Margot Robbie at Barbie premier in Sydney, Australia

                                (credit: Eva Rinaldi, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                                Barbie

I resisted going to Barbie, but after two days of internal debate, I went. To see what the fuss was about, or so I told myself. Two days after seeing Oppenheimer, which already had me angry, Barbie just made things worse.

Barbie tried so hard to be clever and genuine and all that good stuff. Tried so hard I feared one of the cast might pull a muscle. Ryan Gosling, in particular, tried so hard to emote and evoke as an evolving SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy) that I felt he must have needed six months rest after the filming was over. 

It did have thoughtful moments. The title character dropped the word “dying” into the first prolonged dance sequence during another interminable party at the Barbie mansion. For a few moments, the dancing and the party stopped cold. But she covered her gauche moment, and glitz was restored. That moment did satirize the whole Barbie worldview. Alright, thoughtful writing. And there were other moments. We got to see the creator of the doll and the whole – as it turned out – durable, profitable craze. She was surprisingly articulate. Also, a junior high girl of Latino roots disses Barbie pretty severely, saying she set the whole feminist movement back fifty years. Harsh, honest stuff.

The plot line of Barbie also loosely followed a kind of Buddha story. Go outside your sweet, privileged life to engage with the world. See aging. Suffering. Death. Start to question the whole lot. Barbie endures some deep disillusionment over whether she ever had a decent role in the real world at all, but she rebalances herself. And she doesn’t withdraw into a contemplative life as Buddha did. Like many modern Buddhists, in the end, she resolves to engage with the sad, scary, real world, to learn more about herself, and to try to be a better person.

But “better” by what moral standards is not discussed. And there, for me as a student of Philosophy, lies the rub. There are a lot of widely varied moral codes out there in the world today, forced by our transportation and communication networks to rub up against each other often and hard. What makes an action or a life morally “better” is not just a matter for debate. Unfortunately, in the world now, disputants of “better” talk completely past each other. Then fight and spill real blood.

We can’t even resolve our woes by saying: “Well, then live and let live. Accept all others as they are.” Some of those others are violently opposed to accepting you and your family and friends as you are. To them, your “way of life” is crowding in on theirs, and they won’t sit still for it. Won’t stand for it. Won’t take this lying down. Chop your metaphors as you please. The conflicts go on.  

Can we resolve this mess? How? In Barbie, these questions are never broached.  

In fairness to the makers of Barbie, no films or books or song lyrics today try to get to this dilemma or deal with it. Unfortunately, with Putin, the Taliban, etc., there lies a rubbier rub. They aren’t going to live and let live. To them, we are the aggressors. Again, the questions aren’t raised, which is the case in nearly all works of film, literature, etc. these days. Barbie is no worse and no better.

But I do get weary of postmodernist posing. They pretend to deal with big issues and even to answer them. They don’t. In the end, they don’t prove their moral code, they just assume it; they don’t defend it on the basis of reasoning or evidence. You know ... just like their opponents do with their code.    

So, yes, Barbie contains laudable moments. But I didn’t come away from the theater with even one new, thoughtful idea. And this postmodern stuff – all the clever tropes and double meanings and allusions – hey, leave me alone. They are so cliché and predictable these days that they amount to a mental meal of snore sandwiches with yawn sauce.

Everystunt, Everywhere, Every Chewy Whatever similarly underwhelmed me last year. All that effort to say trite things. Incoherent premises about alternate universes, all to tell mothers and daughters they should work hard to stay in touch emotionally. In fact, I think, to a lot of fans, the deepest thing Barbie says is similar. A minor character, late in the film, empathizes with Barbie’s anguish, and reassures Barbie that she isn’t so bad. After all, Barbie helped the Latino girl and her mom to find each other after a long estrangement.   

Decent themes, but pretty cliché. I didn’t need to invest $20 (well, you know … popcorn) of my cash and two and a half hours of my life to learn these themes. And they weren’t particularly resonant. Resonance sounds in viewers’ hearts when writers, directors, and actors create characters about whom audiences care. Barbie just didn’t contain any for me.

I comfortably accept that perhaps for some females, particularly ones having trouble with their daughters or their mothers, the film might have been moving. It just didn’t speak to me. The answers that Ken gets in the movie for his woes couldn’t have been more disappointing. They answer not one male woe in the real world. At least, not for me. He was marginalized and trivialized. Ridiculed. 

So, I can’t recommend Barbie to males or females. Unless you regularly need to eat mental calories full of sugar with no vitamins or minerals or fiber. If you want real mental nutrition, Barbie is pretty skimpy fare.

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Maybe, I should stop going to movies. 

              

                            Ryan Gosling (credit: Nivrae, via Wikimedia Commons)