The opium of the people is pink
If you enjoyed the repetitive didacticism of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, you will love the Barbie movie. Robert Tressell’s once famous novel dealt with the realities of class, but Barbie presents the more important reality of feelings.
Time was when ‘pink’ had been a way to describe the left-of-centre, politically. In this milieu, however, identity politics lets ‘pink’ be the way to satirise the demeaning result of becoming toys of capital. Whether class struggle comes to the fore in the film, though; is not clear.
The film is so arch and self-conscious that class becomes just another subject for irony (like the CEO’s ‘very real and important’ title). What really stands out from the narrative, perhaps, is that the only Alan in a world of Barbies and Kens turns out to possess martial arts training typical of Jason Statham. The film states its messages so baldly that it dares you not to laugh, and by laughing you join a clever club.
There was none of this feel-good in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Of that, there is over 700 pages, and had Tressell found a publisher, he could certainly have been given an editor. He died (in 1911) before publication (1914). In what is a very long book the anti-Christianity passages repeat themselves, as does the misery. By agreeing with Tressell, you join the immiserated. Not so Barbie.
In Barbie, the anti-religion theme takes the form of a new civic religion, secular humanism. Part of the reason that the film launches into irony right from the off is that it begins with a very funny nod to 2001. It follows that plot. Like 2001, Barbie ends with an individual human being transcending humanity, and a Nietszchean dream sequence made nice. In Barbie, the old person whom the human being encounters at journey’s end is a ghost, not a mystery.
That ghost is also the ghost of the creator. Ruth invented the Barbie doll and is all the ‘god’ that there is to Barbie. Near the end the two are filmed facing each other on a bare set, when Ruth disappears — and Barbie faces nothing. This is the final disenchantment of the world, in which humanity discovers itself, of course. A message that fuelled Stalinist atheistic communism has tactfully been sent like a chocolate.
It is not really a new joke, nor is it anything but orthodox, to depict God as a female person. God does this Himself, when in Scripture Isaiah uses the image of a woman in labour for the God who gives being to the world — or when Jesus compares himself to the mother hen who gathers her chicks. There is everything right about a story, be it Barbie’s or another’s, in which a human being discovers their true dignity — for God’s glory is (as St Irenaeus wrote) the human being fully alive. As human beings are the temple of God (says St Paul; living stones of a temple, St Peter says) Christianity finds no need to choose between God and humanity.
Also, it is massively encouraging that messages of hope should reach the cinema. In Bladerunner back in 1982, the humanoid was a robot, not a doll, but he had a ‘creator’ too. However, ‘the creator’ here turned out to be only a man — a simpering, bespectacled man (hardly Rutger Hauer). Rutger Hauer’s character murders him, in disgust and despair. As Stalinism, Nazism and Caligula showed, that is our fate when the human being sets himself up as God.
In Barbie, what the character finds is genuinely within her. God’s creating us and sustaining the world’s being does not mean a ‘toytown’ where we lack power of free will. Discovering that, is ‘realising’ it — in both senses. The Barbie message is a wholly orthodox and Christian teaching, whether the film’s makers or audiences realise that or not. A human being really can be ‘like gods’ (Psalm 82:6), so long as they do not sacrifice their true relationship with the actual God; only, God does not manifest Himself much in beauty treatments or boardroom suits.
Even Ken discovers that he has to become a person, regardless of focus on a woman. He’s good kenough. It is more Robert A Johnson (among Jungian authors) than Robert Bly, and certainly makes for a better offer than the reactionary male role models on display just now. The obligatory nod to reasonableness in the backlash has made fans of the film Barbie concede that it does depict men in a derogatory way. Its point is surely that all men and women degrade themselves in consumerism.
And this is why — apart from the question of pretty clunky style — the Barbie film recalled the Tressell book. Just as identity politics began to take over, in the 1980s, an old form of revolutionary socialism was falling apart. It was the Trotskyism that had resisted feminism — which morphed into a Trotskyism that accepted it. As women entered the workplace, they had played the role (‘objectively’, as socialists once said) of cheap labour. They were opposed by male workers as workers subsequently resisted (with no better morality) migration.
According to this Left analysis, feminism was a solvent for capitalism: and liberal feminism was just neoliberalism. The more enduring point has proved to be, perhaps, that the multiplication of identities and sub-identities based on factors we used to see as status rather than class has indeed distracted people from the social forces to which we are all subject — the logic of capital, and the perdurance of class. Many people argue once again that we should not be distracting ourselves from class structures through the other identities constructed around them.
As with free will, so with this realisation, to distract people is to lend reality to what they see, and to make what they turn from, seem impossible. We cannot imagine a better way to oppose the claims of capitalism than to pay to see a film about Barbie dolls. Debates about creators really are a false consciousness of what we’ve done there.
