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After a turbo-charged, months-long advertising marketing campaign, Barbie was lastly launched in theaters this week. In between dance routines and jokes, the film invitations us to ask questions on feminism and the strains between commerce and artwork.
First, listed below are three new tales from The Atlantic:
All the Sides of Barbie
Over the years, Barbie has been many issues: an emblem of unattainable magnificence requirements, a profession lady, an embodiment of the male gaze, an inspiration for younger women. This summer time, Barbie is the place to be. My afternoon screening of the film in Brooklyn yesterday was bought out, filled with delighted folks sporting pink. To perceive what’s driving the film’s ubiquity this summer time, and to debate how the movie handles feminist themes, I known as Shirley Li, a tradition author at The Atlantic.
The following accommodates mild spoilers for Barbie.
Lora Kelley: I’ve seen Barbie all over the place this summer time—on billboards, at a pop-up in Manhattan, blanketing my Google search-result pages in pink. Is this sort of advertising marketing campaign regular for a summer time blockbuster? Or is there one thing particular about this challenge?
Shirley Li: The film is a giant swing for Mattel. I believe they’ve poured every little thing they will into its advertising marketing campaign. Mattel has been fighting the Barbie model for a number of years and was searching for a strategy to flip round Barbie’s cultural relevance. And Barbie occurs to be very enjoyable to market.
At the identical time, this sort of advertising push, a minimum of for giant summer time tentpoles, was par for the course earlier than the pandemic. The Hollywood strikes are an element right here as properly: The Barbie forged packed in as a lot promotion as they might on the press tour earlier than the SAG-AFTRA strike started final week.
Lora: Is Barbie a chunk of brand name advertising for Mattel, or is it a murals by Greta Gerwig?
Shirley: It’s form of model advertising for Mattel—and it’s additionally a murals from the writer-director Greta Gerwig. That’s one of many causes the movie is fascinating to me. It’s very self-aware of the truth that it’s a film a few product. But it argues for Barbie as not only a product, however a protagonist—somebody who deserves her personal heroine’s journey, and whose operate is to symbolize a model but in addition symbolize the best of womanhood to younger women. All of that will get wrapped up into this movie.
The movie invitations you to think about all the perimeters of Barbie. You can’t speak about your self with out speaking in regards to the issues that influenced you, and sometimes, these are issues that you’ve got consumed or purchased. We usually assume the issues that make us us are the issues we play with, devour, watch, and hearken to. We can turn out to be very possessive of these issues. At the identical time, we’re not utterly composed of them.
Lora: I’m interested by your ideas on whether or not and to what extent this can be a feminist movie.
Shirley: One of the Mattel executives stated that Barbie is “not a feminist movie.” Margot Robbie later responded to the sentiment like, What do you imply? I believe it’s a feminist movie, and I believe it actually tries to be nuanced about what feminism means. Early on, the Barbies consider that they reside in a feminist world. But their concept of feminism is flawed. They reside on this world through which Kens are second-class residents. There isn’t gender parity. The movie wrestles with this shiny concept of feminism that quite a lot of younger women had been bought. Being informed that you may be something is inspirational, however that’s not essentially truthful. That debate is what the movie invitations you to consider, however on the identical time, it’s squarely feminist.
Lora: You wrote an amazing article right this moment about America Ferrera’s monologue, which was a placing second within the movie. How did a severe monologue in regards to the challenges and contradictions of womanhood match right into a film that additionally has quite a lot of dance routines and enjoyable costumes and sparkles? Did Gerwig reach reconciling these energies?
Shirley: I believe it was profitable, as a result of I don’t assume a monologue that sobering would land the best way it wanted to land in a extra sobering movie. If the movie wasn’t so high-energy and colourful and bombastic, then that monologue would have come off as didactic.
What Greta Gerwig has carried out is put this speech inside a Trojan horse of a movie. In a meta approach, that’s true to the expertise that America Ferrera’s character is speaking about. For girls, with a purpose to succeed, you need to consistently negotiate your energy. Like, you need to play up this concept of not being too aggressive or threatening, so you need to giggle just a little bit. You maintain having to evolve to those expectations of how girls ought to act. Something that made me love that monologue—even when the issues the character was saying had been form of apparent—is that there’s no grand takeaway.
Lora: I’ve to ask, the place did “Barbenheimer” come from? Why is everybody speaking about seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer again to again?
Shirley: The easiest method I can put it’s that Barbenheimer is a phenomenon born out of the truth that two films that appear diametrically opposed to one another when it comes to fashion and performance and perceived target market are popping out on the identical time. One is a grim, somber biopic in regards to the father of the atomic bomb that’s three hours lengthy and comes from the quintessentially-boy-movie director Christopher Nolan. It has all these weighty concerns of morality, human nature, and hubris. And the opposite movie, a minimum of the best way it’s marketed, is that this glittery, poppy celebration of enjoyable directed by Greta Gerwig, whose movies have very a lot been about girlhood and womanhood.
Oppenheimer appears to be for individuals who need a movie about actuality, and Barbie appears to be for individuals who simply need fantasy. I believe that’s why folks have had a lot enjoyable mashing them up and making memes about them. For all of the dichotomies that these two movies symbolize, although, I believe in addition they share quite a lot of themes. They ask existential questions: How can we change concepts? What prevents us from changing into the most effective variations of ourselves? What makes us human?
Related:
Today’s News
- Former President Donald Trump’s classified-documents trial will start in May 2024, regardless of his request to delay proceedings till after the presidential election.
- James Barber, who was on Alabama’s loss of life row, was executed after the Supreme Court refused to dam his execution following a collection of botched deadly injections within the state.
- Police started making arrests associated to a video that went viral this week depicting two girls in Manipur, India, being sexually assaulted and compelled to parade bare by way of the streets amid ethnic clashes in May.
Evening Read
The Real Lesson From The Making of the Atomic Bomb
By Charlie Warzel
Doom lurks in each nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s residence workplace. A framed {photograph} of three males in army fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first look like two water heaters however are, actually, thermonuclear weapons. Resting in opposition to a close-by wall is a black-and-white print depicting the primary billionth of a second after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba. And above us, dangling from the ceiling just like the sword of Damocles, is a plastic mannequin of the Hindenburg.
Depending on the way you select to take a look at it, Rhodes’s workplace is both a shrine to awe-inspiring technological progress or a harsh reminder of its energy to incinerate us all within the blink of a watch. Today, it feels just like the nexus of our cultural and technological universes. Rhodes is the 86-year-old writer of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a Pulitzer Prize–successful e book that has turn out to be a form of holy textual content for a sure kind of AI researcher—specifically, the kind who believes their creations might need the facility to kill us all.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead’s newly launched sequel to Harlem Shuffle, is each powered and restricted by its most absorbing attribute.
Watch. For the non-Barbie followers right here, there’s all the time Oppenheimer, which is greater than only a creation fantasy in regards to the atomic bomb.
P.S.
I bear in mind being a child and watching a film in regards to the deep sea on 3-D in an IMAX theater in Chicago. We strapped on these nerd glasses and felt ourselves surrounded by fish and reefs. I took that have without any consideration. So I used to be shocked to study that there are solely 19 film theaters within the United States the place you may see Oppenheimer in IMAX 70-millimeter. The Washington Post estimated that folks in massive swathes of the nation are greater than a three-hour drive from the closest theater screening the film on this format. Of course, the film may be watched in different codecs in varied film theaters. But Christopher Nolan informed the Associated Press that when he shoots movies reminiscent of Oppenheimer on IMAX 70MM movie, “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled.”
— Lora
Katherine Hu contributed to this text.