Barbie: Greta Gerwig Summits The Glass Cliff
For many women, Barbie is little more than a symbol of misogyny and impossible beauty standards. An insidious reminder to little girls everywhere that their looks will always be more important than their intellect.
Director Greta Gerwig was given an almost impossible task in making this film – a glass cliff, as they call it in the corporate world. To rehabilitate Barbie’s image for a feminist audience, while acknowledging the doll’s problematic past. Yet she has negotiated this precarious tightrope without toppling over the edge, performing a feat almost unheard of – a billion dollar phenomenon that is also critically acclaimed.
Selling Matriarchal Dreams
The film starts by showing life in Barbieland, where the dolls live alone in their own houses and hold all the top jobs in the land – President, Judge, Astronaut etc. Men, or Kens, live in this world of Barbies (but no one knows where) and hold no power professionally or domestically.
Anyone who has played with Barbies knows there is rarely a Ken on the scene, and very few girls would even own a Ken doll. For many years, Mattel attested that their relationship was purely platonic, too. His superfluity is a running joke, hence the film’s tagline ‘Barbie is everything, he’s just Ken.’
We start to see that in a way, Barbie is a feminist icon. She can have any career she wants, and gets to the top. She has no domestic responsibilities for children or men. Female friendship and community are her main focus, while Kens are an afterthought left on the sidelines.
Who Runs The World?
You might almost find yourself thinking – a world run by one gender, what a crazy idea! But Gerwig says wake up sheeple, this is already happening. Disturbed by sudden thoughts of death and cellulite, Barbie accidentally triggers a portal into the ‘real world’. Barbie (and Ken) discover the Patriarchy, where men have all the top jobs and hold all the power. Sadly, the dreams Barbie sold to us were never real. Even Barbie’s parent company Mattel has only had three female CEOs in its nearly 80-year history – perhaps they faced glass cliffs of their own?
As Barbie looks for the source of her discontent, a high schooler tells her that she has achieved nothing for women today and even held the feminist movement back.
‘Men hate women and women hate women – it’s the one thing we can all agree on.’
While Barbie is horrified, Ken can’t wait to bring Patriarchy to Barbieland and quickly gets to work reversing the world order. Barbie’s Dream House is now Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, a Western style saloon crossed with a children’s gaming arcade. Horses are everywhere too, as simple-minded Ken is endearingly confused about their role in the patriarchal system.
What Was She Made For?
So far the film has exceeded expectations in its subversive questioning of the misogyny Barbie has come to represent. Gerwig struggles to deliver a satisfying ending however, leaving us with some mixed messages.
Barbie has reclaimed Barbieland, telling Ken that he needs to focus on himself (because she doesn’t need him financially or emotionally). But for some inexplicable reason, Barbie then decides she wants to leave Barbieland to be a real woman in the real world.
In a somewhat drawn out epiphany scene, a dreamy montage shows what seems to be a romanticised mother-daughter relationship. Billie Eilish’s haunting What Was I Made For? swells in the background. Then in the last scene, Barbie arrives back in the real world, and her first order of business is.. a trip to the gynaecologist.
For all her career aspirations, rejection of men and domestic servitude, is Barbie’s final goal actually motherhood? Maybe that’s the joke. After all, it’s the one job she hasn’t tried yet.
Men: Alex Garland Takes a Shot at the Patriarchy
Can’t live with them, can’t live without them?
Between March 2021 and March 2022, 198 women were killed in the UK. Ninety-five percent of the suspects charged were male. In his latest film, Alex Garland explores the horror of misogyny, in a quintessentially English setting. Jessie Buckley plays Harper, a woman who sees the gruesome aftermath of her husband’s suicide after she suggests they divorce. Escaping to a manor house in the countryside, she experiences a sort of purgatory where all of the residents are men and their abusive behaviour escalates from unsettling to threatening and finally, violent.
Are We the Bad Guys? Alex Garland Takes Eco Horror In a New Direction with Annihilation
Those of a certain age might remember Alex Garland from The Beach and 28 Days Later. Since then he’s been on a sci-fi/horror hot streak with Ex Machina, Annihilation and his most recent film ‘Men’.
