Life in plastic, not so fantastic

Subjects discussed: Online misogyny, Barbie, movies for children, girlbosses, Velvet Goldmine, David Bowie

The internet is an incredibly misogynist place, because the world is an incredibly misogynist place. It’s not new, or original, to point this out. It’s like saying: “Hey, you know what’s hella bright? The sun.” I am a man, and I am making a secondhand observation that replicates what hundreds of millions of women already know firsthand. But it’s still surprising to log online and see how many people really do relish their hatred of women. It’s common to find young men openly mocking the concept of the WNBA, or the concept of body positivity, or the concept of a sex worker having an opinion about relationships. Online misandry, as a phenomenon that sprouted online during the Obama years and was often cited in bad faith as an example of “how the feminist movement hates men,” was almost always rooted in irony and/or sarcasm — sometimes a tedious irony and/or sarcasm, sure, but the subtext was there. But these guys are not making jokes, beyond the arrogance of “what I’m saying is obviously funny because it’s obviously true.” It’s simply just “I hate women, and find them beneath me.” There is a genuine vitriol that contains a vein of offense — like it is simply fucking ridiculous for anyone to believe that Sue Bird is good at basketball, or worth watching.

I thought about this as Jen and I were watching Barbie, which we both broadly enjoyed — particularly the bits with Ryan Gosling, whose faces and line readings still make me giggle, a few days later. I know it’s not very critically rigorous to greet the aesthetic and political contradictions of a piece of art with the “eh, whatever” hand-waving of the inveterate wine drinker. I had some hangups, sure. But it’s pretty impressive to make a monocultural movie with a perspective that isn’t total slop. Seriously, look at the list of the highest-grossing movies of all-time — most of them are steaming heaps of worthless imagery and incoherent ideas. (My exceptions, in the top 20: the James Cameron films and Black Panther. I haven’t seen the Frozen movies or Top Gun 2. I was going to include The Lion King before I realized it was the live-action one and got very upset.) Barbie is going to make over a billion dollars, and it’s going to be seen all over the world, with a clear-cut and basically interesting perspective of: “Hey, women are complex and worthwhile.”

I won’t say if this is a “good thing,” when you factor in the usual caveats of “this is a Hollywood entertainment” and “this is a toy commercial” and “movies can’t change people’s minds” and “we are drowning in Barbie-derived microplastics.” It certainly doesn’t mean you should like the movie, if you didn’t. And “women are complex and worthwhile” is such a basic idea that I’m laughing, ha ha ha, can you believe this is the standard for pop culture in 2023 — the floor is through the cellar, as they say. (Nobody says this, perhaps.) But when I think about how hostile the world is to women, and consider the scale of the movie’s success and appeal, I weigh that just a bit more than my own tastes. (For what it’s worth, I think Oppenheimer is a better movie — but then again, Oppenheimer doesn’t have “I’m Just Ken.” Tough call.) I don’t want to sound like some wack ass performative ally or white knight or whatever, when I say this; it’s just how I feel.

A funny thing about the modern superhero movie is that even though superhero comic books are mostly for kids, the adaptations are increasingly not. An eight-year-old is not the target audience for watching Peter Sarsgaard get his head blown off by a bomb. At the same time, these grown-up, gritty superhero movies — The Batman, the Zack Snyder Justice League, Joker — are not super sophisticated. A slightly mature eight-year-old could probably follow along, provided their parents were okay with the violence. But the Barbie movie, also about a children’s toy, is relatively advanced. I suppose more and more kids know about the patriarchy, but many of the jokes and observations are specifically aimed at adults. Our audience was entirely adults, too, with not a child in sight. And this is by design, of course: The movie’s emotional throughline concerns the real-life human played by America Ferrera, who grapples with her identity as a woman. Her cynical tween daughter accompanies this journey, but her arc is just about realizing her mom is a complete person.

America Ferrera’s character works at Mattel, Barbie’s parent corporation, whose executives (led by Will Ferrell) are rendered as man-childish buffoons. But even though Ferrera is a corporate flack, she’s never treated with derision. In fact, she has the movie’s central monologue, an epic speech about the difficulties and contradictions of being a woman that ends up being the key to un-brainwashing the Barbies. Here’s an easy critique: It’s very telling that our sympathetic human lead is a jaded would-be girlboss, whose frustrations stem from how hard it is to be everything all at once. “What about the women who’ve made their peace with all that, and just want to be,” you might say. “What about the women who never had a chance in the first place?” And I get that; it’s not perfect. But then I laugh at how rare it is, these days, that a tentpole blockbuster movie actually inspires debate and critique. Like, nobody is talking about the themes of fucking Avengers: End Game, or Jurassic World.

And, the more I think about it, the more the movie seems like an explicit elegy for the mainstream feminism of the Obama era. An attempt to come to terms with all those deferred dreams, and accept the validity of being “ordinary.” Older millennials, of whom Greta Gerwig is one, came of age right as feminism seemed to make making real inroads in American power structures. Hillary Clinton was going to be president, and though her failure in 2016 is rightfully remembered as probably the most humiliating electoral defeat of all-time, she actually did win the popular vote by a gigantic margin.

