EPISODE 825: BARBIE IS A STORY ABOUT ADAM AND EVE AND MOM JEANS AND FREEDOM
...Also, I appear to be singing.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, where we’re putting the wow back in culture. (That makes absolutely no sense and I’m terribly sorry.)
Thanks to everyone who tuned in for my “Mental breakdown co-starring Garfield” on Thursday. It was a lot of fun putting that together. Later this week I’ve got some fun stuff planned for anyone who is sick of hearing “Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve.”
But that’s for then, this is now! It’s been a big week. Let’s get into it!
THE WOWND UP
This week Star Trek: Strange New Worlds released the Star Trek universe’s first musical episode, “Subspace Rhapsody,” in which made-up-science-things happen and everyone starts singing for a while. It’s very much inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s classic musical episode, with a similar amount of “Oh my God, this is my secret thing why am I singing it” moments.
I especially loved the opening number “Status Report,” which is nothing like that. It has a strangely haunting vibe.
(The Ortegas moment in this song is particularly hilarious. She’s asked to give a status update and she’s like, “Sure, my status update is I’m sitting in my chair and I fucking rock.”)
Also in outer space news, it turns out there’s a lot of planets just roaming around the universe—like, trillions, and, in a fit of pique, NASA “shouted” at Voyager 2 this week to try and get its attention after controllers accidentally instructed it to shift its antenna away from Earth two weeks ago.
The shout traveled over 12 billion miles in 18 hours, which is absolutely mind-boggling. Imagine your parents calling you to come home for dinner, but you’re playing on Alpha Centauri, and dinner is in 300 years.
And yes, shouting into the universe is absolutely the opening scene of an alien invasion movie, but hey, at least we reconnected with an ancient spacecraft that was going to reset its antenna in a couple months anyway.
Meanwhile, if you’re buying travel books from Amazon, it might be time to double check those authors, because apparently nogoodniks with ChatGPT are now selling computer-generated fake travel guides, and also giving themselves tons of five-star reviews. Honestly, there’s tons of fake companies selling genuine garbage on Amazon, and the company seems oddly content to let it happen. For as much as it presents itself as the premiere retail space online, it’s actually more like a mall which rents half its space to skeevy fly by night tenants. Which is honestly kinda weird!
And hey, Heartstopper season 2 is out on Netflix! I can confirm, there is a lot of kissing, texting, apologizing and also more kissing. It is very good.
BARBARTHIS
I promised some thoughts on Barbie this week. If you still haven’t seen the film, which just broke the one billion dollar mark in ticket sales, I highly recommend skipping this, because spoilers ahoy. (And believe it or not the spoilers are big.)
There’s so much to be said about Barbie. Its de- and re-construction of the Adam and Eve story—like Eve, Barbie does something that she isn’t supposed to (asks questions, which is really the essence of what Eve does, too), and her action ends up ruining Ken and their whole society.
But Barbie is also the instrument of that society’s redemption, as she teaches the Kens to stop thinking of themselves as “and Ken,” and in doing so also opens the possibility for her fellow Barbies to see and treat the Kens differently. (At one point she’s asked the question, “Where do the Kens sleep at night?,” and she has no idea. It haunts me.)
The Kens live in literally none of these places.
There’s also what the film has to say about the experience of being a woman, told both through the lens of someone who knows that intimately, Gloria, and someone who is experiencing absolutely everything for the first time, Barbie.
In some ways this film reminds me of Elf. In both cases we’re dealing with a magical childlike figure inserted into our reality. But in Elf that character is more or less completely unaffected by their experience; it’s reality that has to change, not him.
In Barbie from the moment she enters our world she’s being affected by it (and in horrible ways—how disturbing is it that her very first experience in our world is feeling objectified by men?). And her story is about how her experience changes her.
The anxiety (or fear) on Margot Robbie’s face here is just devastating. It would have taken just a slight pivot for this to be a horror film. (Honestly, maybe it was anyway?)
I love Elf, but when you put it alongside Barbie the fact that Buddy’s story is really about a guy being adorable and not having to grow or change at all is…disconcerting.
And there’s the fact that Greta Gerwig took a story about a children’s toy and turned it into a potent analysis of the virality of fascism, which offers such a fascinating take on what’s gone in our country and others over the last ten years.
But for me, the film’s most important statement is about revelation and freedom. At the climax of the film—boy oh boy I hope you’re not reading this if you haven’t seen Barbie—from kind of out of nowhere, America Ferrera’s mom Gloria starts talking about what it’s like to be a woman, the contradictions inherent in that.
“It is literally impossible to be a woman,” she starts. “You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”
(Here’s a link to the full speech.)
Ferrera is incredible here. The spontaneity with which she delivers the speech, the sense of her just thinking out loud and it snowballs absolutely sneaks up on you.
And unexpectedly, Gloria’s words become the means of saving everyone. In sharing the contradictions in the experience of being a woman with the Barbies, she wakes them each up.
