Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Listener supported. WNYC Studios. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Frye. This is a special edition of the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. It's an episode we're sharing from the New Yorker's Critics at Large, a show where the three of us gather every week to make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. We hope you enjoy it. ♪
So, you guys, there comes a time in every critic's life, a very special time, when that critic is obliged to consider what this year has been about. And my friends?
That time is now for us, the critics at large. Let us join hands and decide what the year has been about. Let us pray. Alex, would you like to do the honors? Oh, I would indeed.
Well, as we three were sitting around discussing – Shooting the shit. Shooting the shit as we do on a regular basis both on and off the air. Crossing it back and forth. Yeah, yeah. And trying to come up with, you know, as Nomi says, this great critic's responsibility to take a chaotic mess of a year as every year inevitably is and come up with one dominant cultural through line, one narrative that will make sense of everything we've just experienced over these past 12 months. We came up with –
The Year of the Doll. That's right. The Year of the Doll. We have seen any number of cultural objects in which a cloistered woman, often used as a plaything by another person, breaks free of her circumstances and goes off into the wide world to learn something about it and about herself. Hey, Barbie.
Can I come to your house tonight? Sure. I don't have anything big planned, just a giant blowout party with all the Barbies and planned choreography and a bespoke song. You should stop by. The big example of this, of course, is Barbie, which I finally watched yesterday. Yesterday I was finally inducted into the cult of Barbie movies.
I'm all about it. Do you wear hot pink? If I knew that exact pantone, it would be my entire wardrobe, of course. But if you suddenly wore like full hot pink, like 7,000 months after the movie premiered. I think that would make you chiquer than chic. I think it would be really cool. Once we started to sort of toss this idea around, as you said, Alex, I saw it.
There are all kinds of examples of it. One of my favorite movies, kind of campily this year, was Megan. Oh, yes. The animate sort of like female Chucky. Hi, Megan. I'm Katie. It's nice to meet you, Katie. Do you want to hang out? Okay.
Yeah, it is everywhere. I mean, there's so many examples where we have this figure of the doll, either like an actual doll, right? But then also if we think about it a little bit more broadly and metaphorically, you know, we've had Yorgos Lanthimos' new movie, Poor Things, which just came out starring Emma Stone as a sort of like Frankenstein-like invention. She's an experiment. Good evening. Her brain and her body are not quite synchronized.
We've had Priscilla, the Sofia Coppola biopic. Of the Elvis Presley bride who is cloistered in Graceland. We've had, you know, to go to the fashion end of things, kind of doll-like fashions taking over the TikTok sphere. Bows, velvet, you know, sequins.
We've had Taylor Swift. We're about to go on a little adventure together and that adventure is going to span 17 years of music. Time's person of the year and her era's tour with all of its glittery, girly glory, which is kind of doll-like in a lot of ways.
You know, I mean, the list just goes on and on. OK, so today we're going to be tracing this idea of the doll across the culture of this past year. And we'll talk about how this trend maps onto the political reality of today as well, where women's agency over their own bodies has become a newly radical idea in the time since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. You're hearing Critics at Large on the New Yorker Radio Hour.
Our show is 2023, the year of the doll. Okay, so let's start with the obvious. Barbie, a movie about a literal doll, which grossed $1.44 billion. The highest grossing film of the year and the 14th highest grossing film of all time. Is that true? That's real? It's real. Oh, my God. Directed by Greta Gerwig.
Yeah. And I want to start off by asking you guys, especially Vincent, because since you just, you kind of sidestepped this. The whole moment. The whole moment. Yeah. What do you guys make of this movie's popularity? Yeah. What do you think? Yeah, I thought I was...
Pretty enthusiastic about it. I liked it a lot. You liked it, right? You texted us after and you were like, I'm into it. It's great. To your point, that's exactly what happened. I sidestepped the sort of initial critical discourse, which had a lot to do with, you know, whether the politics of this movie were somehow revolutionary, which, of course, they are not. They are things we've heard. But it's funny, which I didn't really get from the initial conversation.
of speech about this movie. It's funny. It sort of takes place on two levels. You can always feel the sort of critical intelligence of Greta Gerwig as transmitted through the narration of Helen Mirren, who is talking a lot at the beginning and telling us about, like, about Barbie land. Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.
