– PART TWO –

Gerwig’s attempt at subversion recalls Many Farber’s definition of the kind of ‘termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss-art’ that tenaciously burrows beneath the surface of the host body, breaks down decaying organisms, and recycles dead matter. As Farber’s friend and Jean-Luc Godard’s confrère Jean-Pierre Gorin put it, ‘Termite art is about how someone manoeuvres inside a restricted terrain and how they problematize every part of it’. Blame for Gerwig’s failure to do so effectively need not be laid entirely at her feet. Powerful forces are work in the world that circumscribe or curtail freedom of expression. She might be reasonably be accused of wanting to have her cake and eat it too, but she didn’t bake the cake. Gerwig may be an enthusiastic amateur cook (see Mistress in America), but she isn’t a political animal so, consequently, she isn’t interested in the ingredients or where they come from, let alone in how the cake is divided up.

In Barbie, the fissure or fracture between fantasy and reality is ruptured and sundered when Barbie pushes through it, but, although Gerwig works in an industry in which fantasy and reality collide, she isn’t much interested in how it works. To be fair, I detect neither failure of will on her part nor any sense of self-censorship in the film. And we can decry her capitulation to the corporate pencil-necks of Mattel she disingenuously mocks and deplore her surrender to wider capitalist forces while still warming to the sly mute-button moment when President Barbie’s mouth is effaced by the Mattel logo as she yells ‘motherfuckers.’ We can baulk at the disgusting and dispiriting product placement in Barbie while still, I hope, applauding Gerwig’s daring and wit. We can be charmed by Barbie’s journey to self-awareness along the pink brick road while baulking at the fact that she’s driving a pinker-than-pink General Motors Corvette soon, rumour has it, to return to production due to skyrocketing demand.

And we can grow sick of the sight of pink while appreciating its appeal. I used to own a pink Rolls Royce myself (FAB1 – a Lady Penelope Thunderbird model). It was dinky. I once had a dog too, with wheels and a frame you pushed. Toys can be really weird. Yes folks, we live within capitalism and capitalism lives within us, in a deep dark corner many of us want to leave. I loathe advertising and marketing almost as much as Bill Hicks did. I’m as sick of being marketed at as women are of being talked at and as the Barbies are sick of being sang at. Sick of clickbait, cold calling, commercial breaks, firewalls, pop-up ads, junk mail, trailers, those imposed ads that pop up when you want to watch a video on YouTube, product placement in films . . . at advertising full stop. But disgust at Gerwig’s decision to aid Mattel’s marketing work shouldn’t prevent us from finding Barbie funny. Without humour we really are lost.

Barbie contains all the ingredients of J. B. Priestley’s recipe for humour: ‘Not all the following are absolutely essential, but the mixture will be the richer if they are all found in it: a feeling of irony; a sense of the absurd; a certain contact with reality, one foot at least the ground; and, at first sight surprising, affection’. Analysing humour is a fool’s game but it’s worth taking a closer look at how it operates in Barbie, beginning with one particular scene in the film that says something profound about Gerwig’s modus operandi and her forgiving attitude to conformism. The moving scene in which Sasha calls Barbie a fascist work on several levels. On one level, it’s uproariously comical that a doll who has only ever lived in a pink plastic dreamworld should be upset about being called a fascist; on another level, the scene is an absurdist, neo-surrealist gem. The humour arises from within the rupture between the fantasy world of Barbieland and the Real World. Until she thinks of death, Barbie’s existence has been characterised by blissful ignorance and she shouldn’t, by rights, even know about Fascism, certainly not about Mussolini’s administration of Italy’s railways. If Baumbach and Gerwig had adhered to the logic of their script that scene could not have happened, but the film bursts into life whenever the interplay between the two equally absurd worlds is hilariously highlighted.

