Tipping point?

I saw the Barbie movie with my 13-year old niece. The hype, the build up, and general excitement were palpable inside the large sold-out Dolby theater. We even attended a pre-release event the week before, replete with pink play pools, sparkly palm trees, and full size Mattel doll boxes. It was clear this has the making of a singular cultural event beyond the usual average summer blockbuster fare, though that remains to be seen.

I went in with little expectations, hoping it would be good silly fun, hoping the filmmakers would spare me something singularly bad and awful, something that would leave me a few brain cells shorter, scattered inside my half-eaten overpriced tub of burned popcorn kernels. I don’t know what I expected, really. Never in a million years, did I expect what I got. I left the theater fully engulfed in a feeling I can only describe as disquietude.

“Did you like it?” My niece’s sincere question felt more like a taunt. Like, not like, seemed to me beside the point. I was at a loss of words. “I, uh, need to process it.” I literally said process. Well, so what? I was only being honest with my feelings as the film encouraged. I was, still am, baffled by such a strange, funny, flawed, exquisite, infuriating film, so much so, I forgot to ask my niece if she liked it, which she later confirmed all on her own.

“We should buy the doll.” Ugh. I pinched my eyes. Will we ever break free of this endemic consumerism, the beating financial heart of the film? Irony, irony, irony. I declined by silence. This too we shall pass over, like the pink advertisement for an exclusive $64.99 tub of Barbie popcorn inside a cheap plastic toy pink car that excites and repels simultaneously.

Bad manners aside, I really need to process the film, part of what I am attempting to do here, untangling the various roots to find the right words, my words, my own voice. Still, I suspect the whole endeavor is superfluous, that the real source of my existential unease is the simple fact that the movie was speaking to my niece alone and others like her and not to me. I was not the target demographic. Culture, old man, has left you behind.

Apparently, Barbie is a problem for millions of people. So much so, the film dedicated itself full time to addressing the elephant in the room, throwing down the gauntlet: Go meta or go home!

The Barbie Problem. I could have said a problem for millions of young girls, and perhaps women in general, but that seems far too narrow in scope. Beauty and gender roles are only one aspect of the Barbie Problem. The film was much more ambitious, touching on themes of toxic masculinity, death, war, political order, human value, etc., perhaps too ambitious for its limited subject matter. Nor can I plead ignorance in this regard. Sure, I never played with dolls or action figures but still, I should have had an inkling of the awesome representational power of a Barbie doll.

The Barbie Problem. At a certain point, you have to stop pretending, stop playing with dolls, and grow-up. The film inverts this, to great comedic effect. Barbie literally sheds her doll skin in order to become real. The film invites you to make this journey along with her. The Barbie Problem is now my problem. Something without resolution but ever hopeful, we push on. In any event, the Barbie Problem is too great to tackle in one sitting or even a lifetime. For now, I will be content to chip away at it by making a few observational remarks.

1) As we move to CGI worlds, please do not lose sight of the requirement of basic metaphysics. Show me the craziest world, but at least let me understand the rules by which it operates. If anything goes, then no one will make an emotional investment in your characters’ disintegrating moments of self-realization and growth. What is Ken’s raison d’être? Without Barbie, Ken is nothing. Barbie has the inspired creation to become something else. But that is not Ken’s fate. Ken has no future apart from Barbie. Go and be Ken is cold comfort. He can’t. It’s like asking a man without legs to go walk alone. Try as I might, I can’t imagine or even care what happens to Ken in a few years. Does anything ever really happen to Ken? That’s not a good sign. That can’t be a good sign. The eternal lives (on and off-screen) of characters matter. Ken slinking into the crowd waving goodbye. Was this poignant? Tragic? I didn’t care and I felt bad that I didn’t care. Show me at least the spark, the hint of a Ken without Barbie. The film folded the question by turning it into another product line joke. Here. Take my fur coat! Ken doesn’t need it, but Ken will love it!

2) When characters are held together in a tenuous, superficial way, and then suddenly torn apart, nothing can put them back together. Barbieland was headed for extinction, incapable of self-governance or a faith in the social contract. Why does Barbieland exist? Who does it serve? God (Mattel), or the collective fantasy of young girls? Barbies, be nicer to the unrequited, unloved Kens of the world we are told at a moment desperate to restore the semblance of teleonomy, but why? Men are the decoration. Here, women rule. When the real world is hopeless, shouldn’t we retreat further into Barbieland? Those who stay behind, are they the winners? The losers? The survivors of our collective shipwreck? Are they self-deluded? Did the de-programming lead only to a political restoration of the matriarchal Ancien Régime not an entirely new edification? These are questions raised precisely because the intersection between reality and fantasy bring about this existential rupture. Yet the film invests scant thought or time explaining it, focusing on the historical product lines of the Mattel Universe instead. Maybe others felt it was a trip down memory lane. I had an unsettling feeling Barbieland was nothing more than a beautiful garbage dump.