At least, that's what the Barbies think. After all, they're living in Barbie land. And about the sort of, the beautiful lives that all the Barbies live, especially what they call stereotypical Barbie. Which is Margot Robbie. Which is Margot Robbie, right? Because we should know that, of course, there's Barbies...
of all stripes. You know, there's like Dr. Barbie, like there's scientist Barbie, there's Dr. Barbie, there's, you know, there's President Barbie, Supreme Court Justice Barbie. Every role that can be performed is performed by Barbie. It's a liberal utopia. That's right. And it's a world in which the patriarchy has been banished. Obviously, right, like this all gets complicated when Margot Robbie, Barbie,
suddenly has what she first says, you know, sort of thoughts of death. Maybe some thoughts of death? Thoughts of death! Is that a problem? Oh. What? I've heard of this. Of course, I didn't think it was possible. And so she has to make a journey into the real world. Oh, you've done it. You've opened a portal. I didn't open a portal. Someone did. And now there is a rift.
Alex, how do you think the movie helps build up our archetype of what this figure of the doll is?
Well, in one sense, it helps that she's a literal doll. And we all know her. There's that. And we've always known her as long as any of us has been alive and for many generations prior. But I think in our archetype of the doll, we're talking about a beautiful woman.
played by Margot Robbie, as we've said, who fits into not just the stereotypical Barbie ideal, but kind of the stereotypical ideal of white female beauty, thin, blonde, big blue eyes. And life is easy for her. Life is good for her. But that's in part because it is so cosseted. The doll figure has to both learn about
Right.
With other Barbies and also crucially with a real life woman, Mattel, administrative assistant played by America Ferreira. Yes. Who clarifies to her what it is about.
like to be a real woman in the world. And as you know, I'm sure one of the most quoted passages in this movie is this speech, this soliloquy that the America Ferrera's character gives about how impossible it is to be a modern woman. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood, but always stand out and always be grateful.
But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also always be grateful. You have to never get old. Never be rude. Never show off. Never be selfish. Never fall down. Never fail. Never show fear. Never get out of line. It's too hard. It's too contradictory. And nobody gives you a medal or says, "Thank you." And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
It's about the fallacy of having it all, right? She's like our representative in that world. The non-Barbie woman viewer gets to be like, yeah, at that moment. Exactly. And, you know, and Barbie's role in that instance is to discover as the doll that real women have, that there are difficulties that they face, that if she accepts the challenge of
becoming, you know, a real girl to Pinocchio's real boy. This is just, you know, just thrown out references here, Pinocchio. It's true. That, you know, it comes with a bunch of not so great stuff that she's going to have to navigate as well. And of course, one of the points of the movie is that the warts and all are
is actually worth it. Right. Rather than living in a kind of fool's paradise of supposed utopia, being in the real world with all its difficulties is kind of a worthy endeavor. Right. Right. So this brings us to another film I really wanted to talk about with you guys. And it's a new movie. It's out in theaters now called Poor Things. It's directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara. Yeah.
Which also, I think, shares with Barbie this thrust of a doll-like figure who goes out into the world and discovers that things are maybe a little bit more complicated than she might have guessed.
Does anyone want to give me like a brief synopsis of how she came to be this sort of doll-like figure who didn't go out and then suddenly like breaks into the world and so on? That's right. Well, we learned sort of a little bit into the movie that...
that Bella Baxter, who is the sort of the Frankensteinian creation of Godwin, Dr. Godwin Baxter, a sort of mad scientist figure played by the amazing Willem Dafoe. I must betray my sympathies toward this act. I love Willem Dafoe. He's the man. We learn that she was in a former life, a young woman who, a young woman, pregnant woman, who decides to end her own life. She jumps off of a bridge.
Dr. Baxter finds her, performs an insane surgery whereby he excises the child from her, performs the most nefarious C-section ever depicted in film.
takes out the child's brain and implants it into the child's fetal developmental brain and places it into the body of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, therefore creating a kind of woman child who he will watch
develop from a child in this accelerated way, kind of, into a young woman in the body of an already adult woman. Hello. Bella, this is Mr. McCandles. Hello, Bella. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. I'm fine. I'm fine.