The same dynamic is in play when Stereotypical Ken visits the Real World and absorbs what he assumes are its ways. He is so accustomed to being a mere appendage of Barbie and so deeply conditioned by life in a matriarchy, that he is gratified and grateful whenever anyone as much as nods at him, which he interprets as respect. Even being asked the time is a thrill for him. Gerwig’s mischievous humour carries a hint of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll but also a whiff of radicalism. This is the world turned upside down, a reversal of the absurd and unnatural order of patriarchal capitalism. Gerwig is as literate as she is cineliterate, so I’d be amazed if she were unfamiliar with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian feminist novel Herland. The same subversive framework is at work in that novel as in Gerwig’s film. Women rule Herland and men are elsewhere. When men stumble into the matriarchy, they are taught by wise women. The women rule their world well and have all but abolished war, even the kind of stylized West Side Story-style combat that Barbie presents would be frowned on. The beach battle scene in Barbie is played for laughs; this is not pacifist didacticism, it is knockabout high-jinx. Gerwig seems to be saying, as Perkins Gilman did, ‘Men make war. Women make peace’.

As they say, I’m not a pacifist myself but I’m still not too keen on war. Or, I’m not a director myself but I wouldn’t work for a big studio if I were. There is so much grandstanding and posturing, so much performative outrage about Gerwig’s capitulation that one feels like defending her just for the sheer devilry of doing so. We can recognise that she works in an increasingly comprised and corporatized industry yet still insist that moral responsibility and the actions of individuals matter. Conservatives who defend Gerwig’s decision to help Mattel sell undercut their own arguments. Monopoly capitalism crushes individuals and individualism rather than abetting them. If the logic of their incoherent arguments triumphed, we’d all be Luxemburgists crying ‘socialism or barbarism’ and we’d all find ourselves being slaughtered on the barricades like flies again.

It’s a time to box clever and Gerwig’s supporters would argue she’s doing just that with Barbie. Whether or not she let her best self and the side down is largely beside the point. If Gerwig hadn’t made Barbie, it has inevitably been argued, Mattel would have found somebody else who would have, for few can resist the siren call of big money. Whenever and wherever people rally behind progressive causes – be that the struggle against colonialism, for civil rights, votes for women or fair pay – there will be those prepared to break ranks. There always have been. As long ago or as recently as 1945, depending on how you view history, Browning criticized Wordsworth for selling out the ideals of the Tom Paine and the American and French revolutions in ‘The Lost Leader’. Even that unrepentant, steadfast Red Bertolt Brecht was unable to resist the lure of the Dream Factory. In ‘Hollywood Elegies’ he says, ‘Every morning, to earn my bread/I go to the market where lies are traded/In hope/I take my place among the sellers’. To respond to Gerwig’s shoddy compromise with a call for moral purity that risks asking mortal humans to be saints is also beside the point. Again, that’s not the main problem.

Independent filmmakers will always wish to spread their downy wings. Big budgets offer bright possibilities until those wings are clipped. Lynne Ramsay may rail against the ‘bullshitters and backstabbers of Hollywood’ but she, too, took the golden shilling. She left the poetic lyricism of Ratcatcher behind and placed her art at the service of American violence in You Were Never Really Here. Carol Morley followed a similar trajectory, Sarah Polley is about to. I think they were wrong. I think small is beautiful and that documentary and independent cinema can hold its own. But whether you think compromise or conflict drives change, none of this make those who travel to Hollywood in search of money and/or fulfilment, or the fulfilment they imagine money will buy, any less impressively gifted or human, likeable or greedy than the rest of us. Greta Gerwig is not a bad person but that, too, is beside the point.

Among the vital pertinent questions Gerwig and her film raise and peck at are: how does the patriarchy maintain itself, how do we challenge the mechanisms of  social control, and how do we achieve the revolution in values that Dr. King called for, in order to achieve justice for all, and to dissuade folk from consuming, driving, flying, spending and wanting so much that we destroy our habitat? Barbie declares herself on the side of the status quo. From the moment she gets up in the morning, her Panglossian worldview takes over, all is well in the best of all possible worlds, and she doesn’t need or wish to think or feel. Barbie she tells us repeatedly that she never wanted change, but change she does. Gloria reminds Barbie that life is change and she heeds her.

