My comrades, my friends in arms, my people on the Internet: Oh, lo these many years we fought tooth and nail to avoid this very fate and still, with much trembling, we arrive at another trying time for women. I refer, of course, to the painful blow which was legendary Survivor winner and new gay Parvati Shallow doing hot-on-hot crime in killing Love Island’s Ekin-Su off of season 2 of TRAITORS last week! Also the many dozens or millions of fantastically demented posts made this week about the film Barbie.
Barbie, which you surely saw over the summer–possibly (I did this) as a Barbenheimer double feature more enjoyable in concept than reality but still kind of an amusing thing to do, hopefully after taking a small edible so that the fireside “Push” by Matchbox Twenty sing-along really hit– is a pretty funny movie with gorgeous sets and costumes which uses paper-thin progressive politics as scaffolding for a not particularly coherent story. It ranks a distant third place among Greta Gerwig’s three solo-directed features and yet–because it made a lot of money, because of the strange narrative which developed wherein any criticisms of the Barbie movie were criticisms, actually, of Women (adult girls) as a monolith (always), because Gerwig in her relatively young career already is a name that Academy voters recognize and confer a certain amount of intellectual or perhaps safely, lowercase f “feminist” (you see, she is a woman) prestige onto–it, too, was nominated for Best Picture, along with seven other awards, at the upcoming 96th Academy Awards.
By my math, this amounts to quite a coup for a comedy about a doll that was released half a year ago, but the immediate uproar over the Academy’s failure to grant Greta a nod in the much more competitive Best Director category, nor one for Margot Robbie’s Barbie (dare I say, the titular role) in Best Actress, reveals a very different and depressing perspective held in certain circles.
Here’s where I say that I liked Barbie fine. Being about a doll, it has nothing to do with my life or the lives of human women at all but why would it? To me, that America Ferrera speech is stupid but who cares? The colors are lovely. Margot Robbie is always great, and she was heartbreakingly beautiful as a doll learning about death, but I didn’t even know that anybody was expecting her to be nominated until they were mad that she was not. Happily, the lead actress field was particularly strong this year and not everyone can get in. Natalie Portman’s frankly career-best sicko mode turn in May December also went unacknowledged, along with a near-total rejection of the film as a whole (thank u to the writers for at least getting it!), but you don’t see me proclaiming that the Academy’s failure to appreciate the queer sensibility of a Todd Haynes film is equivalent to systemic discrimination. (Well……I mean. Maybe I will do that at parties, but just for fun.) Robbie is a known Academy quantity with multiple nominations to her name, including as a producer for Barbie this year. She has not been punished for being too pretty, or feminine, or pink. She was pushed out by performances that voters responded to more powerfully and that’s okay.
As to Greta–whom I have been riding with since high school, okay. I know these dilettantes haven’t even seen Hannah Takes the Stairs–well, if ever there was a time to speak out bravely on behalf of this rich and famous, Barnard-educated white woman it was when they gave the Best Adapted Screenplay honor that she was up for for her inventive and moving 2019 Little Women adaptation to Rita Ora’s husband and his insipid nazi comedy. You (“you” not you) guys missed the boat!! Greta Gerwig is the first filmmaker in history to have her first three solo features all nominated for Best Picture! Ever! In history!!!!!! She is fine. Other directors did work that was more impressive to the voting body this year. It’s not a big deal. Also she is so good in 20th Century Women. Just something I need to have said here due to my nature.
Should she have received a nomination purely because hers was the highest grossing film of the year? Just last year, Top Gun and Avatar sequels both shot past a billion in ticket sales and got into Best Picture. Neither Joseph Kosinski nor James Cameron made the Best Director cut. A person who would argue that art awards should be given out based on cash earned is someone with whom I have little common ground, but even if that were your position, history shows that the Academy’s aversion to giving up the more limited Best Director real estate to box office favs cannot be so simplistically tied to gender.