She's like a baby, right? She's sort of like, you see her toddling, or a toddler, I guess you could say. She sort of like physically toddles around, like barely keeping her body upright. This is occasion to much hilarity. You know, she's like, Emma Stone is a fantastic actress and a fantastic like comic actress as well. So there's a lot of like...
to be had with her sort of playing this like full-grown beautiful woman who's kind of like lax. You know, she pees on the floor. There's all of that. She speaks in this highly idiosyncratic half-baby, half-raised-by-a-scientist way. Right, yes. I have made discovery. Yeah, yeah. Bella has made discovery. She talks about herself in the third person. You know, Bella Baxter has made discovery. She confuses we and us, you know. And what's similar to me about this with Barbie is that
the entity, in this case Bella,
is a sort of... I kept on thinking about the figure of the golem, G-O-L-E-M, the sort of creation of dust and air in Jewish mysticism, right? And mud. And mud, which is like... is a projection of the hopes and wishes and desires and needs and fantasies of the maker and is like sent forward into the world purely as that, right? But of course...
The idea is free will agency itself must out.
Yes. That somebody, even a creation of somebody else's pure will, will embark on their own journey. And this is what Bella does. You know, for me, like you mentioned the golem, Vincent, and that's a great comparison. But it's also kind of, to me, this is coupled with a kind of My Fair Lady-ish plot or narrative where, like,
And Godwin Baxter and this young assistant he hires. Max McCandles. Max McCandles, played by Rami Yusuf, who's great as well. Really good at this. Really good at this. Surprisingly good. Yeah, I was like, wow, he's great. They try to teach her to be a lady, you know, to be a woman. And, you know, one of the main ways the movie suggests
That free will will out, as you know, Vincent, is the sexual component of this woman who's fully a woman, you know, even though she's like much behind intellectually and emotionally, certainly. And so...
There are all of these very funny scenes and it kind of like gains steam as a narrative as a narrative kind of point over the course of the movie where Bella discovers that she's horny and
And it starts by her, like, masturbating with, like, a piece of fruit. With an apple, yeah. An apple significantly. An apple, yes. Just think of Eden, my friends. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, it's not even – I mean, later is it a banana? I feel like she tries a lot of different – She attempts a banana, but an apple is – Yeah, the apple is the first. The fruit of her enlightenment. That's right. The fruit of her enlightenment. Very true. Very true. And then, of course –
the men are horrified, right? Horrified and yet aroused. You know, there's that whole thing. And the kind of like male fantasy component of this doll figure who's like, she's a little baby, but she wants to fuck, you know, like this sort of like, all she wants to do is like, you know, so it's like this thing that definitely is like,
Which is also we should talk about Barbie in relation to that because it's quite different. Sure. Well, when I first saw this movie in September, my thought was, holy shit, this is Barbie with a twist. It's in both cases. It's about a beautiful woman who doesn't really understand the currency that that holds out in the broader world, entering the broader world with a silly male companion in the case of Bella Baxter in Poor Things 4.
her silly male companion, the Ken to her Barbie, is the character of Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo. Also so good. I know you're upset with me. Forgive my kidnapping of you, but it was for love, a romantic jeep. Don't be such a cunt about it. I want a drink. Of course, my darling. The ship is fun, a whole world to explore. Do you love me? I love you. Describe the elements I should be looking for within myself to be sure.
Coming back to the idea of the doll in both of these movies, I think the real question, especially around sex in Poor Things, is...
Who is the doll for? You know, what is discussed in the beginning when Bella begins to gain more control over her body, at least, is basically like, you know, Max McCandles, the Rami Youssef character, asks her creator, Godwin Baxter, who is the doll for?
did you create her to have sex with? Like, did you basically make a living sex doll? Yeah. And the answer is, no, no, but that's because I'm a eunuch. Why don't you do it? Why don't we marry her to you? Yeah. And so when she enters the world, it's through sexual agency because she gets really, you know, excited by the idea of running off and having a lot of sex with Duncan Wedderburn, which they proceed to do. And then, of course, she calls it furious jumping. Furious jumping. Beautiful. But he can't control her. And this...
her unleashed passion, you know, and sexual agency. Of course, the stuff that men have tried to control for as long as they've been men and women can't be controlled by Duncan, can't be controlled by anyone, and becomes like this sort of seat of her liberation. Like, if we want to get into brass tacks, I think that plot line goes totally off the rails. Okay, so she becomes a sex worker in Paris. And even though she is literally the plaything of men, she is under these sort of
economic control of a female madam. And then she finds a female lover inside the brothel. Is it a brothel? Inside the brothel. It's definitely 100% a brothel. Right. And this is like, I think this is meant to sort of gradually sort of the sort of disappearance of men from the direct sexual control over her is supposed to, I think, be a sort of an arc in a kind of completion of that initial process.
