Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon

Couched

Dear Friends,

I’m catching up on movies and sharing a couple of discussions. As usual on this Substack, the attempt is to think from a slightly broader perspective — whether aesthetic or historical — than is available from most criticism. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Samuel Lopez-Barrantes

shares an excerpt from his new novel and

Joshua Doležal

writes on Martin Luther King and the humanities.

Best,

Sam

BARBIE (2023)

dir. by Greta Gerwig, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, with Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken

I guess they really are an unlikely pair, Barbie and Oppenheimer, but whatever. They came out at the same time and broke all the box office records together and saved Hollywood together, so you sort of have to write about one with the other. 

And the way I’d think about Barbie and Oppenheimer is that they represent two rival, or at least divergent, aesthetic traditions. Oppenheimer is of course realism or, specifically, historical fiction. It’s based on a very real series of events and, to a surprising extent, it trusts in the audience’s ability to really get in under the hood of a pivotal moment in history — not so much the science, which is elided over in a series of Sorkinesque exchanges and the usual montages of hard-thinking physicists — but the nitty-gritty politics of the McCarthy era. I have this fantasy that Christopher Nolan made a bet with someone that he could get the teens of America caring about anything he wanted them to care about — and, sure enough, every 16-year-old in the nation spent the summer of 2023 thinking about Edward Teller’s relationship to the rest of the Los Alamos physicists and about Robert Oppenheimer’s Q clearance. But the strength of a project like this is supposed to be its relevance to our world, which, in the case of Oppenheimer, is two-fold: there’s the invention of the atomic bomb, which is still our seminal geopolitical event, and then there’s the much-discussed analogy to AI and the theme of runaway science. 

But, at the end of the day, Oppenheimer was a sort of high-budget History Channel program. Barbie is a much better movie. And the real reason is that its aesthetic tradition — I’m calling it The Imaginarium — is, at the moment, more robust. What I mean by The Imaginarium is ‘world-building,’ or a fantasy realm that’s adjacent to our own and in which the artistic creators get to create the rules any way they want to.

Transit in The Imaginarium

I’m not really sure what the aesthetic history of world-building is. Maybe the key event is the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and then some of the core ideas drifted into American imaginative space. But the sense is that world-building and fantasia have become steadily more important as a means of serious expression. Charlie Kaufman and Forrest Gump are a kind of world-building. Inglourious Basterds and Get Out are world-building. Barbie is a beautiful example of The Imaginarium aesthetic reached a very high level of maturity and with a tremendous amount of industry resource behind it.

What’s challenging about The Imaginarium — and is, I’m sure, very nerve-wracking for the creators, is that it doesn’t have the storytelling rules of some hallowed genre behind it. You don’t actually know where the turns are going to be in the way that you would with Oppenheimer — not so much because of the actual biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer but because any story of a scientist has to follow a particular Promethean arc, with a pairing of brilliant innovation and of bitter remorse. In The Imaginarium, the story creators are always fighting for structure and coherence — and there are moments in Barbie where they absolutely seem to lose the thread, just aren’t quite sure how to get all the different pieces to fit together. 

The story of Barbie turns out not to be, as initially advertised, the story of Barbie finding the sad girl who is playing with her (her connection with Gloria is kind of the weakest part of the film) or Barbie sealing up the rift between Barbieland and the real world. There’s the story of feminism — the whole film as a kind of symposium on the confused state of feminism in the 2020s. And then there’s the story of a relationship — Barbie and Ken working through a difficult moment in their dynamic and then concluding, essentially, that she’s just too emotionally mature for him. 

It’s not at all easy to get that plane to land, and Greta Gerwig and the film’s creators do so basically by means of a few throwaway jokes — the Gilbert & Sullivanish conclusion of the Mattel leadership’s arrival in Barbieland and then a laugh line right at the end. The idea Gerwig banks on is that she doesn’t need a ton of structure — the 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof at the beginning, the breaking of the fourth wall at different points in the film, are meant to show that Barbie can largely stay in the realm of hijinks and banter and not figure out too, too much what it’s really trying to say. 

But it is at the same time an intelligent film with a lot of thoughts on feminism. The opening narration, “Thanks to Barbie all problems of feminism and actual rights have been solved!” is actually a more cutting piece of satire than it might at first appear. Feminism, over a half-century, really did reductivize itself to empowerment. Just have the right role models and the right mottoes, went a very powerful school of pop feminism, and it really was possible to produce feminist paradise. “Because Barbie can be anything women can be anything,” continues the opening narration. “And this has been reflected back onto the little girls of today in the Real World. Girls can grow into women who can achieve anything and everything they set their mind to.” Or, as Barbie (living her best self in Barbieland) puts it: “We fixed everything so that all women in the real world are happy and powerful.”

