4-6 AM thoughts on madame bovary and barbie
Fully unedited, written on the plane ride to India. [statements in brackets are comments from a saner Ani]
I genuinely enjoyed the movie but...
Some ideas demand consideration. The weakest of these is the intrusive thought, propelled only by the taboo nature of the result. Stronger yet is the thought that one knows might result in an incredible story. Make strange deals with strangers that lead to strange places, and a good story will surely follow.
But sometimes, an idea itself animates you. A great muse descends from the heavens, and instead of whispering the sweet words of the divine they scream revelation straight into your brain. Reader, these muses haunt me. Never do they give me what I need, magnificent insights to the nature of my research. Those must be won in the trenches, platoons of ideas running into the firing lines of reality only to be shot down. No, what the muses send to me are instructions on the summoning of a mad god.
Reader, I recieved[sic] one of these at three AM, unable to sleep on the first leg of my journey to India. After reading the entirety of Madam Bovary in a single sitting, I watched the entire Barbie movie. This order made me realize something about the Barbie movie.
Barbie is not the protagonist of the Barbie movie.
Ah, you say. I know where this is going. He's about to claim that Ken is the protagonist. Of course not. Sure, Ken is the one who leads the musical number at the climax of the movie. Sure, Ken is a tragic character who starts in a place of emotional struggle, travels to a foreign land to find a solution for his ailment, brings it back to his people, is punished by gods (aka the real humans), and leaves his society to learn from his hubris. But Ken can't be the protagonist of a movie made in the 21st century: his personality flaws are real and terrible, and not the personality equivalent of "my greatness weakness is my desire to work hard." Even movies with villain protagonists must make their evil actions understandable and noble in a twisted way. What is noble about being a pathetic insecure loser who is incapable of helping themselves?
If not Barbie, and not Ken, then is it the Mom? Closer, but still no. The Mom only comes in midway through the script. The protagonist
The conflict of the Barbie movie is the war between desire and materialism. Materialism, of course, if the protagonist.
[Looking back at this, I want to fix the trailing sentences of an addled mind, the glaring spelling errors everywhere, and the abominable organization. But then the product would become a lie, and at odd hours of the night truth is far more important than correctness.]
What? (Barbie recap in some weird freudian class lens idk I can feel the sun rising and I haven't slept)
What does the movie start with?
The Barbies in barbieland. Incorrect. Before that, a bunch of girls play with baby dolls and desire for more. Barbie is the answer to their desire, a doll that is more than just a baby. Barbie 'changed it all' 'again and again'.
Then Barbie the modern Barbie is defined as "she has her own money, her own house, her own car, her career." Barbie is purely defined materially: she is a human who is financially complete. All the positions one could want, all at once.
Barbie is the satiation of the desire for more in life with material object, and represents the sad completion of that desire. Cue to her going about her 'perfect' daily routine: she goes through the motions of what should make her happy empty of any of the positive aspects associated with them. She showers without the pleasure of hot water on skin; enjoys a breakfast without food or drink, and while she has uncountably many friends when she struggles none of them are able to support her.
Despite this, her days feel perfect. She doesn't know what a better life would be, and she has her own house , car, money, and career. What more could she want? Barbie is practically a boddhisatva, free from desire.
From this lens, Ken's villainous role comes in stark contrast. Ken's entire life is unrequited desire. Dangerous, destructive, but in the idealized society of Barbieland powerless. He is bereft of any material possessions save a surfboard: he has no house, no car, no career save beach, and we can assume no money.
This situation is stable for several reasons. First, Ken has no power to realize his desires. The girl of his dreams, the one he is madly in love [This sentence remains uncompleted, but its completion is core to the argument. You must fill it in, reader, for my doing so would make this less like incoherent sleepless rambling] . Second, Ken has no power to change himself or his station. No monetary power to build his own life (starting with a house), no political power to enact larger scale change, and no intellectual power to think of what could be. All the Kens are uneducated simpletons, good for dancing and cheerleading. Life goes on with unevenly distributed material wealth successfully preventing anyone from pursuing their desires in potentially materially destructive ways.
However, this utopia is broken by the introduction of suffering by those with the means to solve their problems. Barbie body degrades slightly, she leaves1 Barbieland, Ken sneaks on her car, they go to the real world, encounter sexism, and split. Barbie gets dressed down by the Tween2, and Ken discovers Patriarchy.
Ignore everyone else for now, what happens next? The preestablished idiot manages to convert the entire country to Patriarchy through unintentional brainwashing, and through this starts to achieve his desires. But his desires never cover his insecurities, and so despite having much of what he wanted he is still unhappy. Desire is a villain never sated, and it takes and takes and takes from others without providing true happiness, which is of course entirely encapsulated by material comfort and nothing else.
On the other hand, Barbie does everything in her power to recover the status quo. She loses her house, and everyone loses their career. With the support of the corporate overlords, she regains political and economic hegemony by making the Ken's fight amongst themselves.
Desire runneth over in Barbieland. Barbie's house can either be entirely hers or it could be anything else. The entire governing system can be entirely female or it could be anything else. These conflicts affect the desire of the real world, but in the real world the corporate overlords can Fully Meet Desirous Demand by producing Mojo Dojo Casa Houses or Barbie Houses as needed. In the real world, material production can match any desire, no matter how large or numerous or overindulged. Ken is depraved: he wants something of another person. He wants something that can never be directly sated by material.
He wants a place in the life of someone he loves.
Of course, if it were just that then one could equivalently say the the story if Barbie vs Ken. This is where the Mom comes in.
What does the Mom desire? The Mom, like any career mother in modern society, wants it all. She wants her composed side acknowledge in the corporate world, her loving side acknowledged by her daughter, and her weird side acknowledged by anyone.
Mom, unfortunately, has a career/house/car/money and still isn't happy. There's something missing from her life, a desire yet unplugged.
The Dad and the Tween are the angel and devil on her shoulders. The Dad knows how to solve any problem with material and sans human interaction. Instead of learning Spanish from his fluent family members, he learns (poorly) through duolingo.3
The Tween, on the other hand, is an incredibly social creature. She is depicted surround by her clique, and is well established in the pecking order of the school, close to the top. She is not swayed by the promise of Barbie, and would rather give away her toys than store them unused so the corporate overlords can produce more value by selling more product.
How does this plot resolve? The Mom finds her solution. She creates a product whose ownership would satisfy her desires: the ordinary Barbie. She earns the respect of both her corporate overloads and her daughter, all by just being herself.
I legitimately stared at this word and had to think if the thing on the tree and the present tense of left are spelled the same [I wish this was a joke]
In the metaphorical sense you freak [is using a common phrase a metaphor?]
Were I more a Freudian I would say that the inability to speak her language is a symbol of her inability to satisfy her [these comments were also written at 4am. apologies]