Despite the star power of Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac and Tessa Thompson, Annihilation was a commercial flop, flying under the radar with a limited release in cinemas. It’s now a cult favourite, with fans attesting that it follows in the footsteps of some of the greatest sci-fi films ever made, with echoes of 2001, Blade Runner, Alien and Under the Skin.
Olivier Assayas Looks Beyond the Male Gaze
French director Olivier Assayas has been associated with the New French Extremity movement, known for transgressive films such as Demonlover (2002). He began his career as a more rebellious, anti-establishment figure working with alternative, underground bands such as Sonic Youth. Now, as a veteran of the industry, he has perhaps reluctantly joined the mainstream, collaborating with Twilight star Kristen Stewart on his recent films Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria.
While Assayas may have mellowed since the quirky days of Irma Vep, his focus on the feminine continues. In many of his films, he looks at the inner, private life of women – their hopes, fears and desires. Some might find this disconcerting and even offensive, as how can a man really understand what women experience? Somehow, Assayas sees more than we might expect, focusing on themes of women’s relationships, anxiety over the ageing process and societal expectations of femininity.
Guillermo del Toro – New Book Looks Inside the Mind of a Legendary Director
Artwork by James Jean, created for the launch of The Shape of Water Dark fairy tales, gothic horror, amphibious love stories and Spanish Civil War history – surely no other director has spanned quite so many genres while achieving this level of critical success. A fan since Pan’s Labyrinth, I was thrilled to read a new, in-depth look at the work of visionary auteur Guillermo del Toro.
Empire magazine film critic Ian Nathan explores Del Toro’s early years in Mexico and his beginnings in special effects, before looking at each of his films in detail. From his debut vampire fable Cronos and the chilling Devil’s Backbone, to the dark allegory of Pan’s Labyrinth, gothic romance of Crimson Peak, Oscars smash The Shape of Water and everything in between.
Saint Maud: A damning indictment of societal collapse
Saint Maud poster by Jack Hughes Saint Maud from debut director Rose Glass might be advertised as another jump-scare horror film, but in reality it’s a complex allegory and at its core, a damning indictment of our society. (Warning – spoilers ahead!)
Maud (whose real name is Katie) is a young woman who started her a career as a palliative care nurse at St Afra’s hospital. We later find out she lived a promiscuous lifestyle during this time, using sex as a temporary outlet for her stressful job and loneliness. After a traumatic incident, which it’s inferred is the result of overwork and lack of support, she loses her job and starts working for a rich private client (Amanda) who is dying from cancer.
Review: PTA’s Master-Piece & The Cult of Corporate America
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
George Orwell“The victim of mind manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.”
Aldous Huxley“Thou shalt be free
The Tempest
As mountain winds: but then
exactly do
All points of my command.”I finally got round to watching The Master which I’d somehow missed and yes, it is a masterpiece. On the face of it, a WWII veteran with PTSD struggles with the transition to civvy street, drifting from job to job and succumbing to serious alcoholism, before being taken in by a manipulative cult leader who examines people’s past lives. (Loosely based on the infamous L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology.)
Antkind: Charlie Kaufman Kills the Inner Critic
Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has described his debut novel Antkind as his ‘big book of jokes’, but of course it’s much more than that.
Primarily it seems to be a device for him to torture a film critic of his own making – named B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. This irredeemable character has all the cliché character flaws you might expect in a film critic – he’s pompous, self-aggrandising, and almost completely lacking any self-awareness.
Midsommar – The Truth Behind the Twisted Fairy Tale
In many European countries, the Summer Solstice has traditionally been linked to pagan fertility rites and the anticipation of a fruitful harvest. In Sweden, one of the many beliefs linked to this time was that if a girl picks seven different flowers on the midsummer night and puts them underneath her pillow, she will dream of her future husband.
Charlie Kaufman is Life
Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman is known simply by some for creating quirky, out of the box concepts. Armchair philosophers and film school nerds on the other hand, would argue he serves devastating truths about the human condition. Truths through the lens of white male privilege of course, but truths nonetheless. (I’m on the side of the armchair experts and film nerds by the way.)