3) Irony is a poor man’s wit. Too often, when the whole crazy world was in danger of collapsing in on itself, threatening to become a gravitational black hole, the filmmakers resorted to a tiresome, self-referential pose. See, we are in on the joke too. Did no one find it jarring when the narrator undercut the central character’s epiphany by reminding us that Barbie was played by the actress Margot Robbie? Was is so afraid to take itself seriously at this important moment? What is lacking is the kind of artist’s love for their characters. A child can take and smash their dolls apart, not the filmmakers. What’s missing is the kind of awe, reverence, respect, and love that prevents an artist from turning against their characters lives (no matter how tragic, silly, or despicable those lives might be). I kept asking, am still asking, where is the humanism in this? It’s the difference between character development and caricature. It’s the worst form of caricature, an elevated animus to serve as a forceful critique of society, a militant objectification of the inauthentic experience of this fantastical world (and by extension our own world). Take the deprogramming speech. Such a powerful weapon should be wielded with delicate precision, not used as a bludgeon to be clearly aimed and pointed directly at the audience to beat them over the head. The characters got out of the way (literally worked into siloed corners) slipped out of the scene entirely though their bodies were forced to be present. It felt as awkward as the acting.

4. Never, under any circumstances, adjust your art in order to preemptively address or cut off potential critical lines of attack. Art is not critical/literary analysis. Blend the two and the art suffers. The corollary statement is “trust your audience.”

Tracing the connections people draw in their own thought is often revealing especially when one finds the contours of another person’s mind baffling. It is illuminating to watch someone like Ben Shapiro, for example, come up with a reasoned defense for saving Baby Hitler (as if this is a thought experiment in need of substantive analysis) in the fear that this could become a back door approval for some form of abortion on demand. In his mind, he drew a straight unencumbered Euclidean line from Save Baby Hitler to a pro-life position. In my mind, the line wrapped itself around an 11-dimensional labyrinth of pitfalls and snares willfully ignored and traversed with quixotic self-assurance that I almost admire his clumsy attempt, an example of the kind of high genius that emerges from time to time in the savant syndrome of our political discourse. Perhaps there is a deeper connection that I and others have missed. If so, God bless Ben Shapiro for making us see the world in a new light.

But, and yes there is always a but, to repolarize the abortion debate: so what? I doubt either side (pro-life or pro-choice) agonizes much over the absurd, hypothetical plot against the infant Hitler. The simple fact is, and this has been lost in the post-Roe world: there is no nuanced debate. There is only a single proposition: Do governments have a right to substitute their judgment for the judgment of a patient in consultation with their chosen medical professional? And the answer is clear: no. Never. Not even when a judge rules that a feeding tube can be removed from a patient are we under any pretense that the government is substituting it’s judgment on behalf of the patient. Rather, a judge attempts to determine, in the best way possible and under sometimes difficult limited information, what the patient would have preferred if they could provide their consent.

None of this rules out the ordinary regulatory function of government (a power which incidentally conservatives are attempting to dismantle root and branch). Governments have a right to regulate the form under which medical practice occurs related to the interest of safety, efficacy, standards of practice, etc., grouped under the rubric of protecting the public welfare. But pro-life proponents are arguing something else entirely, a bizarre hitherto unimaginable application of policing power to intercede between a mother and her unborn child, something which nature mocks and the laws of bodily autonomy reject. Who speaks on behalf of the unborn child? The mother. Full stop. There is no intervening authority. If the power to intervene be granted, it can certainly be applied, disgustingly, in reverse. We can imagine some future world where a woman is forced to have an abortion against her will. The power is what matters. Whether you agree with the actual decision is immaterial.

