I am become Barbie, destroyer of worlds

by David Benjamin 

 

“I wanted to do something anarchic and wild and funny and cathartic.”

—Greta Gerwig, director, Barbie

MADISON, Wis.—You’ve probably heard the joke about Phil the promoter who barges into the office of a showbiz talent scout and says, “Sol, have I got a dynamite act for you! This girl, she’s not just gorgeous, she’s built! I mean stacked—58, 24, 36!” And Sol says, “Wow. What can she do?” To which Phil replies, “Well … with a little help, she can sit up.”

According to an expert anatomist who once researched the issue of her figure. Barbie, the doll, could have been Phil’s dynamite act. Her bust was all out of proportion with the rest of her polyethylene bod. 

Which brings me around to my big sister Peg, who was quite capable of sitting up and probably never had a Barbie. If she did, she never bonded with it or tried to protect her from me and my kid brother Bill. Peg was eleven when Mattel sold its first Barbie (based on a German doll named Lilli). At that point, Peg was resolutely outgrowing dolls and studying boys. Besides, she didn’t need a Corvette-driving blonde doll with big ta-tas to symbolize her struggle against 20th-century patriarchal oppression. Peg was liberated, independent and Ethel Merman bossy on her own steam. And, she had a BFF named Rosie who was way more interesting that Barbie.

Thanks to Peg and Rosie, my households went Barbie-free for twenty years, until my daughter Ellisa caught pink fever. 

Lately, of course, pink fever is pandemic. For reasons entirely related to the timing of its release, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie has been conflated with the dark, long and historical biopic, Oppenheimer. Suddenly, the term “Barbenheimer” has become a carbuncle on the ass of the English language. 

I feel obliged (actually, eager) to see Oppenheimer—or better yet, in a double feature with The Imitation Game. But I suspect I’ll wait on Barbie ’til it pops up in clumsily censored re-runs on the USA network. Although there are major film critics who insist that I should see Barbie right away, I’m going to buck the tide. After all—come on, Manohla!—it’s a movie about a toy. 

Yes, Hollywood makes hugely successful movies about toys—all those Transformer installments, GI Joes, Ninja Turtles and Mario Brothers (and I hear they’re working on a Hot Wheels movie)—but I’m spared, thank God, because my kids are too old for this shit. 

Yes, I understand that director Gerwig’s version of Barbie is tongue-in-cheek with a less than subtle element of women’s liberation. But I think I see what’s really going on here. In her disquisition on the philosophy of Barbie, New York Times pundit Michelle Goldberg injected the significant adjective “campy.” 

I’m old enough to remember when “camp” became a pop-culture trend. It applies to objects, styles, attitudes and personalities that carry bad taste and consumer excess over the top. “Camp” conveys an exaggerated irony that fails to be ironic because the sort of shmucks who have no grasp of irony get the joke. 

Elton John, in his rhinestone glasses and glam rock costumes made a career of camp. Andy Warhol, a pioneer in the field, was the apotheosis of camp, turning soup cans, Brillo packages and Photoplay stills into “art” and laughing all the way to the bank as millionaires waged bidding wars to own one of his silk-screen razzberries. The coneheads, on “Saturday Night Live,” were camp. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers went for camp but they were too subtle. 

In the end, camp was just kitsch without the Yiddish. 

The creators of the Barbie film are doing camp, apparently with great skill. They know it and they’re having fun (all the way to the bank). Weirdly enough, they’ve caught in their web of flagrant irony a passel of politicians who lack senses of both humor and proportion. Goldberg cites a right-winger named Ben Shapiro (with that name, he should know his Yiddish) who set two Barbies on fire on the air. Congressman Matt Gaetz somehow perceived, in Gerwig’s script, intimations of terrorism. Senator Ted Cruz accused Barbie star Margot Robbie of “kissing up to the Chinese Communist Party.” And Sen. Raphael Warnock, one of the movie’s fans, said something indecipherable about Ken (Barbie’s consort, if you did not know) “pushing to end maternal mortality.”

But, as long as we’re talking proportion, a fundamental point seems to have eluded the serious reviewers and the dead-earnest Congressfolk viewing Barbie either with alarm or feminist glee.

Look, guys. Please! Everything in the movie is painted pink. This is a clue. Barbie—notwithstanding Greta Gerwig’s obvious skill and wicked sense of humor—is a summer movie. Summer, in La La Land, is the silly season.

Think Beach Party and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Think Will Smith in Independence Day, slugging the alien and saying, “Welcome to Earth.” Think Jaws, Star Wars, Grease, Ghost, E.T. Top Gun, Shrek, Toy Story, various Terminators and Aliens, Harry Potter, Iron Man, Batman and Indiana Jones.

I do not recall any previous politicians commenting on any of the above flicks, or any summer movie of any vintage. Of course, politics does appear, sort of, in many of these films, although cartoonishly depicted in characters like the major of Amity Island or an idiot vice-president, in The Day After Tomorrow, who spends the whole movie denying climate change, until … well, you know how it went.

There have also been hints of feminist activism in summer movies. In all those Beach Party flicks, for example, Annette has Frankie totally whipped. Princess Leia pushes around Han Solo the way Peg used to browbeat Bill and me. And Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2? Whoa, watch out, Greta! If Sarah Connor showed up in this summer’s blockbuster, she’d kick Barbie’s ass and eat Ken for lunch with fava beans and a nice Chianti.  

So, yes, there are political and polemical undertones in Barbie, as there have been in all its hot-weather forebears. But these are insinuations, one-liners and throwaways. They’re punchlines, noticeable if they’re clever enough, but not arguable—because arguing about the racial and phallic iconography of Barbie’s pink convertible would be—should be—embarrassing. Barbie, bless its greedy heart, is a summer movie. It’s fluff. It’s nudge-nudge wink-wink, its’s campy, “anarchic, wild and funny.” 

Ted Cruz, pay attention: It’s all pink f’Chrissake!

Which is why I’m hesitant to follow the dating crowd to the metroplex. 

However, some summer night in a few years, maybe with my daughter, I’ll give in and go see Barbie, ideally in a triple bill with Godzilla vs. Mothra and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, at the Big Sky Drive-In.