#14: Barbenet, The Movie Event of the Year (Plus, Oscars)
The Academy Awards
The Oscars were this Sunday which for me officially marks 5ish years1 of making A Spread. I owe this demented, labor-intensive ritual to Demi Adejuyigbe whose punny, themed party menus I first saw in about 2019. The voice of a generation! He always comes up with ideas that are so lyrical and singular, I couldn’t possibly live up to it, but I try anyway. Is it bad that I now go see new releases with the twin thoughts “What will my Letterboxd review be?” and “Is there something here that will translate into an amusing Oscar party menu item?” bouncing around in my brain? Of course it is! But that won’t stop me.
Here were some of this year’s offerings:
As is usually the case for the Oscars following all the precursors, this year’s well paced2 ceremony had vanishingly few surprises. A few were good: The Zone of Interest winning in Sound (cool!), The Boy and the Heron winning in Animation. One was a huge bummer: Lily Gladstone’s loss in Best Actress. Emma Stone (talented! wonderful!) looked so stricken I felt bad being so upset about it but I am! The Academy’s continued allergy to more subtle, internal acting continues to be a scourge and I just think everyone was a real fucking baby about Killers of the Flower Moon’s runtime. Shut the fuck up and enjoy your great, harrowing American masterpiece!
My other favorite parts: Godzilla Minus One win and they were all holding Godzilla toys!!!!!!!!!!!!, the “I’m Just Ken” performance, John Mulaney describing Field of Dreams, Pacino’s “MY EYES SEE OPPENHEIMER,” and on a serious note, Jonathan Glazer’s lone, thoughtful, brave and insistent speech about refusing to allow his Jewish identity and his Holocaust film to be hijacked by a genocidal occupation and about the necessity of resisting fascism now. He’s now facing some of the dumbest and most depressing criticism I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Don’t Try To Understand It, Feel It”
Last month, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Tenet for the fourth time (but this time, in IMAX!). The first time I saw Tenet was in September 2020 through the window of Adam’s car at a drive-through. I was so goddamn excited to be out of the house I didn’t care we missed the first 15 minutes of the movie because they didn’t let us into the drive-in in time. Tenet is a) not a movie that makes much sense and b) has a very cool opening sequence, so missing the opening is tough but right off the bat my feeling was “this makes no sense but it’s fun.”
It feels gauche to bring up Letterboxd scores, but we all know I am on that app obsessively, so here it is: in the 4 watches and 4 years since I first saw the film, I’ve bumped the score up from a friendly 3 stars (watchable nonsense) to 4 1/2 stars (masterful nonsense).
Despite the fact that on this latest watch I confidently declared that I almost totally understand this movie, I find myself struggling to explain what the hell this movie is about to the uninitiated. It made sense to me in the moment. John David Washington plays a super secret spy called the Protagonist (dumb. Fun!) who is trying to stop a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh doing an accent) from destroying the world because the oligarch is in touch with the future who hate the past for causing climate change and also know how to invert people and send them backward in time (if they do this, everything they do is backwards and also fire is ice). I don’t know!!!! The Protagonist’s colleague/best friend is Robert Pattinson dressed as Christopher Nolan playing a man named Neil. They crash a plane into a building. It’s awesome.
Early in the film, Clémence Poésy delivers a bunch of exposition to the Protagonist about the nature of “inverted” objects which are traveling backward in time and various pieces of war debris that implies that in the future, World War III has occurred. Then she says, “Don’t try to understand it, feel it.”
Many, many people have pointed out that this is essentially the mission statement of the film: don’t worry about it! It is the opposite of Inception, which spends a full hour on painstaking exposition. They’re gonna be doing stuff backwards, and in the meantime a plane crashes into a building and Washington and Pattinson are going to bungee jump INTO a skyscraper. Generally speaking, I find this kind of “don’t worry, relax, have fun” attitude to be complete and utter bullshit. I am sitting here watching your movie, of course I’m gonna think about it and of course I’m going to want it to make sense! I have seen enough movies that offer both clarity and excitement to reasonably desire more! And yet…?
I am surprised to find that I’ve fallen in love with Tenet. What generally works is that where the action is unclear, the emotional motivations are relatively clear: Elizabeth Debicki as Sator’s wife wants out of the marriage and to keep her son, Sator wants total control over the world and his wife who hates him but who he still loves (in an evil way, granted), the Protagonist wants to do his job (save the world) and Neil wants to be his best friend (in fact at the end it’s revealed that they ARE best friends but the Protagonist doesn’t know that yet because they’re moving in different directions in time, Neil toward his death & the end of their time together and the Protagonist toward the start). I find this friendship incredibly moving. Neil knows his drink order before the Protagonist does! He reverse-Casablancas with “I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship!” I also think this is the only film John David Washington is good in because his weird, flat, confident, sarcastic affect is good for a blank spy with no name. Between these interpersonal elements are the action set pieces which are really, really, really cool. That opening in the opera house! The Oslo Freeport art heist! These scenes are massive and kinetic, and more than anything there is a minimalistic brazenness to Nolan’s refusal to explain himself well that I find myself entranced with. Tenet is above all, 5 action movie climaxes strung together into one bananas movie, the oddball pandemic gift that for me, keeps giving.
It was in this spirit of openness that I happened to rewatch Barbie.
