The 2023 Barbie film is a commercial. I’m sure it will be fun, funny, delightful, and engaging. I will watch it, and I’ll probably even dress up to go to the theater. Barbie is also a film made by Mattel using their intellectual property to promote their brand. Not only is there no large public criticism of this reality, there seems to be no spoken awareness of it at all. I’m sure most people know that Barbie is a brand, and most people are smart enough to know this and enjoy the film without immediately driving to Target to buy a new Barbie doll. After all, advertising is everywhere, and in our media landscape of dubiously disclosed User Generated Content and advertorials, at least Barbie is transparently related to its creator. But to passively accept this reality is to celebrate not women or icons or auteurs, but corporations and the idea of advertising itself. Public discourse around Barbie does not re-contextualize the toy or the brand, but in fact serves the actual, higher purpose of Barbie™: to teach us to love branding, marketing, and being consumers.
[…] The casting of Gerwig’s Barbie film shows that anyone can be a Barbie regardless of size, race, age, sexuality. Barbie is framed as universal, as accessible; after all, a Barbie doll is an inexpensive purchase and Barbiehood is a mindset. Gerwig’s Barbie is a film for adults, not children (as evidenced by its PG-13 rating, Kubrick references, and soundtrack), and yet it manages to achieve the same goals as its source material: developing brand loyalty to Barbie™ and reinforcing consumerism-as-identity as a modern and necessarily empowering phenomenon. Take, for example, “Barbiecore,” an 80s-inspired trend whose aesthetic includes not only hot pink but the idea of shopping itself. This is not Marx’s theory on spending money for enjoyment, nor can it even be critically described as commodity fetishism, because the objects themselves bear less semiotic value compared to the act of consumption and the identity of “consumer.”
[…] Part of the brilliance of the Barbie brand is its emphasis on having fun; critiquing Barbie’s feminism is seen as a dated, 90s position and the critic as deserving of a dated, 90s epithet: feminist killjoy. It’s just a movie! It’s just a toy! Life is so exhausting, can’t we just have fun? I’ve written extensively about how “feeling good” is not an apolitical experience and how the most mundane pop culture deserves the most scrutiny, so I won’t reiterate it here. But it is genuinely concerning to see not only the celebration of objects and consumer goods, but the friendly embrace of corporations themselves and the concept of intellectual property, marketing, and advertising. Are we so culturally starved that insurance commercials are the things that satiate our artistic needs?
god i go absolutely apeshit every time i think about how much garrus loved shepard like. romantically or platonically he was unconditionally loyal to the one person who showed affection toward him and who had his back no matter what. he LOVED shepard like family and would die for them over and over again and that makes me go bonkers fucking yonkers
What’s so interesting about the idea that Eleanor deserved better than her ending is that it’s both the ending she deserved and the only ending she could have had, and *that* is why she deserved better.
She was a woman born of great wealth amassed in part or totality through participating in the slave trade. Her claim to power in Nassau rested on her last name. She repeatedly chose to secure that power through siding with empire over freedom, and in this quest for power, she sowed the seeds of her destruction. She was a queer white woman whose reliance on her whiteness and her wealth amassed through that whiteness put her at odds with every other queer character in the show, as well as the notion of queerness itself. She sold off parts of herself until she was a husk of the woman we first met, and it was not enough to save herself from the fate foretold to her by her father, from the fate that had met her mother.
She got exactly what was coming to her, and yet her ending, deserved though it was, still was tragic. It was not tragic because she was done wrong by the narrative, but because everyone deserves better than life under capitalism. The entire economic and political structure of capitalism necessitates the selling of parts of ourselves in doomed quests to live lives of material prosperity. It requires endless structural and personal violence. It requires the denial of fundamental parts of ourselves, such as Eleanor’s queerness. There is not one person alive who would be less happy without capitalism.
Eleanor’s arc is thus both cathartic and a deeply cautionary tale.
