This Barbie Is Disappointed!

🎀 magic & myth in GRETALAND 🎀 Sure, she sold out, SO WHAT?

A FASHION WAR FOR THE AGES; Adrian’s Letty Lynton dress vs. the hideous Barbie garment I must’ve sold 250 pieces of in the last month

IN A THROWBACK TO THE 1932 FEMALE MOVIE-GOER ransacking her nearest Cinema Shop after a night out at the theatre marveling at Joan Crawford’s ruffled frock in Letty Lynton (the obscure MGM swoonspectacle that sparked *the* dress craze of the decade, presumably selling over 500,000 replicas) I recently saw hundreds of Peruvian screen shoppers similarly lose their heads to the same HIDEOUS Barbie dress while managing orders at my ex girlfriend’s fashion store (which she named after Madonna’s The Virgin Tour — I swear I’m not making this up!¹). Can this theatricality & tackiness by avid women audiences remain in vogue for years to come, PLEASE? Though soon to disappear, this revival of emulating staggering Hollywood styles has been rejuvenating me FR even if *my* personal outfit failed to live up to the occasion…

As all I did was dye my hair pink!

JK it did not fail at all. I defy Gilbert Adrian to rise from the dead & sew me a gown that will make me feel more chic than this two-piece 1930s dress my friend Zynab gifted to me when I was nineteen. This was my first time wearing the skirt in public :-)) 🎀🪄

(minor spoilers ahead)

High-camp hoopla & fashion fads that kept me AGOG for months aside, I am disheartened to report that Barbie did *not* really linger on me, & that I have forgotten most of it by now; for all the kooky props aping The Ladies Man (1961), high-flown tidbits of girliepop (luv Charli XCX’s song!!!) AND the poignant —but scattered, and regrettably scarce— denouncements of how the ramifications of pornography plague & torment The Womanhood Experience™, I exited the movie theatre with a cloud of disillusionment hovering above me. To be fair I *was* delusional enough to pin all of my hopes up on Ms. Gerwig to deliver *the* provocative feminist think piece of the decade via a freaking live-action opus about a toy, but with such a fabulous marketing campaign & the (non-Mattel) people involved, can you really blame a gal for harboring dreams of ✨ misandrist ✨ grandeur? What I could *never* anticipate and REFUSE to overlook, however, was that a story launched with 2001-A-Space-Oddyssey-levels of tour de force and an imperial Margot Robbie in a bathing suit would climax with a mishmash-montage of tearjerking nonsense accompanied by —of all musical arrangements— an insipid, bland and generic song by Billie Eilish (sorry but I hate her and her voice 🤍).

ALL HAIL MARGOT ROBBIE THE NEW QUEEN OF POP

How Barbie went so downhill after its first 25 minutes or so has genuinely dispirited me. While during the prologue & opening credits sequence I had sat *awestruck* at Ms. Gerwig’s madcap confections of sugary splendor (my older sister nearly shed a tear at the sight of the pastel pink ambulance maneuvered by Hari Nef), I ultimately could not look past the unabashedly unimaginative use of tropes (e.g. the estranged mother-daughter dynamic), the scrambled script’s lumpiness & unevenness (e.g. the shuffling between wacky comedy & “self-reflective” woman’s picture with as much depth as a TikTok video) and the failure to sustain prolonged emotional connection between image and spectator.

Let it be known, though, that my main issue with the film weirdly does not lie in the half-baked feminist politics alone that many a letterboxd critic has (rightfully, for once!) condemned as small-minded & sloganeering — I agree that, while on the whole, they are nothing but fluff and even uphold traditional beauty standards without batting an eyelash (e.g. the looking down upon cellulite played for laughs), some of Barbie’s boldest anti-patriarchal statements *do* linger, or at least one sordid scene in particular did for me (spoiler! That of the brainwashed dolls handing off ice-cold beers while in skimpy, tight-fitting outfits; I would not have been surprised if one of them had mentioned she was wearing the infamous “blowjob-proof” lipstick, too). What mostly upset me, instead, was the inane creative choice to allow the zany, cartoony antics of Barbie Land to leak into the grim “real world” thereby nullifying ALL of the accomplished bits in the script that REALISTICALLY portrayed how dehumanizing objectification can feel (e.g. Barbie’s horrid first exposure to sexual harassment. Though startlingly dark for a mainstream release, the whole matter got neutralized by the band of one-dimensional pinheaded Mattel executives who contributed NOTHING to the movie besides cavorting around in lackluster action sequences & glossing over the few interesting ideas in the material).

Barbie worked at its best when bordering on the stagy female suffering melodramas of the pre-code era, á la The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)

Forever 21 pro-women politics aside, I cannot downplay how gleeful I have felt while witnessing flocks of women spectators prove that PINK IS THE SUPERIOR COLOUR and that, well, movie-going magic is *still* very much alive. With my penchant for overproduced women’s spectacle, the whole Barbie ballyhoo has legitimately restored my spirit *and* even given me hope for the Liz-Taylor-school-of-mythical-movie-stardom to make a comeback (as seen in Margot Robbie’s viral red carpet looks). As long as Barbie paves the way for more Technicolor-era craftmanship & hand-painted sets, I am very much OK with what the film has accomplished even if I *do* reserve the right to resent that I had envisioned a Breillat-level of feminist transgression but was met, instead, with the sleek triviality of a Sex And The City episode.

I just feel soooo silly for having gotten my hopes up. I hated Lady Bird (2017) when it came out but then Little Women (2019) blew me AWAY so I did not put it past Gerwig’s magnum opus to strike a chord with me. Previous to my Barbie screening I had even gone out of my way to unbury a quote by the legendary Dennis Hopper wherein he virtually defended his right to sell out; I was committed to advocating for Gerwig through thick and thin, all right, and even in my current disillusionment I maintain that a lot of the discourse against her making a $145m budget movie is just rooted in misogyny. As a director whose raison d'être is literally to direct, she owes fuckall to the indie scene from which she emerged, in my opinion, but then again, Dennis said it best…

Q: “Why did you make a movie for $370,000? Why didn’t you make a 16mm or 8mm movie and give that money to the Cause? Why are you copping out, putting commercial music to this movie? Blah-blah.”

A: “You're only kidding yourself. If you make a propaganda film, art film, any film you feel has something to say - you can work small and show it to people who think like you already, dress like you, wear their hair like you, and you can all sit in a little room somewhere and look at your movie over and over. Great. But if you want to reach a large mass of people at this point in history, you have to deal with the people who are going to release your picture. Hey, all I know is how to make movies! I don’t know anything else. It took me fifteen years to raise $370,000. I’m not going to give it to the cause — I AM the cause!”

-Dennis Hopper in response to what he called “a young communist” (lol) at the Cannes press conference for Easy Rider, 1969. Funnily enough, nor Easy Rider nor Barbie had THAT much to say at the end of the day tbh!!!

1. A few months ago I acquired this custom-made hot pink sweatshirt embroidered with “The Virgin Tour 1985” which mirrored Madonna’s OG concert merch to a near-perfect degree. While sat at a bench next to my ex girlfriend who then had dreams of opening a fashion shop, she broke our silence at sudden by boldly asking: “what if I name it Tienda Virgen?!” (tienda = Spanish for store]. And that is how history was made! Just for the record I no longer work with her though LOL