Ken, on the other hand, is definitely not on the side of the status quo. ‘For Barbie,’ Helen Mirren’s voiceover says, ‘every day is a great day: for Ken, it is not a great day unless Barbie looks at him.’ Denied agency and love, Ken wants change: he wants to kiss Barbie and hopes they’ll spend the night together, even if, because he is ‘just Ken’, unjustly a doll with no genitals, he can’t imagine what they’d do if they did. Ken is changed by his discovery of patriarchy, and horses. He then becomes even more ridiculous than he was as a beach bum mooning over Barbie, more dangerous certainly, but still he changes and finds himself – with Barbie’s help. These metaphorical meta jokes are what render Barbie subversive, based as they are on the difference between how things are and how they could, should, might and ought to be.

Discussing Barbie in the London Review of Books, Michael Wood perceptively points out that while reality changes, the real problem is it doesn’t change enough (or ‘Kenough’ as Gerwig might have it). Wood says, ‘The film gets a little lost at times, as if it has too many storylines to play with and won’t let any of them go.’ That’s true, but Wood saves his most profound insight for last: ‘A person who sings and dances may be just the same as the person who talks and walks, but we recognise the idealising moment. This is who [the Barbies and Kens] want to be or ought to be. Or, more negatively perhaps, who they are programmed to be.’ That hits the nail on its head. Our feelings about Barbie and Barbie are tipped upside down if we interpret the welcome return of audiences to cinemas not as ‘victory for cinema’, or not as victory for cinema only, but, rather, as a form of low-level mass hysteria precision-engineered by cynical mass marketing and hinting at the troubling, credulous conformity of mechanized consumers herded to their seats like so many sheep.

I was shocked, when I left the cinema after watching Barbie, by the sight of a Barbi-queue forming. Women, and a few men, were lining up to enter a pop-up Barbie box photo booth presumably provided by President Josh Goldstine and Warner Brothers’ obliging marketing team. In Gerwig’s film, the suits of Mattel are keen to pop the runaway doll securely back in the box of fantasy she’d escaped from. Mattel’s CEO (Will Ferrell) yells, ‘Get back in the box, you strumpet!’ At the last second, Barbie sees through them all, wises up to their fiendish plan, slips her manacles and legs for freedom. Here, in our Real World, women were stepping voluntarily into the very box Barbie escapes from. This suddenly made Barbie appear like a hideous, ironic reference to Rosie the Riveter. Here, before my very eyes, in both concrete and symbolic form, was Aldous Huxley’s nightmare vision of people renouncing freedom and embracing servitude.

While researching this review, I was no less shocked to career into a deranged podcast, by none other than by our old Barbie-burning friend Ben Shapiro, about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – which he compares with George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley compared the two books himself, in his terrifyingly prescient non-fiction masterpiece Brave New World Revisited: ‘In 1984,’ Huxley says, ‘the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure’. ‘What exactly,’ Ben Shapiro asks during his podcast talk, ‘would the Left object to in in Brave New World? The heart sinks.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman also, compares those two great books. Postman argues that there is more truth in Huxley’s novel (with its warnings of a post-Fordist, post-scarcity society in which a ‘dictatorship without tears’ is achieved by psychological conditioning and compulsory pleasure) than in Orwell’s (in which social and political control is exercised by ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’, and tyrannical terror). Actually, both books contain powerful home truths. Society is permeated by fear (of climate collapse, death, old age, poverty, homelessness, etc) and propelled by ‘pervasive, almost compulsory pleasure. Building on Marshall McLuhan’s claims that ‘the medium is the message’, Postman, an apt writer to deliver the message, argues that TV has influenced the way we live off screen, that general elections have become a battle between contending advertising campaigns (see Pablo Larraíns’ No), and that entertainment values have come to dominate public discourse to the extent that the message is now far less important than the entertainment value of its delivery. The reception and discussion of Barbie would seem to bear that out, but, look closely, isn’t the message, in fact, the thing.

Postman says, ‘What Orwell feared was those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.’ He concludes, ‘[Huxley] believed, with H. G. Wells, that we are in a race between education and disaster . . . For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World – was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking’.

