I’m showing Barbie in my class pre-break next week, and I’ve prepared a bit of a speech to frame it for my students. This is a bit far afield from my more recent concerns in this newsletter, but I figured readers might enjoy (and possibly want to engage with) the views I’m trying out.
-pb
All literary criticism, as a form of intellectual inquiry, seeks to uncover the deeper meaning of texts. We can do this in multiple ways. At the shallowest level, we can employ an ideological lens to a cultural artifact, like a novel or a film, in order to make that artifact intelligible in terms of that ideology. So, for instance, the Barbie movie can be read as a Marxist film, a neo-liberal film, a feminist film, or a film that is most intelligible under any number of ideological schemata. Through a Marxist lens, for instance, we might say that Gerwig’s negative depiction of Mattel’s corporate culture, combined with the message that economic influences shaped Barbie’s cultural impact in ways that ultimately undermined women’s ability to celebrate their differences, supports a radical critique of consumer capitalism.
Engaging in this kind of criticism is important and often illuminating. For one thing, it allows us to put these ideological schemata into conversation with one another. Just as the Marxist, the feminist, and the neo-liberal will have different ways of interpreting reality, so too will they make sense of a particular cultural artifact in different, often incompatible ways. Using a film like Barbie as a common ground, we can thus challenge the limits of these ideologies in the real world, and see which has more explanatory power. Things become complicated, however, when you consider that films themselves are created -- often though not always -- based on the screenwriter’s, director’s, and producer’s ideologies. And so those films that lend themselves best to a particular ideological analysis were often engineered in order to verify that ideology or spread it to message. On the extreme end, we find propaganda films. Here I include the output of dictator’s production operations, but also Hallmark movies, “Christian” films, Marvel movies, and -- in a slightly higher cultural register -- movies like “Fight Club” or “The Dark Knight Rises.” These films are usefully subjected to critical commentary, but are not proper objects of literary criticism in their own right, and provide very little common ground for critics with competing ideologies to converse in the space of meaning.
But the best films, like the best works of literature, or the best pieces of visual art, resist simple, ideological interpretations. In some instances, they appear sui generis: parlaying cinematic conventions and methodologies into brand new visual and phenomenological experiences. “Tree of Life” is in this boat, as is “The Florida Project.” In other instances, the films themselves comment on ideological interpretations directly, moving dialectics forward and sometimes participating in their own critical conversations.
The second level of meaning at which films and other literary objects can be interpreted is philosophical. While it is always culturally and ideologically conditioned, the aim of philosophy is to transcend ideology, and to describe reality, as it is in itself, rather than to promote or support any particular ideological agenda. Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, and David Lynch are known for making films with philosophical themes and content, and which are, themselves, often an attempt to examine the truth or breadth of some particular philosophical theory. In Fargo, for instance, we see a reflection on the limits of grace and justice in a thoroughly corrupt world filled with greed and self-aggrandizement. In Raging Bull we’re invited to see the separation of excellence from virtue in the context of human misery.
But philosophies are never absolutely successful in their attempt to present reality without interpretation, and perhaps this is necessarily true because they are themselves artifacts of human thought, and thus culture, but the fact that they aim at this lofty goal, allows us to use them to analyze and criticize interpretations of literary objects at and above the level of ideology.
Finally, films sometimes insist on transcending both of these levels of meaning, and commenting, directly on reality itself. When they do, they become works of philosophy in their own right. And they ask viewers to interpret them, not only on the basis of ideology, or of some pre-articulated philosophy, but in terms of their very own human experience and intellectual vision.
Here, in a nutshell, is the genius of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie: it plays between the first two levels of meaning — both internally as a film and in its process of creation — in order to articulate a pure intellectual question unnumbered by any of the ideological or philosophical frameworks that make it possible. It is a simple and powerful articulation or a question we are all — in our postmodern, neoliberal, anti-religious culture — asking ourselves: what was I made for? And how, given the social structures of ideology, do I live an answer to this question?
Let me start by articulating a concrete challenge that Greta Gerwig must have faced in pitching and finding the support to make this movie. How will the Mattel executive be portrayed? On the one hand, because the ideological territory that Barbie occupies in our culture is so fraught, the film had to present itself to viewers as radical along multiple dimensions. But no Mattel executive in their right mind would give a filmmaker rights to use a cultural object like Barbie in a way that would diminish its monetary and cultural value. So Gerwig casts Will Ferrell as the CEO of mattel and the chief buffoon of capitalist patriarchy; a figure so ridiculous and absurd that the cartoonish critique that results risks no damage at all to the brand or the broader cultural status of Barbie. Indeed, it allows for a corporate wink to the most potent critiques of the real damage Barbie has done socially and culturally to the women its shaped over the years. Mattle is thus able to get “in” on the critical jokes that have long been made about its earnest stance as desiring to empower women: We get it, Mattel can say, we know that we’re profiting off the whims of culture in ways that ignore those very cultural values. We’re the bad guy, but, hey, we can change and this film demonstrates our commitment to what we all ultimately care about.
Meanwhile, Rhea Perlman is cast to portray the maternal artist and creator behind an object that is ultimately meant to empower young girls, and women. In doing this Gerwig presents, the film had a basic cultural level as radical, a critique of consumer capitalism, and the ways in which greedy executives play on a cultural insecurities to make a profit from the genuine output of earnest artists and creators.