Still, is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences against girls?? Well, girls are children. The conversation at hand is about women and it would do us all a lot of good to proceed with that in mind. And, yeah, sure. If an institution can have A Woman Problem it is reasonable to expect that it does. Sexism leeches into all venues but naming it as the sole cause whenever an already powerful woman experiences a perceived setback feels so lazy as to become dangerous. Simply put, it is not the Margot Robbies of the world that the patriarchy most vociferously crushes, kills. But it is hard to argue against a position ardently, personally held, and the flavorsome idea that the true aim of misogyny is a war on “girliness” has amassed real devotion.
Something shifted in the last ten years or so. I watched it happen. On Tumblr in 2013 (unavoidably, a great many of my pop culture reflections begin with “on Tumblr in 2013”) the thought that the passions and interests of young girls and women are considered frivolous out of hand, and that they should not be, must not be, was percolating–of course, not for the first time. But powerfully! And in tandem with the poptimist wave. From there on this runaway train, we have arrived at a place where any criticism of something deemed “girly” –be it music, movies, Stanley thermoses– is immediately discounted as a bad faith reading rooted in sexism, even (especially!) if it is a woman making the critique. The overcorrection is so intense that yesterday I saw a woman I took multiple undergrad gender studies classes with post re Barbie, that “they” don’t allow women to be feminine. Wow, you’re so right! Rather than allow, actually, they demand it. Like, what are we talking about. Barbie was particularly meaningful to many women and that’s great. Nominating or not nominating it for one award or the other should not, to reasonable people, amount to an attack on that meaning.
As it happens, it was in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things—aka Barbie for girls who required mental health hospitalization in college, a stupid and gorgeous film that collapses under the weight of moderate introspection but absolutely rips—that I found a vision of what it is like to be a woman in the world which aligns closely with how I feel. As newborn adult, Emma Stone’s horny whirling dervish Bella Baxter discovers the fact of herself as a thinking and feeling person in the world first, and while journeying into her own depths is confronted with the strictures of gender roles. This was for me a more compelling and relatable portrait of what it is like to come of age as a woman in this world, and that a great many people hate the film or are offended by its weirdo vision of self-actualization does not diminish that for me. It was a particularly good year for women at the movies and to see the gobbling monster of Barbie world order devour that unnerves me. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is fantastic. Everyone needs to watch Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and let the radiant tenderness of Rachel McAdams’ performance warm them. The Color Purple has script issues but the cast is unimpeachable. Past Lives made it into Best Picture! ! Lily Gladstone graced us with a quiet power to which I have yet and may never find an appropriate comparison. Other gays really loved Bottoms and I didn’t but that’s literally fine.
As misogyny is real and not a fiction and because we live with its threats and pressures, some annoying some bloody some tripping some choking–and, too, today, in light of the hard-fought gains that have been made and the nervous drive to keep them–it can be a fraught thing as a woman to insist on your unrepeatable personhood. It’s considered such poor form to stake your place too firmly beyond the permagirl industrial complex that it necessitates the existence of the entire “not like the other girls” genre of joke and think piece. But the thing is: I am not like the other girls!!! No one is. Who are these other girls? What are their names and dreams and how do they like their eggs? A framework useful in curbing internalized misogyny and girl-on-girl bullying among schoolchildren should not be applied with the same extremity to adults who have vastly varying lives bound only by the fact of being someone’s daughter. Being A Woman in the world and the experiences I have had which are shared by other women informs every aspect of my life, but it does not define me. As a queer person with no money and a fevered brain and many hopes I find gender of less and less consequence year by year. I am a woman by happenstance and an annoying person through years of careful thought and hard labor.
In the United States of America, one in six women experience sexual assault of some kind. We know the number is really higher than that. Each night, over 14,000 women in Los Angeles have no safe place to sleep. Since October in Gaza 16,000 women and children have been murdered by the settler colonial state of Israel. I love stupid shit, too, and do not presume myself any less vapid or selfish than the next person on the street, but there has to be a point at which we can say, okay, this does not matter. I invoke real world violence and death in a conversation about films because these films are made and released into that very same violence and death, and despite what the anti-intellectualism of the day might insist, it is not too much to ask that we consider them within that context.