The italics in the last part of that last sentence are my own. It’s important to stress the relevance Postman’s comments have for our readings of Barbie. Laugher, great: an appalling hedonistic mindlessness, not so great. Barbie herself is, of course in a race ‘between education and disaster’, caught between mindless sappy happiness on the one hand, and the sudden self-realisation that comes to her (and us all) after her epiphanous recognition of death. The importance of education and self-education is, implicitly, another of those pertinent questions that Gerwig elides but which her film invites us to consider. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley describes a process of depoliticization, in which Gerwig is implicated. In Barbie the Kens and Barbies compete for political control by no visible voting process but, rather, as if by coup de état. Power, the film seems to say, does not come from the ballot box or the barrel of a gun, but from a few well-timed jokes and well-choreographed dance sequences. Gerwig, thankfully, doesn't guide us by the hand to the conclusions her film invites us to reach, but that is only, I think, because she is herself uncertain about those self-same conclusions and because she left herself no room for manoeuvre when she stepped into the restrictive terrain of big-budget, commercially compromised cinema.

Huxley might have been writing about Barbie, its audiences, and Gerwig or Mattel’s Kens and Barbies when he says: ‘That so many of the well-fed young . . . should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent is distressing but not too surprising. ”Free as a bird”, we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned to how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone – or at least by bread and circuses alone’. Of course, Gerwig and Mattel’s Kens and Barbies don’t eat, they’re dolls, but the analogy and metaphor, I think, holds true.

Huxley continues by reference to Dostoevky’s Brothers Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor’s parable on freedom it contains: ‘”For nothing’, the Inquisitor insists, “has been more insupportable for a man or human society than freedom”. Nothing except the absence of freedom; for when things go badly, and the rations are reduced and the slave drivers step up their demands, the grounded dodos will clamour again for their wings – only to renounce them, yet once more, when times grow better and the dodo-farmers become more lenient and generous. The young people who now think so poorly of democracy may grow up to become fighters for freedom. The cry of ‘Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibility of liberty’, may give place, under altered circumstances, to the cry of ‘Give me Liberty or give me death’.

‘If such a revolution takes place,’ Huxley continues, ‘it will be due in part to the operation of forces over which even the most powerful rulers have very little control, in part to the incompetence of those rulers, their inability to make effective use of the mind-manipulating instruments . . . science and technology have supplied, and will go on supplying, the would-be tyrant’. Unlike Orwell, neither Huxley nor Postman believed that capitalism was the locus of the threats to freedom they describe, but then they wrote before algorithms, climate collapse, the internet, mobile phones, social media, steaming services, the invasion of our private lives, and the privatisation our public space. Postman said, ‘Even the Japanese, who are said to make better cars than the Americans, know that economics is less a science than a performing art’. He may have felt differently if he’d lived to see the way many companies now use algorithms or witnessed, for example, the finely calibrated marketing campaign that precipitated the Barbenheimer phenomenon or the clinical almost scientific promotion of Barbie by Mattel and their partners.

Companies such as Birkenstock, Chanel, Chevrolet and Impala are among 100 partnership deals Mattel have in place to milk the milch cow of Barbie, so there will be definitely be more stuff in the world as a result of Barbie. As Jessica Defino says, on the day after the trailer for Barbie appeared sales of blonde dye tripled, and qualified doctors subsequently started offering ‘Barbie Arm Botox’, $120,000 ‘Malibu Barbie’ plastic surgery packages, and ‘Barbie Butt’ procedures. Even on the film’s opening weekend ToysR Us reported an increase of 30 per cent on sales of Barbie dolls. Sales of Barbie dolls rose by 53 per cent in the Czech Republic. Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify (the e-commerce platform) publicly stated that doll sales had risen by 56 per cent, but he later retracted the claim. Rumours that the film had led to a worldwide shortage of pink paint were subsequently disavowed. There have been a lot of smoke-and-mirror stories circulating around Barbie, but we know for certain that Greta Gerwig has already recouped the $145 million Mattel gave her to spend to help them sell their plastic toys. She has already (bravo!) become the first female director of a billion-dollar movie.