sex doll-ish nature of Bella. Is that fair? Yeah, I think you're totally right that it's supposed to. I also find it like incredibly facile as just an escape from the problem. Like the conditions that exist for this brothel are not, you know, there's a joke in the movie where she says, wouldn't it
be better if we got to choose are the men because wouldn't everyone feel better if we liked having sex with these men instead of being chosen by them and it's explained to her no silly silly of course not so she's put in a position in which she has no choice and there is one really ghastly moment where she realizes oh this is not about me at all after all this fun consensual sex I'm about to basically be raped by a John but I'm
But he turns out not to be very good in bed. And so it becomes fun again. And she realizes she can kind of twist it to her own making. And that I find just like a big lie of the movie and a lie of this idea of sexual agency. Yeah. No, I totally agree. I mean, I love this movie. I loved it like 100 times more than Barbie. Sorry, Barbie. I mean, I think Barbie was, you know. Barbie's fun. Barbie's fun. This is an amazing movie. I totally agree with you, however, Alex. Like there's this huge balance.
blind spot there, you know, of this sort of like male fantasy of not just the idea of this beautiful woman who's just like up for anything and will always be like, yeah, I want to have sex, but also just in the sense of her emotional landscape being
It's consistently detached. It's kind of like it's that in itself is, of course, a complete fantasy that this doll figure is able to maintain. Right. In one way, I see what you're saying, Naomi. I think it's really interesting. Like in one way, the doll of Bella Baxter comes off as totally liberated because she escapes the constraints of the desires of both the men who have created her and the man who thinks that he can possess her.
But at the same time, she mimics a different kind of total male desire, which is like the woman who has no feelings and basically can't become needy. Exactly. She can't be needy. She needs nothing from you. She needs nothing from you. And that might be what drives you mad, but also makes her totally alluring and endlessly irresistible. Yeah. I agree with you that I think it's a really great movie. And I also think that it is fascinating.
just attached to its own... It's just attached to itself. To me, it goes on too long. Attached to its own conceit. Yeah, it's attached to its own conceit. It goes on a bit too long, and it doesn't really allow the real person to form out of the doll-like figure. So I think in some ways...
You stay stuck in a trap. Yeah, stuck in doll land. My friend did mention something yesterday that was really interesting. It was like how perfectly laser-shaved Bella Baxter is through that whole movie. Who's doing all that shaving? A hundred percent. Here's some questions I have about that movie. Yeah. Who's shaving her armpits? Okay. Is it Prim? Is it Nurse Prim? I noticed the armpits thing. I was glad I was over. She had pubic hair.
Oh, my God. So much about this movie. It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy. Okay, guys. Glitter, bows, women trapped in a vortex of desire and capitalism. Join us as we continue our exploration of the Year of the Doll. Hells yes. I love it.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, you guys, Barbie, poor things, you know, two central texts of the last few months that talk about dolls. But there's always more, right? And I want to hear from you. What else have we got in terms of our doll-like year? Yeah, one of my favorite films of this year is
Visually, I'll say. Maybe it wouldn't make my top ten just like my favorite films, but I love the way it looks. It's Sofia Coppola's Priscilla. Yeah. What do we have here? Elvis, this is Priscilla Beaulieu. What do you say maybe we get someone quiet? Just what is the intent here, Mr. Presley? What do you got? It came out in theaters about a month or so ago, and it's starring, and this matters, I think, the...
teeny weeny, Kelly Spaney as Priscilla Presley and the human giant, Jacob Elordi as Elvis. I think they make a lot out of the difference in these two heights. Incredible casting. The doll of Kelly Spaney is... Elordi is really good in this movie and she's good too. Yeah. I thought she was excellent and she is, as you say Vincent, she is doll-like in every particular. She's tiny. She's a young...
14 years old. 14 years old. I believe that's correct. Her family, she's sitting in a diner and some guy, some emissary of Elvis comes over to her and says, hey, Elvis Presley is throwing a party and I think he would really like you. I think he, you know, this like truly like, I'm sorry, like Epstein Island level of like recruitment and horror. It's like one of the. It's a horror.
It's a horror movie. You guys, please. It was a different time. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No. And so and that's very scary. And she goes to live with him while she is still in high school. And he like he and his father, Vernon Presley, become her wardens. Well, yeah, it is Presley.