But Trump’s election slammed the lid on all of that. It was a total rejection, filled with the offense and vitriol I mentioned above, of the idea that women were going to be in control. The idea that women would even have a semblance of control. This is just my own personal cultural history, but it’s also borne out by evidence and data: Explicit online misogyny really did spike post-Trump, because his election gave the men permission to admit, “Hey, I hate women.” And many of these women didn’t help matters by pursuing the same avarice and exploitation that landed many men in trouble. Sheryl Sandberg, Sophia Amoruso, Elizabeth Holmes, Ellen Degeneres, Audrey Gelman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, most recently Lizzo — all of these figures, and others like them, are in the mud, for how their pursuit of power ended up being their downfall (or, in RBG’s case, ours). You look at those old magazine covers about how Elizabeth Holmes was going to be the next Steve Job, and it just seems like rank delusion.

I won’t go so far as to say I empathize with Holmes, or anyone who looked up to her. But I broadly empathize with the shock that manifests upon looking back at a period of history, and realizing it’s gone. That part of life is over. After Trump won, and the girlbosses fell, this brand of corporate feminism swiftly became unpopular. In 2020, Kamala Harris became the first woman and Black person to be vice president, and it was treated with the ceremony of someone filling out a punch card at the coffee shop. This was just four years after Hillary put her entire strategy into “I’m With Her.” A lot of the jokes in Barbie, ergo, have that whiff of “Ha ha, can you believe how fucked up society actually is? Like, really? Can you believe how dumb we were?” It pokes fun at the naïveté of believing that gender equality could be achieved through linear progress, through the symbolism of one woman having a job. It’s a fictitious treatment of how people briefly thought about feminism, before the world swerved in a different direction. A time capsule, just as much as it is a breeding ground for debate and an advertisement for Ryan Gosling’s Oscar hopes.

Last week, we watched Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, which Jen had not watched since high school and which I had never seen at all. Obviously, I loved it. A movie about a journalist hunting for “the real story” at the heart of the ‘70s glam rock scene and its stars, who are loose analogues of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and the rest? Yes, yes, yes. Not a perfect movie, but a fun one. There’s one notable historical distortion: Brian Slade, the fictional Bowie, doesn’t actually sing any Bowie songs, because they were unable to get the rights. Bowie himself was allegedly working on his own movie about this era, and so Slade has to sing material by Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry, among others — a sleight of hand that doesn’t really work, because Bowie’s singular charm was his fusion of space oddity and human emotion, the way he really did seem like an alien who’d come down to Earth to live amongst its people. I love Here Come the Warm Jets, but you don’t get that from “Baby’s on Fire”; you think, “Hmmm, this guy’s a little disturbed.”

Bowie did not like the movie, which feels a bit territorial considering his would-be project. But Velvet Goldmine, for all its reverence of glam rock, is also pretty cynical about what that era amounted to. In its timeline, the fictional Bowie ends up becoming a corporate sellout, and a willing yes-man to an analogue for President Reagan. The neon colors and paisley patterns of the ‘70s fade into the earth tones and dark rooms of the ‘80s. (Which, in the movie, look like it could be set in the ‘90s, an even more “real” decade.) “We set out to change the world... ended up just changing ourselves,” Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor, playing Iggy Pop) tells the journalist. Asked what’s the matter with that, he replies: “Nothing, if you don't look at the world.” It’s a sour take on the idea that rock n’ roll opened minds and challenged norms and exploded culture. perhaps it did for the individual, but society remained largely the same. Reagan was president, and Thatcher was prime minister; the countercultural advances of the ‘60s and ‘70s were pretty firmly rejected by a plurality of normies who said, “hey, fuck all of that freak shit.” David Bowie got to be David Bowie; most of his fans had to settle for regular adulthood, in the regular world.

Velvet Goldmine, like Barbie, is an elegy for how some people used to think about the world. Those times are gone, and they’re not coming back. It’s melancholy, but it’s the way of most culture. The past is a graveyard of dead things that people used to care about, and don’t anymore. Sometimes, when I think about this, I’m swallowed up by a despair that no amount of lightness or pragmatism can shake off. But you have to accept it on your own terms, I think. Here’s László Krasznahorkai talking to The Paris Review, in a quote I almost used as the epigraph for my novel before I decided it was too long and, besides, a little too “did this mf really make Krasznahorkai his epigraph”:

LK: We don’t have any idea what the universe is. Wise people have always told us that this is proof you shouldn’t think, because thinking leads you nowhere. You just build over this huge construction of misunderstanding, which is culture. The history of culture is the history of the misunderstandings of great thinkers. So we always have to go back to zero and begin differently. And maybe in that way you have a chance not to understand but at least not to have further misunderstandings. Because this is the other side of this question—Am I really so brave to cancel all human culture? To stop admiring the beauty in human production? It’s very difficult to say no.

PR: You still write novels, though.

LK: Yes, but maybe that’s a mistake. I respect our culture. I respect high ­human articulation in every form. But the root of this culture is false. And if we do nothing, everything continues anyway. And maybe this is the most ­important thing. Everything must go on without any thinking about essences, about what it is, and other such questions.

Be well, friends.

Novel time novel time novel time

The impossibility of declaring the truth about anything, or anyone, is one of the explored ideas of See Friendship, the novel I sold last month that will be out in 2025. I apologize in advance, because I will probably mention it in every single newsletter I write until it comes out. But this is simply how it must be, and I know you’ll understand.

Professionally speaking

Next week, a piece I have worked on for over a year will be coming out. To say I am excited, and a little relieved, is to understate it.