Can You Feel the Kenergy?
Celebrating mediocrity for political reasons may be going slightly out of fashion.
I am neither a Barbie truther nor a Barbie hater. Back when the movie came out, I saw it neither as a sinister woke manifesto nor as a masterwork of crypto-conservative subversion, for the simple reason that I just thought it was kind of a mess.
I enjoyed myself; I laughed; there were even some genuinely touching moments. The scene where Barbie is hurt to learn that her 1960s brand of empowerment has long passed its best-by date was poignant in a very telling way. But there’s really no philosophical or cultural outlook to speak of or critique in the movie. Writer/director Grega Gerwig isn’t disciplined enough to put one forward.
The America Ferrera monologue that we’re all supposed to soyface over in the third act is really just a dog’s breakfast of #metoo lean-in platitudes, expressive of an attitude which is itself fast curdling into cringe. The trouble with mining cultural capital from the inadequacies of five minutes ago is what happens five minutes later. Sooner or later, the youthful side-eye comes for us all.
And anyway Gerwig can’t decide which wave of feminist she is—whether she wants Barbie to embrace her cuddly and domestic side, or become the CEO of Mattel, or shut it down altogether in a radical gesture of anti-capitalist solidarity. Basically it’s whatever seems funniest in a given scene. Trying to elicit a coherent thought pattern from this screenplay is like trying to spot faces in the clouds. You’re always going to be picking out the details that fit your picture.
But one absolute and unambiguous truth, about which anyone who’s being halfway honest can agree, is that Ryan Gosling absolutely crushes it. He is Ken. He steals scenes he’s not even in. Which is why I find it totally justified—and yes, a little amusing—that he got nominated for the Best Actor award while Gerwig was passed over as director.
This is supposed to be a grave injustice for women, who (I learn from the trade papers) need to feel validated by the Oscars because reasons. I’m sure the Oscar Committee would like to think that’s true. In reality I don’t think most women, or most people, look to awards shows for their primary source of self-worth. The sense of desperation that this elicits in tastemakers may be a clue to what’s really going on with the nominations this year.
What I suspect we have here is an epic clash between two august and powerful forms of snobbery. On the one hand, the sorts of people who run the Oscars want very much to be seen as Serious Critics with Big Thoughts. But since they would not recognize an actual insight if it slapped Chris Rock in the face, they mimic real erudition by overlooking tentpole blockbusters in favor of smaller, artsier, movies. Barbie—a summer hit about a doll that comes to life—is exactly the sort of thing they love to pass over en route to other more important aims, like being as pretentious as possible.
On the other hand, PR fiascos like #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite have made it trendy to accuse voters of racial bias and Hollywood executives of oily creepery. For a while this contributed to the general conviction among self-styled sophisticates that no one who is anyone can afford to overlook the contributions of womxn and other marginalized folx. They even made rules about it. According to this particular fashion trend, who could possibly snub Barbie—an industry-saving financial triumph laced with (again, very confused) feminist sentiment?
I imagine the voters spasming in tortured indecision as two contradictory forms of pompous nonsense waged war within them for and against one movie. And it’s interesting that the older form—the contempt for pop art—seems to have won out. I wonder whether this is an indicator that the more recent affectation—the taste for elaborate and self-abasing gestures of demographic piety—has already started to become outré.
“Elevating the voices” of various underrepresented groups has been screamingly and ubiquitously fashionable in recent years. Maybe the edgy thing to do is now to block all that out and just nominate the guy who obviously deserves it. Could it be that inflating the merits of mediocre pablum for political reasons is now in itself a little last-year? One can certainly hope so, and it would be reason enough—as if we needed one—to feel the Kenergy.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:
I may be trying too hard to impose order on philosophical incoherence, but I did see find a message. It is: be a mom! The 2001 A Space Odyssey takeoff at the beginning had all the little girls ominously smashing their baby dolls, driven to metaphorical infanticide by the possibility of, well, looking like Margo Robbie in a swimsuit. But then Stereotypical Barbie cycles through the dawning awareness of death and the meaninglessness of her plastic, consumerist existence, encounters the "patriarchy", and watches it infect Barbie-land only, to be mitigated by the power of maternal love in the form of America Ferrara, whose only motivation is a better relationship with her daughter. The final montage is mostly children, begin loved by their parents. That is everything. The last scene is a visit to a gynecologist -- usually the first thing a woman who is ready to get pregnant does.
Well said! We can always count on you to elucidate our jumbled thoughts in a way that not only makes sense, but also sounds erudite and comprehensible. Thank you.
Grace and peace, Jane