We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams...
Barbie is a toy; and, also quite a bit more than a toy.
She's a feminine symbol, maybe even an idol—or a fetish object—and soon to be
the latest nostalgia-baiting IP cash-out movie.
In the interactions between these different functions,
the image is produced (or what I'm calling the image).The "Barbie image."
It's part of a whole modern mythology repeated and ritualized enough times such that it becomes real.
So I went to the movie theatre, a ritual site of the ancient world,
to consume another IP cash-out film. And during the trailers, before the
movie started, I caught a glimpse of a few frames that looked like this:
"Welcome to the real world."
So reality itself has a boundary.
I may not be the target demographic for this film but when it comes to
bounded-reality-allegory films...? Okay Barbie you have my attention.
Side note: if the Barbie movie even looks in this direction I
will take back everything else I'm about to say.
So I started checking out the film's marketing. They want to advertise this as a real film—a
serious film—rather than, you know, the Barbie movie
So their marketing team came up with this line: "the script is the best I ever read."
[Chinese-Canadian Ken]: "Instantly I was like 'show me the script, right now, please. Read it,
it's one of the best scripts I've ever read—probably THE best script I've ever read."
[Barbie]: "This is so good"
[Caffeinated Child]: "She offers the role of Ken—"
[Other Canadian Ken]: "Yes. Best script I've ever read."
So they want to put this out there into the collective consciousness for the
summer that this is a real film, more than just the Barbie movie.
So keep up with me on this division here: a real film has acclaimed hipster writers;
a mere cash-out film could be written by chatGPT as I'm pretty confident this one was.
Oh and one more thing: its teaser was an homage to what's indisputably a real film:
See, marketing strategy is just associations or creating associations through sign-exchange. And
they're hoping some of that real film quality from 2001 rubs off on their IP cash-out.
This is the modern equivalent of casting a magic spell.
Everyone sort of knows an image or an imitation, a copy, when they see one
but there's still a question of what an image is and what's its
relationship to the thing that it represents. No one has finally answered that, I don't think,
despite working on it as a puzzle for, you know, two and a half thousand years
But images do have various types: there are simulacra or concrete copies; then optical
images like reflections; and then, importantly, there are mental images like dreams or fantasies.
And for real wars have been fought over images, so they can be dangerous.
And today of course we got more of them now than ever. So many
that it's hard to categorize what's a copy and what's an original anymore.
So that brings us to Barbie itself—herself—qua image, before the film even.
Barbie already straddles reality's boundary. She's sort of a parody of girls' imaginations
and at once both ideal and ordinary
both witch and wench
sexy but sexless
she can even be—
alright, no way am I touching that, nope.
Anyway, as desire, Barbie is both the projection and the screen. This can be dangerous.
Look, for example, what Barbie has done to this poor woman.
She's completely lost touch with reality.
Needless to say Barbie (the image) is a huge deal. She's got like 98% image recognition
and more than that even you can see the imaginary that she has produced looping on the screens...
One of the best selling Barbies of all time is Malibu Barbie, and hers
is now the reality of the sunny California coast, of reality TV, where America's image is perfected,
finally, at the very edge of the last frontier. California is where America's fantastic images of
itself are distilled and Malibu Barbie is California's fantastic image fulfilled...
At last: the last frontier.
It's plastic, it's magic, fantastic, girl-boss, and accessorizing— lots of accessorizing.
So this is the crucial question: Which here is copying which? Who is copying whom?
Which is the imitation and which is the original? Are these images
of anything at all? Or are they something more like a dream, spontaneously produced?
I've heard them say that Barbie gives little girl something to dream about,
and at least one person actually believes that's true,
You're not really supposed to believe that though it's just one of those things that everyone acts
out like they believe, like believing that the Barbie movie is a real film.
But what Barbie does determine in advance is that
the rest of that little girl's life will progress as a series of images.
Barbie is not something to dream about, because she is the dream:
that material fiction, that little fetish icon of the California coast as the site where all
dreams are produced... ...and reproduced...
...and reproduced...
The imaginary circuit here is already perfected images of images, and they loop in self-reference.
but this is my prediction, I haven't seen it yet, my prediction is that they're gonna
try to mess with this perfection, the perfection Barbie already has.
Malibu Barbie is going to become "self-aware" Barbie.
[Cynical Zoomers]: "We haven't played with Barbie since we were like five years old"
[Ted Lasso Barbie]: "Oh..."
She's going to explore nuance and depth and some existential desire
to find her reality's glass ceiling but don't worry because she won't, she can't
because to leave the California coast is to realize the whole
rest of the world has disappeared in the meantime. The film has no real outside:
it always comes first. Similarly reality TV doesn't represent anything.
So Barbie will drive down this highway only to realize that the real world is a desert
a ghost town, and to go anywhere is just to go back in the direction she came from.
I do think movie is gonna be an important cultural event though.
It's gonna tell you—I'm guessing—that we don't really live in the pink Barbieland California.
No we live in the REAL world, the COMPLICATED one, the thing is though our complicated one,
you know, the one that isn't pink? It's equally a fantasy emerging from a looping
chain of media events where you know you find your best self and your desires are already
all produced in advance by advertising slogans so even if this movie tries to
make Barbie a more "relevant" image by leaving some of the pink fantasy behind ultimately you
know it's just gonna exchange one regime of images for another regime of images.
Look at this, look at this, this is in the new trailer, so this is her red-pill-blue-pill moment:
[Demon Clown Morpheus]: "You can go back to your regular life,
or you can know the truth about the universe."
And what is the red pill?
A product placement. That is unequivocally awesome. Your choice of reality comes down
to a choice between products, and I love that.
Yeah Barbieland is not real—but neither is the "real" California coast.
When Barbie leaves Barbieland what she'll encounter is not reality but
film depictions that reference other media events: other films,
as we already know, but also whatever is going on in the "online discourse"
You gotta have that stuff in there that's the stuff the critics will
love they'll call it "a bold, new, fresh take on a feminist icon"
and it'll probably give you a happy (though nuanced happy) ending with some comforting
reflective pseudo-feminist sales pitch that's by this point more real than real.
Losing Barbieland will be a little sad.
Seriously? what the hell is wrong with these bloggers?
Are you okay?
Losing Barbieland will be sad, though if it is an event,
if you want to go so far as to call it an event, it'll be more like the Pompeii eruption
where everything's frozen in place in one instant that's looped forever
not in molten ash though, in plastic, it's fantastic!
Either that or we're all surprised and the
Barbie film goes the Mulholland Drive route which would be wildly unexpected
[Canadian Ken]: "Best script I've ever read"
[Chinese-Canadian Ken]: "It's probably THE best
script I've ever read and BONKERS is—it does not even begin to—if only you knew!"
Can you imagine? I will offer a genuinely
gleeful retraction if that's the case. Scout's Honour. But we'll have to see.
If you want to watch a movie about California-the-dream
watch Mulholland Drive instead of this one.
That's it for this bite...
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Yeah actually next thing I am gonna put up there is a longer explanation of how I got
to the associations made in this video and the theory behind it more in depth,
so I'll see you there if this is the kind of stuff that interests you.
This has been your dose of plastic pills... thank you for the click