Barbie: A Painfully Honest Beautiful Impossibility

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

The “Barbie” movie was a wonder – I say this without exaggeration.  An exploration of pop culture, gender, identity, and humanity with an exceptional cast and amazing visuals, it deserves all the praise it’s gotten ad then some.  I expect it will be the focus of viewing parties, re-releases, and film class studies.

Yes, it’s that good.  It is also a surprise it’s that good because this movie is one with baggage.  Barbie the property brings in issues of sexism, merchandising, strange choices, and often being low-hanging fruit for mockery.  It could have easily failed, or just been a mildly fun ephemera if the people behind it played it safe.

They didn’t, they leaned into the very large load of issues Barbie brings with her, turning all the challenges of making a film about her into the movie.  “Barbie” is good because it’s incredibly honest about the flaws in what it’s based on, and that is what the story is about.

“The poison becomes the medicine,” as the Buddhist saying goes.  So let’s look at why it works – and yes there are spoilers, if you haven’t seen it yet, just go do it.

Barbie as a toy is aspirational, presenting a woman who can be in any profession, but bears a legacy of sexism.  Barbie is still the slim consensus-pretty woman even if she’s been President.  The movie leans into this, ranging from the character of Barbie finding she and her friends didn’t fix the world, to Barbie being told to her face all the negative things she represents.  The ambiguity of Barbie the toy is dealt with in the film directly to the point that the doll herself gets told off.

Barbie is also the subject of decades of blatant merchandising, with new Barbies, new accessories, and more – indeed this movie has its own merchandise.  The movie of course mocks and calls this out in many ways: conversations, showing Barbie’s ridiculous accessories, to Mattel executives (led by a wonderful Will Ferrel) seeing dollar signs from new ideas.  The film never lets you forget it knows what it’s based on, admits it while celebrating the good of Barbie, and mocks the hell out of it’s origins.

If you want to talk merchandise, you have to talk Ken, because the Barbie-Ken pairing is what people expect.  However, what do you do with Ken who is, basically, an accessory?  You turn his own issue of identity, where he forever craves Barbie’s attention yet has no life of his own.  When Ken finds the patriarchy of our world, he imports it back to Barbieland, to seize control in a sad attempt to be empowered and to matter.  Ken is the villain.

When the film dives into patriarchy it is brutally hilarious, as various Kens try to adapt the signifiers of self-destructive macho swagger from our culture.  Their antics are knee-slappingly funny, but also disturbing as these plastic men lean into posturing and the omnipresent hint of violence.  The human women who become involved in Barbie’s adventures are brutally honest about the sexism they deal with – but also find a way to turn that knowledge into a way to defeat the Kens.

But “Barbie” isn’t just about these issues.  It deals with everything from the value of play to questions of humanity versus immortality.  “Barbie” uses a famous plastic doll to cram in enough ideas for three films.  There’s “going hard” and then there’s whatever Greta Gerwig did in this film.

This is all pulled off by a stellar cast that – and I cannot emphasize this enough – deserve multiple Oscars.  Margot Robbie delivers an incredibly nuanced performance.  Ryan Gosling turns living-accessory Ken into a complex and messed-up character.  There’s not a single actor who isn’t “on” in this movie.

Like I said, it’s good.

It is a strange, funny, disturbing, hilarious movie about a popular doll.  It could not have been these things and done it so well if it had played nice or avoided controversy.  But fortunately for us, “Barbie” is about all the flaws and ambiguity surrounding the toy and it’s world, and that’s why it’s a truly good film.

It’s a movie that celebrates Barbie by being about everything wrong about her and our world – and that’s an achievement.

Steven Savage

When Good Things Are Bad Ideas

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In Project Management there’s something called the Iron Triangle or the Project Management Triangle.  A project has to balance between Time, Scope, and Cost to keep up quality.  You can have two the way you want at best, but the third will become unpredictable, unlimitable, or you’ll have to accept some serious changes.

If you want things done your way on time, get ready for it to cost more.  If you want something at a set cost and scope, get ready for time to get a might out of control.  If you want things on time and for a set cost, get ready to reduce your scope.  Play too fast and loose and things will fall apart.

We’re taught that doing things Fast (time), Accurately (Scope), and Cheap (cost).  But those things aren’t always good and can’t always be done together.  We Project Managers remind people of this again and again, often with “I told you so.”