The focus on empowerment is, the film is saying, missing some very critical steps. It’s not engaging with the Real World. It’s not dealing with the complexities of sex. And much of it involves simply taking the world-at-is and putting women in charge: it’s Barbie’s Dream House and, as she realizes at one point in the film, she has absolutely no idea where the Kens live. 

The arc of the film is mostly pretty silly — it’s about deprogramming the other Barbies from the very simple Patriarchy that the Kens have created. It’s also about finding a certain acceptance between the more programmatic beliefs of Gen Zers and their more jaded moms (the bonding plot between Gloria and Sasha). And, most importantly, it’s about trying to get out of the narratives altogether. “What do you want?” says an at-this-point very annoyed CEO of the Mattel Corporation. “I’m not really sure I know what I want anymore. I’m not really sure I have an ending,” says Barbie. And the ending turns out, basically, to be Ordinary Barbie, comfortable with disappointment, with not having some empowerment arc. Or, as Barbie more optimistically puts it, “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I want to do the imagining not be the idea,” which is beautiful but awfully specific — like the whole arc of feminism is to follow Greta Gerwig’s turn from actor to director. 

What’s interesting about the film, and which created some pretty inane meta debates, is that the Barbie-Ken relationship is less central than might appear. That relationship gives the movie most of its laughs, but saving Barbieland from Patriarchy is actually a bit of a shaggy dog story and distraction from the guiding thread of Barbie’s existential angst. Basically, Ken isn’t in Barbie’s league, and he acts out and then he cries and goes off on his sad lonely journey to try to find himself. 

So what the movie is, in the end, is the feminism disquisition, and then it’s The Imaginarium, the sense of sliding around all possible different genres (slapstick, musical, opera buffa, parody, road movie, you name it) with the filmmakers just looking to land their jokes and quips wherever they can get them. It works great, and it helps to show just how effective The Imaginarium can be, especially in contrast to an essentially staid period piece like Oppenheimer. What will be interesting to me, aesthetically, is how realism fights back. In the 2010s, realism seemed to break new ground by diving very, very deep into minute interactions — in Mad Men and in Annie Baker’s plays. As entranced as I can be by The Imaginarium, I also have the feeling that it has its aesthetic limitations — Barbie is somehow less than the sum of its parts; there’s a slight soap bubble feeling to the whole enterprise — and I would like to see realism really fight for being the aesthetic with the most to say. 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (2023)

dir. Martin Scorsese, written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese and based on a book by David Grann, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest, Robert De Niro as Bill Hale, Lily Gladstone as Mollie

There’s something very melancholic and very upsetting about Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s in, I suppose, the iconic image of the film (or somewhat heavy-handedly designed to be iconic) — the house burning out in the distance of the prairie, the image smudged, Blind Willie Jefferson playing on the soundtrack. The sense with it is that the abiding myths of Americana and western expansion have been unavailing — that there isn’t actually some redemption at the end of the story, that at the very least, new myths are called for.

Iconic or what?

In that way Killers of the Flower Moon is a kind of capstone to, and masterpiece of, the Woke Era, with its presumption that American history needs to be, as it were, told in reverse to the usual triumphalist version — as unremitting expropriation and exploitation, a genocide ending in amnesia. 

And the sort of unsettling core of the film is — strange to say, but vital — the dumbness of Ernest Burkhart, the Leonardo DiCaprio character. Protagonists are supposed to be the driving forces in their stories, but this is history, and — as court records make clear — the real Ernest was “dumb as rocks,” in The New York Times’ phrasing.

Dumb as rocks

He is acted-upon, rather than acting, and if that means that the film is always somewhat at risk of trivializing itself (the question hanging over it is whether the Osage murders are genuinely reflective of larger dynamics or are a somewhat unique set of circumstances featuring an exceptional sociopathy), Ernest’s ingenuousness serves as a prism through which all the larger accompanying forces can be glimpsed. 

And, through him, the entire westward current of American settlement and expansion is reduced to its underlying factor: greed. “I just love money,” Ernest says — sincerely — every time he’s asked to explain himself. 