But what it does is show through, really like through interior design, what it is to...
belong to someone, to be, you know, Barbie uses the metaphor, I think very well, of the dollhouse, right? As a place that can be like a gilded cage, right? A beautiful, something that seems beautiful can be also the agent of your imprisonment. In this case, it's like literally Elvis's bedroom. It's this over-decorated, overly plush space that's very beautiful. But so it's like her and him in this room
Two, three days at a time. And she belongs to him. You know, she basically becomes completely isolated. It's like, you know, R. Kelly level shit. It's interior design and it's also fashion design because there are scenes of Alice being like, you don't look good like that. You should dye your hair like that. This is what I want you to wear. So she becomes literally... She's his doll. Yeah, he's shaping her for his current and future use. You know, it...
There always is the question that we have to ask, which is who is the doll for? In this case, obviously, the doll is for Elvis. I mean, it does remind me of A Doll's House, the classic play, which was also on Broadway this year with Jessica Chastain, which is, you know. The Ibsen play?
for the man who she serves. That is the 19th century point that Ibsen is making. And then famously in A Doll's House, Nora breaks out of the hold that Torvald, her husband, has placed on her and decides to leave and to leave her life. You know, in the case- At the very end. At the very, very end. Which is similar to Priscilla as well. Which is similar to Priscilla. I watched this movie yesterday, probably while Vincent was watching Barbie. Absolutely loved it.
Priscilla, you loved it. I loved Priscilla. It's a great movie, right? I know that Naomi didn't. No, no, I liked it. Okay, I'll tell you what I liked. And then I'll tell you what I loved. Okay, I liked it. What I liked about this movie, I went to see it with my husband who was like practically snoozing throughout and he was like, it was like absolutely boring. I liked that it was boring.
Like, I liked the sort of, I respect the deadness of this movie. That's a really good way to say that, yeah. You know, it's like a monitor with a heartbeat where it's like barely, you know, it's like almost flatlining. And I respect that rhythm and cadence. And I think it really shows what it's like to be a doll under someone else's skin.
control, you know. I couldn't say I felt passionate about it as you seem to feel, Alex. I just love the horror elements and how horror can be a trapping of, or how rather the trappings of a very elevated bourgeois lifestyle, which is what she's living at Graceland, are themselves
You know, the elements of horror. One thing occurs to me that also occurs to me in relation to Poor Things and to Barbie, which is the role and status of motherhood. You know, in the world of Barbie, one reason when I saw the movie, when I first saw the movie, I thought,
huh, you know, how have all these, how have the Barbies managed to have it all, to have these great figures of positions of power and to run the world that they live in? And one answer is they have no obligations to anyone but themselves. They have no mothering obligations, which have been used historically to deprive women of rights and broader society by chaining them to the home. So, you know, there's one mother Barbie character, Midge, who is isolated and kind of
Pushed to the side. She's actually pregnant. She's not yet a mother. And of course, in the real world, the America Ferrera character is a mother and has obligations to her daughter and has tension with her daughter over what it means to mother and be mothered. Then in Poor Things, you have someone who is her, as Godwin Baxter explains, her own mother and her own daughter simultaneously. Also has had all bodily agency removed from her when it comes to that relationship.
And then in Priscilla, she becomes a mother. And one thing that happens is that she has to make actual decisions for her daughter and she has some kind of real responsibility to another living creature. And the...
And that is really, I would think, one thing that pushes her to have to leave this total trap that she actually has to have responsibility and have some kind of, you know, action. Which, you know, in another doll text I'd like to discuss today is Emma Klein's The Guest, right? Where we have this protagonist. Her name is Alex. Right.
Yes, hello. Who is portrayed kind of in abstract strokes, right? We know she is very attractive, though maybe not model beautiful. She's white, you know, as we should note, all of the protagonists we've been discussing so far have been, and this is a point we'll return to. And she is a sex worker. The book opens in the Hamptons. It's summer. She has become the sort of consort of this wealthy older man.
He doesn't know she's a sex worker, but he is – it's clear also that he is aware that the relationship is kind of transactional. She gives him value as a man and he gives her money, right, and a place to stay. And this book takes place over the course of six days where Alex –
You know, fucks up the bag, you know, is like makes a mess as she's going to do. The guy she lives with is like you out. Go back to the city. I'm buying you a ticket back to the city. I don't want to see you anymore.
