Culture

Everyone needs to calm down about Barbie. Including me

Donald Clarke: The frenzy of online irony is woven in with reasonable expectations the film could turn out to be a classic

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in a still from teh Barbire Trailer. Photograph: Warner Bros

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Donald Clarke
Sat Apr 15 2023 - 05:00

Now follows the most controversial plea in today’s newspaper. Everyone needs to calm down about Barbie!

This is a dangerous thing to say. Men have a terrible habit of undervaluing pop culture created by and for women. Greta Gerwig, director of the upcoming doll-related comedy, has been as much a victim of this prejudice as anyone. In 2018, the Guardian allowed comments beneath all the articles on their “Oscar hustings” articles bar the one arguing on behalf of Gerwig’s Lady Bird. I can’t say for certain why the readers weren’t invited to vent on that film, but I have a pretty good idea. There is only so much misogyny a busy moderator can handle.

This writer bows to nobody in his devotion to Gerwig’s work. I included Lady Bird among my 10 favourite films of all time for the recent poll at Sight and Sound magazine. I am greatly looking forward to the release of Barbie on July 21st. Listen to my pathetic pleading. I am not some Victorian cad shaking a supposedly hysterical lady in a railway carriage and demanding that she pull herself together. It’s just I am not sure any film can sustain this degree of pre-release excitement. Barbieism is in danger of becoming a religion.

Little of which seemed likely when Gerwig’s participation as director was confirmed in 2021. It would be wrong to say nobody got it. But there was a worry that the filmmaker, Oscar nominated for both Lady Bird and Little Women, had allowed herself to be kidnapped by Big Toy. Were we looking at a film in the same genre as Bratz: The Movie or The Garbage Pail Kids Movie? Well, yes. Then again, The Wizard of Oz is, by this measure, in the same genre as Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. Both Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her romantic partner and co-writer on Barbie, have maintained integrity throughout their careers. Margot Robbie sounded like strong casting for Barbie. Ryan Gosling was not an obvious choice for Ken, her equally rigid boyfriend, but that only made the film seem more interesting. Most intelligent folk were at least giving it a chance.

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Last September, Robbie expressed concern about leaked photographs from the set. “I can’t tell you how mortified we were, by the way,” she told Jimmy Fallon. “We look like we’re like laughing and having fun, but dying on the inside. Dying! I was like, this is the most humiliating moment of my life.” She really needn’t have worried. The beachside shots of Gosling and Robbie in highlighter shades of sportswear – pink shorts and yellow skates – caused a meltdown on social media. Those stills were credited with fuelling the fashion trend already dubbed “Barbiecore”. As long ago as last August Vogue told us “the filming of Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film has made Barbiecore – which mostly translates into skimpy looks in bright pink – the trend of this summer”. The cult surged. It didn’t take long to become something closer to an orthodoxy. When before has fashion jumped towards a film so long before release? Calm down, everyone!

We can’t know to what extent Barbie, a Warner Bros film, was on Universal’s mind when the studio elected to release Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the same day, but the apparent clash of aesthetics is doing neither title any harm in the pre-release bazaar. No doubt Nolan and Gerwig, both reasonable folk, would quite properly object to the insulting notion that one is a “boy’s film” and the other is a “girl’s film”. They may, however, profit from the comic juxtapositions clogging up the Twitterverse. One stars Cillian Murphy as the father of the atomic bomb. The other features Margot Robbie as a PVC fashion doll. It feels as if all cinema falls within that spectrum. The meme machine is still in overdrive.

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More casting news fuelled the enthusiasm. Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Dua Lipa and Nicola Coughlan (perhaps raised with the more wholesome Sindy) are among those playing variations on Mattel’s creation. Helen Mirren is the narrator. A trailer riffing on the opening section of 2001: A Space Odyssey landed to applause. A later promo featuring actual footage from the film lived up to feverish expectations.

Few films have ever generated this degree of social-media buzz. Every day brings a new rush of amusingly manipulated posters on Twitter. The worry is that, unlike the fuss around, say, Cocaine Bear, all that digital irony is woven in with reasonable expectations the film really could turn out to be a classic. The talent has form. The potential for Day-Glo satire is abundant. Now I’m getting over-excited. Remember the poster for horror classic Last House on the Left? “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie ... Only a movie.’”

Sound advice.

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