Which leads me to our current crisis in social media where everything is, well, rather dumb.  I have no idea where the hell Twitter is actually going.  Facebook keeps trying new things, but the core experience is kinda ad-filled and unpleasant.  There’s not a lot of innovation out there, and it’s becoming more and more clear we’re the product.

But when you think of the Iron Triangle it all makes sense.  Social Media companies want to have it all ways – making money (cost) do everything to keep people and advertisers (scope) and do it all fast (time).  As people like me constantly remind folks you cannot do this.

Sometimes cheap, effective, and fast are bad ideas.  My job – my own habits – lead me to wanting to be cheap, effective, and fast and I know they’re not always good.

Social media is “free” but the money has to come from somewhere and people invested in it want to make money.  This means the enshitification we’ve seen is near inevitable.  People don’t want to pay, advertisers aren’t always happy, and executives want to make the big bucks.  That may not be sustainable.

Cost is a problem in social media (and that cost isn’t always money).

Social media has to provide some service but there aren’t a lot of new ideas (look at all the Twitter clones), and way too much seems to be well we got used to it.  I’m suspicious that a lot of social media we love now is habit not it’s stuff we actually need.  Throw in companies trying to do everything or anything regardless if it can work or people want it?

What’s the scope for social media?  Hell, who’s the real customer?  The users aren’t exactly unless you charge appropriately and that brings in the cost problem.

Finally, sure social media is efficient in some ways – you do a lot, fast, in a unified interface.  Sure technology lets us deliver features fast.  But is fast good?  Who needs new features we don’t care about?  Is it really vital we be able to reply immediately to someone’s movie opinions?  So we need to do everything from one app that’s also potentially vulnerable?

What’s the real timeframe we need with our social media – if we need social media as we know it now?

Social Media has walked face-first into the Iron Triangle which would normally collapse projects and businesses.  But they got enough of a footprint, did enough right at first that they can keep going, maybe forever.  But at best right now a lot of them are a mix of pet projects and money extraction machines, and maybe lawsuit fodder.

Some of us might even get to say “I told you so.”  Well, more than we have.

Steven Savage

Wondering How Long We’ll Care

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

We’ve got the SAG-AFTRA strike.  Big Studios and groups like Netflix seem to be very interested in replacing real people with AI – and we know they won’t stop no matter the deals made.  Ron Pearlman and Fran Drescher are apparently leading the Butlerian Jihad early.

As studios, writers, and actors battle I find myself caring about the people – but caring far less about the media produced.  There’s so many reasons not to care about Big Media.

You’d think I’d be thrilled to see Star Wars, Marvel Comics, and Star Trek everywhere!  But it’s so many things are omnipresent it sucks the oxygen out of the room.  Even when something is new, it can be overhyped.  If it’s not everywhere, it’s marketed everywhere and I get tired of it all.  Also damn, how much anime is there now?

The threat of AI replacing actors and writers removes that personal connection to actors and writers and creators.  There was already a gap anyway as groups of writers created shows and episodes, abstracting the connections with the creators.  The headlong rush into AI only threatens to make me care less – I can’t go to a convention and shake hands with a computer program or be inspired to write just as good as a program.

We have plenty of content made already anyway.  I could do with a good review of Fellini, maybe rewatch Gravity Falls again, and I recently threatened to watch all of One Piece for inexplicable reasons.  Plus of course I have tons of books.

Finally, there’s all sorts of small creators new and old I should take a look at.  Maybe I don’t need the big names anymore.  Hell, the small creators are easier to connect with.

Meanwhile all of the above complaints are pretty damned petty considering the planet is in a climate crisis and several countries are falling apart politically and economically.  I’m not going to care about your perfect AI show when the sky turns orange because of a forest fire.

I have a gut feel I’m not alone in the possibility of just kind of losing interest in the big mediascape.  We may have different triggers for giving up, but there’s a lot of possible triggers.  Plus, again, potential world crises create all sorts of possibilities.

Maybe that’s why the “Barbenheimer” meme was so joyful, with people discussing these two very different films as a kind of single phenomena.  It was spontaneous, it was silly, it was self-mocking.  Something just arose out of the big mediascape (and two apparently good films), a very human moment it seems we’re all too lacking.

Maybe it’s a reminder we can care about our media.  But it the chaotic times we face in a strange era of media, I wonder if we’ll remember it as a fond exception.

Steven Savage