And she decides that instead of going back to the city, she's going to remain in the Hamptons, kind of like tough it out somehow. And so it's kind of an odyssey where she is once again thrust out, you know, as in these other narratives, thrust out of kind of like a relatively cloistered space where she was comfortable and, you know, kind of knew her role into survival mode. And we as readers get to see that.
her journey and how she is affected by it or not and how much agency she can exert.
over the world. Yeah, this is not a journey of female empowerment from lack of knowledge to knowledge. I think this makes a great pairing with Priscilla. There is very little difference between the figure of Alex and the figure of Priscilla. I think one huge difference is just precarity that Alex is really scraping by. She has made herself into a doll of her own creation based on what she thinks the desires of
you know, how she can fulfill the desires of men. I think, like, Nomi, what you were saying before about both she and her boyfriend understanding the deal, the arrangement they're in. She, of course, meanwhile, has no money of her own to speak of, and her very existence depends on her continuing to find favor with people in his world. You know, a book that the guest, and I do just want to say that I am friends with it's
author. As am I. I am a huge fan of the book and also friends with Emma Klein, its author. But, you know, the guest to me is really in conversation with the House of Mirth. We've talked about Edith Wynne on our costume drama episode. But the degree to which a young woman without her own means finds herself really trapped and depraved
by making herself beautiful, by playing the game. You know, it's, the guest is a really chilling book because you see how little that currency buys her in the end and also you see why she can't quit it, why being a doll seems to her like the solution and why she ends up getting trapped, you know, basically out of the doll's house. The doll's house closes to her and she has no other environment she can live in. Yeah.
So if 2023 is the year of the doll, I guess the obvious question is why? That's in a minute on Critics At Large from The New Yorker. OK, so, guys, the question I have is why is this happening right now? Obviously, dolls have been with us from the dawn of time, but now they're back in a big way. And
What do we also make of the, quote-unquote, political awakening aspect of these stories? Well, there's one really clear place to start, for me at least, which is the undoing of Roe v. Wade last year and its –
just a hellstorm of effects that have been unleashed into our world. You know, we can't say that's the reason that something like Barbie exists or the reason, certainly, that something like Poor Things exists. No, and also, of course, these movies have been a development for a long time. These movies have been a development, but they are a huge reason, and to me, perhaps the reason why they hit so hard right now and why this theme is
is a theme that's worth addressing. You know, obviously, American women right now are at a low point of control over women.
our bodies. We're recording while Kate Cox in Texas has become a focal point for the nation, mother of two trying to get an abortion because of abnormalities with her pregnancy and being denied it by the male attorney general of Texas. I mean, talk about a horror story. We're watching a horror story unfold, and there are many other examples, both
publicly known and not. So this question of control and autonomy over women's lives and women's bodies is simply huge. I mean, there are other aspects of doll culture, like the fashion aspects. Like, they're kind of
And honestly, like enjoyable and great aspects of doll culture coming out. And some of that may be like a bit of a girl power from the 90s thing having a resurgence. Yeah. Perhaps even in the face of some of these political threats, a sense of like, yeah, we want to embrace a very obvious and fun aspect of femininity. And I think a lot of these –
more kind of like design elements, right? Or kind of like community building through fashion elements, whether it's like on the Taylor Swift tour or kind of doll-like fashions taking over the TikTok sphere. Beaux, velvet, you know, sequins position themselves as empowering, right? And certainly the Barbie trend of wearing pink, hot pink to the movie theater, you know, and kind of being like, I am...
Barbie woman, Barbie core, right? They call it Barbie core. I am Barbie woman. Hear me roar. You know, we're forced to be reckoned with, um,
you know, recalling in some ways the kind of pussy hat of, you know, 2016 and 2017. Right, a kind of depoliticized pussy hat, maybe. A depoliticized, but, you know, arguably somewhat politicized kind of version of female empowerment, right? And another thing to say about this, are dolls always white women, right? Is this about, like, an awakening of,
of white women to conditions that, say, women of color have experienced for, you know, way harsher ways and way longer. Right. It's like Barbie suddenly being like, oh, wait,
You know, the real world sucks. What do you mean I can't get an abortion in Texas? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to have that realization, you have to be idealized by the culture to begin with. You have to be held up. You have to have something to gain. Yes. And you have to be held up as an example of, you know, ideal femininity, which in our culture is awful.