I didn’t love Greta Gerwig’s Barbie when I first saw it. Turns out the Barbenheimer double bill is actually a pretty bad idea—Barbie’s frothy nonsense was ill-served coming after a screening of Oppenheimer, a great bummer of a movie that makes a ton of sense. I enjoyed the obvious affection for studio era films and the Ken dream ballet but I was also so frustrated. How could Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, who between them have written 2-5 screenplays I think are basically perfect, write a joke as dully millenial as “I’m having irrepressible thoughts of death,” why did the relationship between the dolls and humans make no sense and have no rules, how could they fail to show what compels Barbie about the real world, why is Gloria given a maddeningly generic monologue that has nothing to do with her character as far as we know because she’s barely a character, why’d they have to end with a song by queen of boring film songs, Billie Eilish3?
My resentment festered online—an Instagram account called Girlboss posted the monologue, we were supposed to believe a “girl movie” (silly, about dolls) making a billion dollars was good for feminism, the girlhood girl’s girls were out in full force extolling the virtues of Barbie, vindicated by the film’s gender essentialist take on The Godfather and empowered to post “Citizen Kane found dead.” I was mad that the movie was adding fuel to the fire of anti-intellectualism, I was mad about the line “We mothers stand still so that our daughters can look back and see how far we’ve come.” My irritation reached a fever pitch when Greta Gerwig wasn’t nominated for an Oscar and Hillary Clinton decided to pipe up and tweet this:
And then one day in February, Adam threw on the first 15 minutes of the movie and my annoyance gave way to feeling… charmed. I had forgotten in the 7 intervening months that Barbie is an exceptionally silly movie and also Greta Gerwig isn’t online. She doesn’t know about Tik Tok and the rising tide of a “girls just wanna have fun and stay home and cook” mindset and girls insisting women who like “boy things” are try-hard liars.4 She obviously loves The Godfather. Within the confines of a toy ad, she’s just having fun!
I always thought the first half hour was great—the bright but unsettling bubblegum plastic of Barbie Land, the cheery chemistry of the Barbies, everyone’s pitch perfect doll performances, the introduction of Ken and Gosling’s all-timer line readings (“Because we’re girlfren/boyfren”), the practical effects transition from Barbie Land to Los Angeles.
Originally, I’d felt that in the real world, Barbie starts to fall apart—which it sort of does! I still think Gloria and Sasha aren’t particularly well drawn, which proves to be a problem when the big monologue in act 3 rests on Gloria. Gloria is “a bit depressed” and “a mom.” What does she want? Does she like her job? Does she have any specific aspirations? What about Sasha? Why is she so angry?
But you know what the real world section does have? The cowboy fringe outfits. Ken discovering the patriarchy. Ken trying to get a job with no qualifications. Even the Mattel HQ stuff I found lackluster came into focus this time—like it is funny that when Adam from Sex Education opens the boardroom door, Will Ferrell is going “Always be empowering girls!” and later, when someone asks why it would matter if Mattel sells Kens rather than Barbies, Ferrel shouts “Shame on you executive number 2. You think I spent my entire life in boardrooms because of a bottom line? I got into this business because of little girls and their dreams!” This is a great way to get around the Mattel approval problem of it all—state something positive that is so patently absurd it becomes an obvious joke. Also I like that the office is modeled after Playtime, even though everybody is always modeling everything after Playtime.
For every semi-serious scene in the movie I think is sort of bad (bus stop, Ruth Handler, I still don’t think it makes any sense for the Barbies to be so easily turned to patriarchy because the reason women in the real world do it is because living under capitalism is really hard??), there are scenes I think are great (the giant blowout party, the Allan fight, “Push,” “I’m Just Ken”). That last hour tips a little too far into the emotionally implausible and frankly boring, but on rewatch I was pretty dazzled by the sheer silly, film loving enthusiasm that infuses this movie. The presence of The Monologue and the ending where Barbie becomes a real girl negates the idea that Gerwig isn’t trying at all to make a broader statement about womanhood. She is, and it doesn’t really work without the monologue feeling specific to Gloria’s experience of womanhood (like Jo’s speech is ultra-specific to her experience and ambitions) and without much to hinge Barbie’s love of humans on (she looks around a park for a bit?). Yet there’s a reason “I’m Just Ken” is the best scene in the movie and it’s because Gerwig’s a little more preoccupied with directing a goofy dream ballet battle scene in a colorful sound stage.
At the start of the film, like Clémence Poésy before her, Weird Barbie tells Barbie “Don’t overthink it” and at the end, when she becomes real Ruth Handler says, “Now feel.” This isn’t infallible. It’s fair to question the ill-defined characterization and anodyne female empowerment of Barbie. But I admit, returning to the movie with no great expectations, guided only by feelings, I had a real good time.
There was a year of Covid disruption. Remember when Parasite won Best Picture and it was the greatest night of my life and then a month later we were on lockdown?
Not a compliment, really. I firmly believe the Oscars should be 4 hours long and full of montages (but no BITS, I hate bits in award shows, and no original songs except the good ones. I get that you can’t really just pick the 2 actual songs that are nominated every year but also why the hell not?).
Her acceptance speech was very charming I LIKE HER but it’s a boring song!!!!!!!
Beatrice Loayza has a good piece in The Guardian about how meaningless it is to argue about the “feminism” of Barbie and Poor Things, which also feels like an article length version of the classic tweet: “Is [pop star] a feminist? Is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this tv show my friend?”