(I did not get a good education at Temple Sinai, I’m sorry.) Gerwig is probably reclaiming the Lilith figure here, as so many feminists have done before her. Lilith was Adam’s first wife, the first woman, and a demonic witchy lady, who refused to be subservient to a man and left Eden first and fucked up Adam and Eve’s whole situation because she could maybe control snakes or something. What song plays as she approaches Kate McKinnon’s house and drives into the arid desert past Barbie Land borders? “Closer to Fine.” What do Birkenstocks and the Indigo Girls signify? Lilith Fair. What is the apple in this scenario? A Birkenstock. In fact, it reclaims womanly wiles and deviance and folds them right back into our heroine. In Gerwig’s empowering update to the flawed source material (by which I mean the Bible, not Barbie, who is perfect), Barbie’s choice to eat the fruit of knowledge and set out beyond paradise requires agency, and is less a warning about womanly wiles and deviance or whatever. When the dolls are in Barbie Land, they’re being played with and possibly spoken to (and through?), but they don’t have agency. Playing with Barbies really is playing God, and in Gerwig’s reverse cosmology, God is most definitely a girl. Now think of how many Barbies are veterinarians and horse girls. Think of Adam’s stewardship over the animals. Where fig leaves would otherwise go, they’re as smooth as a Thread poster’s brain. In the trailer, Barbie Land is a Garden of Eden: a paradise whose inhabitants live in a state of innocence and don’t know shame or death. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.” When someone tells you who they really are, and what they’re really going to do for their Barbie film adaptation, listen. “Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. “Barbie was invented first,” is what Greta Gerwig told Vogue for Margot Robbie’s cover story back in May. If this is all wrong, then, uh, it was all just a dream all along. More specifically, I think Margot Robbie’s Barbie’s owner is realizing that she might be queer, based on the Indigo Girls music she (ostensibly) plays for Barbie during her road trip and the fact that Kate McKinnon’s Barbie dangles a Birkenstock in front of her face. Support for this theory includes, but is not limited to: Greta Gerwig including Reviving Ophelia, a book about the unique struggles of American adolescent girls, as a reference point the purposefully wooden/childlike dialogue we’ve seen in the trailers (“’Cause we’re boyfriend and girlfriend”) the “childlike crayon drawing” illustrating Barbie’s “make-believe journey” the teaser that referenced 2001: A Space Odyssey (the evolution of man, etc.) and Will Ferrell being cast yet again as a meta-character in charge of a toy universe (will there be overlap with The Lego Movie, which also revealed itself to be a story about real-world kids playing with toys?). In other words, I don’t think the movie is really about “Barbie” as a character as much as it is about Barbie owners past, present, and future, all processing their own sexual awakening, mortality, sense of shame, and awareness of the chaotic futility of the universe as they come of age and slowly detach from their childlike selves (and subsequently their Barbies, who must then process their own grief and abandonment, maybe?). Our intrepid Jason Frank has been gathering pink string and hanging it on the proverbial corkboard for months in an attempt to understand what the hell Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are up to, and something deep in my subconscious has suddenly informed me that the Barbie movie is not just an allegory for the onset of puberty and burgeoning self-awareness, but an actual story about young girls going through puberty/becoming self-aware and grafting that process onto their dolls as a means of catharsis. Specifically, I was having an active premonition about the Barbie movie, which, tragic, get a life, but here we are. I awoke a recent morning gasping for air like a precog in Minority Report, drowning in haunting visions of the near future.
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