word are intended both the general phenomenon (that in technical jargon is called template), and the single instances, namely posts such as the single Barbenheimer fan arts. This last usage, even if conceptually wrong, is often used in memers community for convenience of use or simply habit. For the sake of a methodological approach I will call memes only the general formats (templates) of the various posts.
Thus, for mass memes are intended those memes that can gain a significant public, a broad pervasiveness in all kind of online community, even trespassing the virtual border but without becoming cringe in real life. Moreover in order for a meme to be really a mass meme it has to be originated in Internet culture and embrace its reference without degenerate and be appreciated both to meme snobs, the most educated and refined palates, and the average person (not capable of recognize all hidden meanings) in the same way. A music comparison could be not the massive summer hit rather a classic song technically excellent but still enjoyable by everyone.
How Barbenheimer became a mass meme
Like every respectful mass meme, Barbenheimer started quite slowly. The announcement of a Barbie film has been received with surprising interest by the Internet community. Cinema has always been one of the hot topics across online communities and it has thus been influential on memes: just think about all classic memes born from a specific movie or just a single frame, then being decontextualized to the point of loosing its original meaning. Think about the influence that films like “inception” with its templates or the “Great Gatsby” Leonardo DiCaprio pic or the many template took from “Avengers: The Endgame”. Those films are pop cultures cornerstone and it was inevitable that they would become part of the culture phenomenon, thing that memes are in its finest form. Sometimes fictional characterss becomesa linchpin in Internet culture and memes in general: Shrek is a virtuous example or more recently Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho” become the representation of schizoposting.
Cinephiles community is very diversified and it must coexist in it the love for commercial blockbusters, the one for cult movies but also the most snobbish individuals with the constant need of showing off their knowledge and taste. This contrast emerged quickly with the announcement of a Barbie movie: somehow a blockbuster that would surely have been a mediocre branding operation proposed itself as something different. A trailer that quotes “2001 Space Odyssey” is rather something too pretentious or the most successful and enjoyable meta-ironic disguise in recent Cinema history. Only later it would be revealed by the director of the film Greta Gerwig herself that it was exactly her goal to attract a public that normally would not be attracted by a movie like that, and that people should expect a something much more deep and meaningful than Mattel plug.
One detail among the others made the film appeal to the memers: Ryan Gosling. That happened because it exists a meme that is literally me, in other word the empathy for a particular cinematic trope, the one of the anti-hero isolated from society, with a strong hidden personality that fore some reason cannot be recognised. I am talking about characters like the Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker or Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver” or again Patrick Bateman. Among this Ryan Gosling is a recurrent actor, especially with films “Drive” and “Blade Runner 2049” in which he is the main actor. For this reason he became the extreme symbol of the literally me meme,with the sub-meme in which the memer pretends to identify as Ryan himself in his version that the meme itself has created.
The marketing plan succeeded and at every leak, or little information released about the Barbie movie, memes were part of the hype in the meme world. The basic idea remained the same: the film is secretly being made for us, the outsiders white male audience (or we will collectively pretend so), only for the lulz. By the way we are going to watch the film at the cinema dressed properly, somehow repeating the gentleminion meme. This is a pretty common dynamic among memers: the more a joke is absurd, the more they will pretend it is not a joke at all, in a post-ironic way. An extreme example of this behaviour is the area 51 storm.
Another element that attracted memers was the Margot Robbie’s feet on screen. For some unknown reason foot fetish is itself a meme and even if the Barbie production knew it would be sexualized by the kinky community, memers will post-ironically take part in this appreciation.
All Barbenheimer thing is just the cherry on top and it sums up on a slow wave of memes vaguely surreal about the Barbie movie. The attempt of Warner Brothers of getting in Nolan’s way by scheduling Barbie’s release in the same day of Oppenheimer backfired. The idea that the white male audience was somehow exclusively took by one of the two film created a sub-meme in which the two audiences exchanged or even that the two movies were part of the same cinematic universe. Another important element in this part is that also Cillian Murphy, protagonist actor in Oppenheimer, is one of the faces of the literally me meme, more specifically when it joins with the other meme of Sigma grindset (that would require a dedicated blog post).