And us, as well. In the packed theater in which I was watching the film, you could literally hear a pin drop. (Also by the end I think most of us were crying.)
I was a little embarrassed at my own reaction, honestly. I worried that I was horning in on someone else’s experience. But listening to Gloria speak just kept reminding me of the experiences I’ve had writing and talking about being a gay priest. So much of the time, I’ve been discovering things literally in the writing or talking. Like how in the Jesuits most of us have been encouraged to embrace our sexual identity, to see it as a gift. Yet I’ve seen very established men passed over for jobs within the Society, and told it was because they came out. And I’ve been in Jesuit rec rooms when guys mention that someone came out in a homily or something, and felt the chill that sets in, including from other queer Jesuits, like they’ve broken an unwritten rule.
That’s what Gloria does in Barbie: She speaks aloud the rules that are not supposed to be spoken, rules that control us. And just in doing that, in naming them, she and Greta Gerwig liberate us. As much as Adam and Eve is a clear reference point for the story, the last act really had me thinking more of Jesus exorcising demons and raising the dead. His project, like the film’s, was always about freedom.
All day I’ve had that Strange New Worlds song running through my head. (Damn your pretty pretty voice, Ethan Peck!) And it’s had me wondering, what is it about the idea of doing a musical episodes that is so impossibly appealing to people?
No doubt part of it is getting to see whether your favorite actors can sing and dance. (Did anyone know Rebecca Romijn, who plays Number One, had such a great voice? Wow.)
But what truly makes a musical episode different from a straight-up musical or musical TV show (like Schmigadoon) is that idea that something special is happening here, that things that have been held back are being released. (Literally, people’s voices.)
It strikes me that the catharsis we experience in witnessing that is very similar to the catharsis we experience as Gloria speaks. Our heroes are doing what we want to do, expressing the truth in their hearts. And the doing of that is such a powerful force in the universe, it creates such an incredible shockwave, that even just being in the presence of a made-up person doing it can make us a little more free.
TOP 5 MUSICAL EPISODES THAT NEVER HAPPENED BUT WOULDN’T THEY BE GREAT THOUGH?
5. Six Feet Under
In retrospect it’s a shock that Six Feet Under never did a musical episode. Its combination of fantasy and pathos is perfect for the genre. Also, imagine getting some big Broadway star like Nathan Lane to play the ghost of the week. He would have been so good on that show.
(PS Only Murders In the Building Season 3 comes out Wednesday!)
4. The Good Fight
This is another case where you almost find yourself wondering, Wait, didn’t they do a musical? Because with Broadway stars Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald, how could they not? Plus, that show—which, btw, if you never saw it because it only aired on Paramount+, boy is it worth finding now—was all about responding to the craziness of the Trump years with big crazy ideas of its own.
And who doesn’t want to see a lawyer jeté?
3. The Crown
Settle down Charles, I realize this is a big swing. Just hear me out: the big problem with the last season of The Crown was that it seemed to tell the same Diana and Charles story over and over. We had already gotten a lot of that story in season four, so it already felt like there was not a lot of new ground to cover.
So what if instead of grinding away for a whole season on every ugly detail, they had covered it all in one musical episode. Maybe the whole thing takes place inside Diana’s mind, or Diana and Charles’ minds, they’re the still points at the center as characters and events around them spin and whirl.
2. The Mandalorian
Three words: Jedi kickline.
You’re welcome.
(Also, an opening number dedicated to finding words or phrases that rhyme with “Djarin;” Bo Katan channeling Olivia Newton-John in a Mandalorian training sequence; and Grogu sings! And it’s entirely about things he likes to eat!)
1. Seinfeld
Larry David famously said that the essence of Seinfeld was “No hugging, no learning.” The only reason he didn’t also say “and no musical numbers” is because imagine Jerry Seinfeld singing, or even attending an event where singing is happening. His cringe factor would be off the charts.
Meanwhile George would be like Pike in the Strange New Worlds video, constantly screaming, “Why are they singing, Jerry? WHY, JERRY? WHY?”
And that’s why I want to see it. There’s no way any of those characters would be comfortable in a musical episode. So them having to endure everyone around them singing for 22 minutes would be amazing.
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Another clip from Strange New Worlds, for any Klingon fans out there.
Pretty certain that’s Weird Al Yankovic spitting rhymes for the Klingon leader, which is freaking awesome.
We’re told over the course of the episode that the reality warp has begun affecting the Klingon Empire as a whole. Is it possible that while Starfleet’s version of a musical is very ballad-heavy, the Klingons are dealing with endless boy bands?
If that generates as much joy in you as it does in me, feel free to pass it on.
If you want to buy me Klingon dance lessons, my paypal is paypal.me/jimmcdsj, or my Venmo is:
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Coming Friday: Adam and Steve is Just Fine, aka Everything we Know about Genesis is Wrong (or A Lot of Things Anyway, Everything Just Sounds More Dramatic).