Fans will be hugely excited to learn that he has a debut novel due for release in July 2020. Available to pre-order now, Antkind is ‘a searing indictment of the modern world’ and ‘a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself―the grain of truth at the heart of every joke’. Funny, because that’s how you could describe many of his films, too. In anticipation of Antkind, I was compelled to reappraise the work of this somewhat underappreciated genius.
Synecdoche, New York
After multiple re-watches, I still haven’t fully cracked this one and I think that’s the point. Like life, you’ll never fully understand its whole meaning. You might come very close, but then you’ll die. I won’t offer my theories here, as like any work of art, people will take their own meaning from it. And there is almost too much to understand in this film – every frame, let alone every scene, has deeper significance that you won’t catch on the first watch. Even the title, Synecdoche, isn’t what it first appears.
We follow Philip Seymour Hoffman as a struggling theatre director named Caden Cotard (again, not just a name), who is trying to make a play that will be his magnum opus. He attempts to capture the truth of all (his own) life experience through art, but the art ends up mirroring or even recreating his life in minute detail. It gets bigger and bigger until the stage takes over the entire city. His life becomes indistinguishable from the art, which is a metaphor for Kaufman’s own experience in making this film.
One of my favourite elements of this is its dark humour. Caden’s love interest Hazel (Samantha Morton) buys a house that’s on fire. As she looks around with the realtor, her assessment is classic: ‘I like it. I do! I’m just really concerned about dying in the fire.’ Joking aside, this is an important point about Hazel’s character – unlike Caden, Hazel has accepted that one day she will die, but decides to enjoy what life has to offer anyway (even if it is a burning mess).
I could go on forever about this film, but there is one scene I absolutely have to mention. Later on in his production, Caden watches a funeral scene where the pastor (Christopher Evan Welch – taken before his time) delivers a moving and darkly funny speech concluding with ‘F everybody, Amen.’ At this point, another director has taken over from Caden and achieved what he had spent years trying to convey about life, in just two minutes. Even if you pass on the rest of the film, watch this.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Tennyson, not Shakespeare, said ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ Kaufman explores this concept in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is based on the idea of an invention that erases the memories of romantic relationships post break-up. The literary title is derived from an Alexander Pope poem, Eloisa to Abelard, which contemplates lost love.
The end is in the beginning – our protagonist, Joel (Jim Carrey), has already broken up with Clementine (Kate Winslet) when they meet and embark on a relationship. With his memories erased, he goes on to make the same ‘mistake’ again. There lies the conceit of the film – if we have our memories erased, we lose the pain but we also lose the joy, and we will never learn from our mistakes. Wasn’t it a worthwhile experience to meet Clementine, to open up and learn more about himself, even if it didn’t end well?
Being John Malkovich
So, on first look this sounds like the acid-induced fever dream of a deranged lunatic. Essentially, the premise is that an unemployed puppeteer (John Cusack) takes up residence in the mind of actor John Malkovich in order to achieve romantic and career success. It might seem bizarre and meaningless at first, but then you find yourself asking the question – are we just meat puppets being inhabited by some enduring consciousness, entirely incongruous with our physical form..?
Adaptation
This film features Nicholas Cage. (I really wanted to end the review there because, sold.) In arguably the best performance of his career, Cage plays Charlie Kaufman himself, trying to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (great book, worth reading) into a screenplay. Writer’s block is a central theme as the neurotic ‘Charlie’ finds it impossible to adapt this book, while his twin brother Donald (who is much more ‘simple’ in every way) picks up screenwriting and runs away with it immediately. He completely changes the meaning and content of the original work – adding in multiple clichés, drugs, sex and an alligator fight. All of this is of course an ironic comment on the Hollywood machine – what sells isn’t necessarily ‘good,’ true or meaningful, and conversely, watching a screenwriter struggle over his art doesn’t make good entertainment. I’m not saying this is a bad film, it’s a film about making a bad film!
One of the highlights has to be Brian Cox’s impassioned rant: “Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!” Charlie looks up, destroyed, and mutters: “okay.. thanks.”
I have yet to see Kaufman’s latest film, Anomalisa, because the puppets creep me out, but I’m looking forward to I’m Thinking of Ending Things, due to be released this year and I will definitely be reading Antkind.
“We’re all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die. Each of us secretly believing we won’t.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York