Bombshells: ‘Asteroid City’ and Henry Adams in the Age of Barbenheimer

We are in the midst of Barbenheimer. We have been in the midst of Barbenheimer since at least Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City hit theaters back in June. But Barbenheimer is older than June even. Barbenheimer is the shape of the Modern Age all the way from Jamestown to this past weekend’s manufactured showdown between Barbie and Oppenheimer.

Historian Henry Adams’ 1907 effort The Education of Henry Adams contains that somewhat famous (somewhat arcane) declarative: “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres” (324).

Adams wrote this line in his chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin”, which is about Adams’ visit to the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris, an experience that “haunted” Adams much like everything haunted Adams. He hailed from a line of Presidents and was an intellectual figure of the 19th century who anticipated and fretted over what the 20th century might bring to bear. The Industrial Age and the scientific discoveries at the time had left him feeling unmoored. He acknowledged there was no real center prior to Yeats saying it couldn’t hold, and he felt lost before Hemingway’s ambulance and wine tours. He was ahead of his times precisely because he was a man of his own time:

As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to…