When the Los Angeles Times publishes an opinion piece (I won’t link to it; you have either seen it or are lucky) where a grown woman moans that oh, gosh, maybe if poor lilywhite Barbie had done something so low down and unwomanly as barely outrun the calculated genocide of Indigenous Americans, well maybe then she would get the Extra Special Good Girl Prize she so deserves, and even just a portion of the people who believe they are feminists receive this as reasonable analysis…… I am worried. I am worried and nauseated and a little disoriented confronting a world where these are the concerns of educated women with every opportunity at their fingertips to learn and explore and expand their hearts and minds by reflecting on the meaning and value of literally any fucking thing outside the shallow pools of their own self-interest. To wake up to the depravity and joy of being alive.
Certainly, you’d imagine that Hillary Clinton has something better to do than rub a loser’s stink all over two accomplished women whose billion dollar plus gross apparently demanded, by Clinton’s calculus, conversion into further accolades. The primary goal of the corporate girlboss feminism which prevails today is amassing wealth and demanding blind approval and I don’t want it. They who would have us accept marketing categories as meaningful social groups, and to then prove our loyalty to those groups and, vaguely, their “causes” by spending money, are an enemy to real progress and love. The insidious influencer culture which convinces women they are going to be sex trafficked at a suburban Target so that they’ll buy security cameras and portable locks for their home is part and parcel with the messaging from Warner Brothers which told women and girls that purchasing from one of Barbie’s many, many brand collabs was essential to performing sisterhood. I don’t want that for myself or for any woman or for any being alive. There has to be more.
In the end, to ward off the vapors, I remind myself I am more than comfortable taking my cues on how to engage with cinema and whatever else may arise from Amy Taubin, not Hillary Clinton. Also that the only real Oscar snub this year was Snoop the dog anyway!!!
consider: Not online shopping. This is an extreme work in progress, but, in short, I imagine it was probably much healthier for people to not have constant access (and heavy-handed encouragement) to Looking At Stores and I am trying to recreate that long-gone era for myself, mainly by not going on The Strategist dot com, with all its tantalizing links. Actually visiting a particular website on purpose and buying some specific, predetermined thing is one matter, but what I hope to get away from is the idle, slovenly scrolling of purchasable goods. I’m not very smart about these things and certainly have my own suckling pig tendencies when it comes to doing my little Brain Turned Off activities, but in an effort to spend my time more intentionally and feel less miserable now, when my head bobs up above the water for a moment after following an Instagram story ad to the brand’s page and diving pages deep into reviews on a satin jumpsuit or “all natural” digestive supplement I just stop. I close the app and kiss my girlfriend or refill my water or do whatever else I was neglecting in my stupor. It helps. ** Babybel cheese as an emotional salve. **To make clear that I am not wholesale against the chronicling of girlhood: loved This Sofia Coppola profile not so much because I think the profile is good (it’s fine) but for content therein, which I may have enjoyed just as much if I could have downloaded it directly into my brain but this was the available option. The prospect of Coppola’s The Custom of the Country miniseries, a tailor-made Tess delight perhaps never to come into being, is almost too painful to even be worth contemplating, but of course not quite. And she was right about Kirsten’s teeth, obviously. ** Charles Melton, sweet prince, you will have your vengeance. ** The Find My Friends feature on an iPhone was a frightening anathema to me until I fell in love with a woman who had upwards of ten or possibly two hundred friends tracked on her phone and wanted me in her menagerie as well. Probably it means that I am now and forever in the deathly grips of the modern mind’s most dangerous disease. But I like watching her little dot travel safely home.
"a pretty funny movie with gorgeous sets and costumes which uses paper-thin progressive politics as scaffolding for a not particularly coherent story" is a perfect description which i struggled to put into words