But sales of Barbie, since the release of the film, have skyrocketed, and by making the capitalist impulse behind the marketing machine that is Mattel, ridiculous and absurd, they defend any real critique that may have come through. In allowing for this caricature, the film defangs itself as a cultural criticism of the capitalist, patriarchal engine that has launched and sustained Barbie into the space of cultural archetype. If this were the only level at which the film had something to say, then, it would be a shallow, ineffective appropriation of a brand. Gerwig could be accused of the worst type of opportunism: piggybacking on an antifeminist object’s popularity and cultural supremacy in order to make a pseudofeminist film to advance her career, popularity, and the likelihood that she’ll be asked to direct the next big budget prestige film some streaming service’s studio needs to make a play for an Oscar for Best Picture.
But Gerwig’s genius is that she comments cleverly on the levels of culture and ideology -- literally providing a masterclass in contemporary feminist theory over the course of the film -- while ultimately leaving it behind. Barbie is not a feminist film. It’s not anti-capitalist. It’s not politically radical in any interesting sense apart from the winks and nods it makes to “The Discourse.”
What, then, is the Barbie actually about?
Well, on the second level, it’s an attempt to see whether existentialism is a livable philosophy.
In the deepest and most interesting philosophical scene in the film, Barbie, played by Margot Robie, confronts the idea that she has no pre-set purpose. She literally confronts her creator to ask for permission to become “one of the people who makes meaning” rather than simply a made-object for which meaning is predetermined, shallow, and unsatisfying. She’s told, by her literal creator, that she doesn’t need this permission. But that, in fully embracing that idea that her existence might precede her essence, she will experience those dangerous feelings that existentialists are always warning us about: angst, anxiety, nausea, even fear and trembling.
At this point of the film -- where Barbie and her creator occupy a warm, therapeutic void -- we experience a sudden shift. We enter Barbie’s internal states and experience her transition into genuine humanity. Gerwig uses classic filmic conventions to signal pure authenticity: shaky, homemade, found footage of people in their most private, intimate, and personal moments. All the while, Billie Eilish’s voice swells asking the film’s central question:
I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know but I'm not sure now
What I was made for
What was I made for?
Takin' a drive, I was an ideal
Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real
Just something you paid for
What was I made for?
'Cause I, I
I don't know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don't know how to feel
But someday, I might
Someday, I might
When did it end? All the enjoyment
I'm sad again, don't tell my boyfriend
It's not what he's made for
What was I made for?
'Cause I, 'cause I
I don't know how to feel
But I wanna try
I don't know how to feel
But someday I might
Someday I might
Think I forgot how to be happy
Something I'm not, but something I can be
Something I wait for
Something I'm made for
Something I'm made for
Notice, though, that there’s a central tension here. This question is not the existentialist’s question. It presupposes the very thing the existentialist rejects. For Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Arendt we’re not made for anything. That’s the point. Existence precedes essence. So Billie’s question, and by extension Gerwig’s, is a crucial misunderstanding of the transition into authentic human experience.
But there’s a good reason why Gerwig leaves existentialism behind. It’s because authenticity obliterates meaning for the existentialist. Pure freedom in defining or creating oneself makes meaning not worth wanting. Authoring oneself makes the biggest, most interesting question not, “What was I made for?” but “Why not suicide?” as Camus rightly identifies. Why live at all in a meaningless, pointless world?
So where does Gerwig leave us? What’s her answer to the question she uses Eilish to raise?
Well, it’s strangely, boldly, concretely philosophical (and thus ideological and political). The answer is to be found where Barbie finds herself in the movie’s last scene. In the place where life’s meaning is lived out in the real-world. In the gynecologist's office.
This is no mere joke in my view. It’s an acknowledgement of a deep, somewhat antiprogressive view of human nature. One on which sex, embodiment, and a strikingly essentialist and biological picture of human life suddenly appears for our consideration. While this is not antifeminist (there are strains of feminism that advocate for this view staunchly), it goes beyond the simple binaries of feminist ideology at work in the rest of the film (which are articulated, remember, in Barbieland; a world shaped by pure social and cultural ideology, the realization of social constructivism. But Gerwig’s answer takes place outside this context. In the “real world.” And suggests that Barbie’s search for an answer can only take place in this world. And that the answer will be complicated. But that biological realities are a good place to start.
Finally, in suggesting that the crucial question of human life is “What was I made for?” I suggest that Barbie’s ultimate level of commentary is spiritual. Gerwig’s best film, Lady Bird, ends in a Catholic church where she makes a call to her mother (from whom she’s been trying to separate herself throughout the entire film). The beautiful culmination of her bildungsroman takes place during the hangover where Lady Bird realizes that authenticity isn’t to be found in the shallow pseudo-intellectual enclaves of elite liberal academic drinking parties. Instead it takes place against the backdrop of a hymn sung by Notre Dame’s very own folk choir. Her ultimate longing finds its context against the backdrop of Catholicism. I believe this, too, is the journey that Barbie is about to undertake.
I believe that Barbie is, ultimately, a film about spiritual longing. Given its grounding in an existentialist quandary about the meaning of our lives, our situatedness within human nature, and the hopeful nods in some of Gerwig’s other films, I’m also going to choose to interpret it as a deeply Catholic film.
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