Hence post-irony that joins meta-modernism created all the ingredients for a meme with a broad public. The fact that the meme has been even encouraged by the two film casts and cinema workers in general, that saw it as free advertisement, made the Barbenheimer explode. The rest is well known.
Why is nowadays a so special fact
With all this being said it appears clear that the circumstances that has brought to the birth and diffusion of Barbenheimer is indeed almost impossible to understand without framing it in an historic perspective. Between memers (or at least the one who knows meme culture) there is a general consciousness about the evolution of the meme concept so it is a target of humour itself becoming meta-humour mechanics that manifest themselves in memes.
In the beginning Internet was a place for few nerds, a nobody land all to be invented. There was a moment, right after, in which every meme was a mass meme, the one that in the image above is called classic era. It was the period of the Internet explosion (even outside the USA) and for many surfing the Net was a desktop only experience. It was also the time of smartphones mass adoption and with a big hype of what one could do with it. This enthusiasm was also about social network platforms in general. Before rage comics ended up to become not just the symbol but the only meaning of the meme word for many, there was little to no consciousness about this concept. In this period it was almost impossible to draw a boundary between a viral content and a meme and at the same time all viral content was known by everybody (with a fast connection).
Memes at that time were simple, without layers of references and also those who did not took part in the creation of Internet culture were exposed to those content. Very often memes of that period originated with comments on some big event or pop phenomenons: a silly and well made photo was enough to start the meme machine.
Here there is a temptation to call this period as a sort of golden age, idea that some of the first memers like and for this reason never went on from that concept of meme. This idea is wrong for two reasons. The first one is the by definition of golden age, it should be the one that the image calls experimental era (without re-thinking the whole classification). The second reason is that some years later there would have been a sort of second golden age.
The dank era should be actually splitted in two moments. In the first one, there has been a tendency of the memers of the Internet culture (that at that time was formed) to isolate themselves in non-mainstream platform, where to think about meme and how to get over the stagnation that rage comics in particular had created making memes not funny anymore. It is in this period that meta-memes born and humour in memes became increasingly more complicated: at this point it was useful to have a general meme culture knowledge in order to understand memes.
The second period of this era is the second golden age. Zoomers became old enough to be new meme prosumers and the pervasive Internet revolution was completed, so memers opened themselves to the mainstream again. Later we would have discovered that this opening was part of an alt-right’s plan to use memes to their advantage, but at the time the hype for a growing community of people who did understand the potential of memes fired up the memers. The consequence was the fast growth of the memers community.
At the end of that era with the burst of the memers “bubble” it was impossible to repeat the auto-ghettoisation that happened few years before. In the never-ending war between meme snobs and normies it became impossible the existence of one global, chaotic and self-handling but also cohesive community living in a multitude of different platforms with different philosophies and world views (also in a political sense) way too different. To this it was also adding the slow decline of some of the biggest platforms, fact that nowadays appears self-evident but it is effect of a slow and complex decline. It could be mentioned many other factors but it is clear why at this point the meme world began to fragment.
Even if it exists an Internet culture, that is only one of the niches in which every memer takes part. If memes are a language, or even a meta-language, the act of making memes becomes an attitude. Every meme prosumer is then part of many niche subcultures, all connected but distinct one from the other. A general meme culture still exists but it is almost a niche of a niche and it is impossible to have a general encyclopedic knowledge of all trending memes rather than some experties about recognising the mechanics of what makes a good meme one of it. This phenomenon gets along with the emergence of new social networks, like Tiktok, that popularised new ways of making memes that already existed but were marginal. This trend is also parallel to to the fragmentation of mass media and Marketing in general.
In a world made of niches, the emergence of a mass meme that not only has to be enjoyable by everybody but has also to adapt to plenty of different social platforms with different mechanics, language and audiences, it become easy to understand why Barbenheimer is an extraordinary event and condition like this will rarely repeat again.