almost always rendered as a white phenomenon. So, yeah, you know, I think it makes a lot of sense that we're talking about – we're doing our white studies episode, as we've joked. You know, we're talking about a bunch of white women who think life is pretty good, discover actually that it's a ploy, and then have to go out into the world and reckon with reality as opposed to having been forced to do that reckoning in a much –
earlier point. You know, Nomi, what you're saying puts me in mind of this essay by Susan Faludi that I was reading. I think she published it last year. Susan Faludi argued that we've become so obsessed with pop culture feminism over the past, you know. Yeah. Katy Perry saying, I'm actually a feminist. Miley Cyrus being like, I'm
Yeah, the past 10 years, I would say, basically, this, you know, putting feminism on T-shirts, basically, and, right, all kinds of pop figures saying, like, I am feminism. I represent it. That, of course, the I has been taken off the ball. And meanwhile, women's rights have been so rolled back. You know, once again, of course, we're sitting around here discussing culture. But is the culture now ready to grapple with that? That's kind of what I'm wondering. Yeah, well, I think this is where we sort of reach the crossroads of where culture is not always –
totally equipped to take on the nuances of a political moment, right? Because art is always stuck between representation on the one hand and rhetoric on the other, right? So it's like, if you want to talk about what Barbie has been, it has to be Margot Robbie. And so that is a representational reality that might not always fulfill the rhetorical needs of a more nuanced thing of feminist right. Which is part of the movie's problem. Yeah, which is why I like...
By the way, a non-white woman like America Ferrara has to be the one to come in and give the speeches. Yes. You know what I mean? She comes in and does the rhetorical part that the representation of Barbie can't do. Yes. Very true. And in Lanthimos, there's a nihilist character played by the comedian Gerard Carmichael who's like brings Bella and watches this awful scene of poverty, dead children, all these beggars. Beggars.
And she just has a days-long freakout about it. Right? It's like a... In a very, like, quote-unquote white woman way. Right, right. Liberal tears. But there, in any case, right, this problem of... I think it's... I think Faludi is totally right to point out that culture as an especially, like, sort of
During the Greta Gerwig move of like, I'm going to try to sneak my messages into this movie that is, at the end of the day, an ad for Mattel, how could it not be, right? That there are trade-offs. But I think that's only a metaphor for the larger problem of what art can do about politics at all.
I think one of the points is that there's this oscillating between empowerment and disempowerment, right? Like, where are we with this figure? Is it giving us more as women, right? Is it giving us more power, more agency, more strength? Or is it just like another clever way to...
To be kept within the realm of, you know, not the realm of politics. Well, it's funny. I think at its best, these representations, almost like what they teach us is contained within your question. Because it seems to me that one of the big sort of even more generalizable lessons of this
trope, let's say, is that what we think is a step forward, what we think is positive, is often a kind of feedback loop that takes us back, right? The premise of Barbie is that she is an invention that thinks that she has helped. Bella is, after all, an agent of a kind of science. I mean, if we want to zoom all the way back out,
Most of us believe that the work of Roe v. Wade was done. I think if that is a message that we could all grasp for many reasons across our culture, that like a step forward is not a permanent thing. The rug can be pulled out at any moment. If we could all learn that, I think that would be a positive.
That would help us. Oh, okay. That's great. Yeah, that's very interesting, Vincent. I mean, when I'm thinking about the doll and the figure of the doll, it also has to do with this big American idea of agency and selfhood and rugged individualism. You know, one thing that these doll movies all have to do with is the idea of what is free will and what is willed by those who pull the strings, you know? And to a degree, these are questions that all of us have to reckon with, like,
There is – if we're all dolls, then as Barbie shows, there is power in banding together and actually changing the circumstances that we operate under and determining that we have to be in control of – we have to be the ones doing the controlling. But on her own, a single doll may believe that she is doing things that she wants to do. She wants to go to the mall because this is the purest expression of her true selfhood. Well, no. No.
No. No. Yeah. Quote, unquote, I'm doing it for myself. Feminism. Right. I'm doing it for myself. Feminism, me time, feminism, you know, whatever. All things that are good, maybe in small doses, but a greater political will needs to be activated. And we are actually seeing it being activated across the country as, you know, abortion does become this huge issue for the 2024 election. So in a lot of ways, you know, I don't know about the good versus bad.
bad question. I like to dodge those kinds of questions sometimes. And simply say that... That dodge is called criticism. Yeah, that dodge is called criticism. Well, simply, I would like to simply say that I think that these huge, frankly, utterly existential questions are showing up in the guise of some really clever entertainment and are giving us new ways to think about things that actually matter a lot to our lives.
Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award-winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.