The position I just laid out is often labeled as extreme. Careful consideration would show there is nothing extreme asserted here at all. Pregnancy is entirely, singularly, by necessity, a medical issue. Centrists like to add strange ideas like viability (yes, I who supported the stare decisis of Roe, believe it was wrongly decided by introducing such superfluous ideas into a straightforward idea). Democrat Amy Klobuchar, apparently in a nod to flexing her centrists chops for a potential future Presidential run, assumes that government intervention is not necessarily gratuitous. “I support allowing for limitations in the third trimester that do not interfere with the life or health of the women.” Seems reasonable at first blush. So what’s the rub? The rub is pregnancy ALWAYS involves the life and health of a woman. There is no reasonable way in which to avoid that. Moreover, that determination is a MEDICAL JUDGMENT. Broadly defined, for medical judgments often involve complex agonizing moral and ethical decisions. The government is ill equipped and frankly incapable and incompetent to make those determinations. Could you imagine a woman unable to receive emergency care for an ectopic pregnancy while we wait around for bureaucrats to decide…oh, that’s right. We don’t have to imagine. We have plenty of examples of that happening already.

Writing advice is often bad, and from other writers, probably worthless. The most commonplace tropes such as “avoid adverbs” are inane, akin to telling a painter that they can use only a limited color palette. What’s wrong with this? Eh. Too much purple.

Still there is a value to be gleaned from advice. As authors we seek, not advice, but valid criticism. It is not the suggested improvements themselves, but the locus of the criticism, the point where it is aimed, that is often spot on. Well, something in that passage isn’t working, regardless of their well-intended but misguided attempt to solve the problem for us. And not because another writer isn’t talented enough to solve the problem, but because they stand too distant from it, haven’t immersed themselves inside the architecture to give it the proper treatment needed. Sometimes the answer really is a purple adverb. But only the author can judge.

And it’s hard to discern. Because judging isn’t reserved for the author alone. We may have crafted a singular piece of beauty, fashioned through hard work, trial and error, a complete world, an architecture that holds together remarkably well no matter how we spin it, only to discover when we show our new world to others, the audience can’t see it and judges it unremarkable. Well, is that true? Are they unable to see it because we authors failed to put what is inside our heads down on paper with enough sufficient detail or care for our craft? Or have we set the challenge bar too high, forcing a new perspective on an audience lacking the sophistication to see it?

The later brings about charges of snobbery, arrogance, martyrdom, the myth of the lonely tortured genius. Yet it does not necessarily come from a place of egoism or defensiveness. There are plenty of examples in history: Kafka, Thomas Hardy, etc. where the writer is indeed ahead of the times. The critics caught up, eventually. But that’s no solace for the author. Above all, we cannot rest content on that assumption. So we take the criticism to heart, not the exact form, but the locus, and set ourselves back to work, reworking, rewriting. So long as we never concede to abandon the work, there is no failure.

This is the inherent danger of too much criticism, one that denies the viability of most artistic endeavors. There are, after all, deep-rooted differences in the way critics and authors treat the value and purpose of writing. A deep cavernous prose may come across as stuffy and pompous if the underlying ideas are superficial and shallow. Sometimes it is better to go with “a dark and stormy night” as opposed to “a dwindling luminesce punctuated by brief flashes of electrostatic discharge.” Whereas I am unbothered by the author’s choice, the critic is apoplectic.

Early on and rather quickly, a subjective value judgment forms, perhaps no more than three pages in before a reader decides to press on or abandon reading entirely. There is a pain/pleasure calculus and our pain calculus has soared in the era of mindless distractions, streaming, social media. That’s not a lot of time to set the hook or the snare. But if we succeed, a pact is made. Ok, I like this, and want to see where we are heading. I’ll even, like any good friend, ignore some of your faults and warts because I like you book and will give you every opportunity to succeed in pleasing me. If we speak in the language of economics, this value judgment comes down to opportunity cost. For most critics, the opportunity cost is set very low, a couple of hours or perhaps a few days at most. The author’s opportunity cost, by contrast, is incalculable. The loss includes months, years, perhaps a lifetime of leisure, love, enjoyment, passion, travel, etc. all these sacrificed in the pain of writing, on the altar of the muse.

This is what we must guard against, that single painful disappointment whenever our art reaches the critical mass light. We must not fool ourselves in assuming this debt can be repaid. Our opportunity cost can never be recovered. It is irretrievably lost. The praise we receive from an audience, a million times over, can never fill that void inside us. It is madness to try. And so we must steel ourselves, honor the muse, she is the one and the only one we need to impress. And impressed she will be, so long as we serve her willingly, to live the creative life fully and not to see the void within us as a vacuum, but for what it truly is, a sprawling bubbling cauldron of infinite possibilities.