Of course, advertisers wouldn’t advertise if it didn’t work and commercial propaganda is as old as capitalism. As recently as 1957, that dogged scourge of consumerism Vance Packard had warned us, in The Hidden Persuaders, that ‘Large scale attempts are being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences . . . Some of it is disquieting, particularly when it is viewed as a portent of what may be ahead . . . The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become a multi-million-dollar industry’. Much of what Packard said was subsequently superseded by new techniques of manipulation. Judith Williamson picked up the baton in her book Consuming Passions and her film A Sign is a Fine Investment. Shoshanah Zuboff and others have taken things further, as we shall see.

More recently, in 1991 to be precise, Naomi Wolf wrote in the Beauty Myth, ‘During the past decade, women breached the power structure, meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical speciality. During the past five years, consumer spending has doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal’. Loosely, the beauty myth might be described as the mechanism of patriarchal control that ratchets up Virginia Woolf’s concept of ‘frock consciousness’ by adding ageing, body size, complexion, cellulite, diet, hairstyle, nail colour, skin tone, height, weight, and so forth to the list of ‘problems’ capitalism promises women it can solve – if they’d only buy this, that or the other  ‘essential’ product. It is in this context that Barbie operates and must be read. We know it will push product. We know the damage that will do.

While we all also know that Barbie was cynically marketed; while we can conjecture that audiences were stampeded into submission, along with the herd of independent minds that have commented on it; while there are coherent arguments for locating Mattel’s Barbie and Gerwig’s Barbie squarely within the injurious beauty myth and the insidious social control it represents; and while the film therefore, only partially succeeds in challenging inequitable gender norms, if, indeed, it succeeds at all; it has manifestly generated a diverse range of opinions on such subjects and got us talking about matters that are all too often swept under the carpet. We can assume, surely, that the debates around Barbie and Barbie dolls, about the beauty myth and the hard sell will continue to exercise feminists and misogynists alike for many years to come.

In her magisterial book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes the new forms of social control attendant upon the use of algorithms; the concentration of data, knowledge and surveillance power; and the harvesting our digital data for insidious commercial and political purposes by a new, mutant form of rampaging capitalism. As well as providing us with the tools for digital self-defence, she concludes with reference to Orwell, specifically to his 1946 review of James’ Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution – the thesis of which was that capitalism, democracy and socialism would not survive the Second World War. Burnham predicted that a new managerial class composed of bureaucrats, business executives, soldiers, technocrats and technicians would, Shoshana says, ‘concentrate all power and privilege in their own hands: an aristocracy of talent built on a semi-slave society . . . Orwell’s disgust is palpable: “It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening . . . “In each case,” Orwell thundered “he was obeying the same instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible”’.

But, as Mark Fisher says in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, ‘The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction that has marked the horizon of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly everything is possible again’. Hasn’t Greta Gerwig, as a woman, reminded us, by the mere brave act of making this confused but complex film, how confused and complex we all are, and hasn’t she coincidentally revivified the art of the possible? If I’ve suggested that responses to Barbie reflect a disturbing degree of conformism in society, it should be stressed that, thankfully, that isn’t mercifully, the whole picture. The heart-breaking recent death of Sinead O’Connor, an indefatigable anti-Barbie role model if ever there was one, reminds us that resistance is noble and capitulation isn’t mandatory.

Ever increasing numbers of women are now wise to patriarchy, are challenging the beauty myth, and refuse to be talked over, talked down to, talked at and sold at. Advertising generates a ‘persuasion knowledge’ defence mechanism that alerts us to the hard sell and independence of thought hasn’t yet been stamped out across the board. And the Hollywood actors and writers strikes demonstrates that love of justice and hatred of injustice still proudly walk the earth. In a touching scene in Barbie, Ruth, the creator of Mattel’s doll, gives Barbie a lesson in reality: ‘Human beings only have one ending. Ideas live forever’. It is a conviction the first trades unionists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, shared. It is why they emblazoned ‘Remember Thine End’ on their banners and why they cried as one, ‘We raise the watchword Liberty. We will, we will, we will be free!’

In honour of Barbie's tears, Dario Fo and Enzo Janucci. In praise of Věra Chytilová, Kira Muratova and Lena Wertmüler. Le cinéma s''insurge!

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