Really, that’s sufficient to explain the arc of Killers of the Flower Moon (as well as a great deal else). “They are a flock of buzzards who steal from us,” says Paul Red Eagle of the whites of Osage County, and that can stand in for every one of the white characters in the film with the lone possible exception of the FBI agent. 

But if the love for money gets to the heart of what’s driving the conspiracy against the Osage, other justifications proliferate. “Osage are the finest and most beautiful people on God’s earth,” says Bill King Hale, and really means it, but then the other — the acting — part of him holds that “their time is over” and that, given the ineluctabilities of history, the only question now is who gets the spoils. The other justification for the murders is more frankly racist and gets to the cognitive dissonance of both western expansion and of this whole era of world history. John Ramsey is a family man, moral man, would never think of shooting anyone in cold blood — right up until the point he’s told that his mark is an Indian. “That’s different,” he says. 

It’s a strange, almost-hard-to-imagine psychology, and the sense of Killers of the Flower Moon is of entering into a very strange and hard-to-understand world, from a sort of intermediate phase of American history. It’s not the classic frontier and there is a delicate modus vivendi in Anglo-Indian relations, at least in Osage County (which the spate of murders, of course, utterly destroys). The Klan is just another civic organization. Masonic Lodges are a pillar of town life. The great homogenized culture — suburbs and radio plays — is soon to catch up to the frontier, but the frontier (at least at the start of the story) has a more complex and diffuse character than the homogenized culture can quite comprehend. Watching the film I kept thinking about a line I’d recently read from Colin Woodard in which Woodard argued that America’s “first national consensus point, frighteningly enough, was the ethnonational white supremacist version of the 1910s and 1920s.” And that may be a useful way of understanding the tectonic structure of Killers of the Flower Moon — the whites of Osage County are forming a consensus, racist and genocidal, and willfully forgetting the complexities of even their own lives. “I thought you were calling me a squaw man,” says Ernest to Bill Smith when the two of them are having a fight, to which Bill’s response is, “That’s something I would never call another man” — and this in a conversation between two men who are both married to Osage women. 

What’s complicated about the film — and is its real emotional center — is that Ernest and Mollie do somehow love each other. (That would seem to be hard to do given that Ernest is in the process of actively exterminating Mollie’s entire family, but such is the power of cognitive dissonance.) There’s an attraction, there’s familiarity, there’s a shared life, and towards the end of the film Mollie is close to forgiving Ernest for everything — except that he can’t quite bring himself to be honest about just how diabolical he’s been and insists that he hasn’t been poisoning Molly. In the cosmology of the film, it’s that dishonesty of Ernest’s — that refusal to look at or comprehend his own guilt, even more than the guilt itself — that causes the final rupture. “I haven’t done anything wrong in this world,” he says at one point, and, a little later, “My soul is clean now,” and it’s that manic insistence on innocence that is, in the end, what’s most unforgivable. 

In a fundamental sense, what the film is about is what was at the time called miscegenation (one of these retired words). In our 21st century, post-Civil Rights perspectives, we’re supposed to feel that, of course, inter-racial marriages are to the good and signify progress; that only biased old people (like Ernest’s parents calling out the word “savage” in a stressed moment) would have any trouble with it. But Lizzie, the Osage matriarch, is equally opposed to any of her daughters marrying white men — and, of course, she’s absolutely right: the white men are all snakes, all in it for the money. The premise is that there isn’t reconciliation, isn’t some happy harmonious ending. There is an original sin at the heart of America. The racist, jingoistic consensus that formed as the “national myth” of the early 20th century didn’t, of course, work. And so, in the attempt to keep the guilty country together, a new myth takes its place — an acknowledgment of the theft and exploitation; an atonement. 

There’s an odd sense too that Scorsese is in some way atoning for his whole career. He has been the patron saint of the unreconstructed gangster. But, in the totality of things, the cheerful ripping-off of Wall Street dupes or even of the United States government isn’t such a big deal; on the other hand, the extermination of the Indians is. Ernest identifying his uncle to a jury is a haunting reflection of Henry in Goodfellas executing the same gesture with his confederates. In Goodfellas, that’s melancholic — a betrayal of the gangsters’ code. In Killers of the Flower Moon it’s something different: a bid for justice. And the unexpected ending has that same sense of requiem and last rites. It’s very distracting, to say the least, for the director to make his cameo in the closing shots of the film, but Scorsese’s appearance there isn’t so much cameo as elegy — one old person reading the obituary of another, bringing to an end a very long, gangsterish, ebullient phase of American history, making his quiet plea for absolution.