I'm reading "The banned Barbie film: her anguished first role as Karen Carpenter/Todd Haynes animated the impossibly slender doll to show what drove the singer to her early death. The film has more in common than you might expect with Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster" (The Guardian).
The suffering of Carpenter’s doll-like facsimile supports the film’s ambiguous interest in quaint, chintzy consumer culture. Her plastic quality and fixed grin reinforce the popular perception of the Carpenters’ music; innocent, anodyne and commercial. Yet her anorexia is seen to reject the values of American consumer democracy, turning instead towards a fascism of the body.... With an impossible figure set off by a multitude of accessories, a Barbie doll becomes the perfect vessel to express the unresolvable tension between these mirror-image imperatives of consumption and suppression, phenomena both concerned on some level with personal empowerment.
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It’s an interesting movie if you can find it. I assume it was banned more so for copyright reasons than for its subject matter.
My theory is that the Barbie audience moves on to "The Real Housewives of..." Which, if you think about it, is a doll house for grownups; you can watch their antics, like they promised us as kids with the "Sea Monkeys." Any adult still trapped thinking about the original Barbie is a victim of arrested development.
Todd Haynes was a monster to have made that film and I’m glad he got sued and the film banned. It’s very cool to defend him and the film.
If people had affirmed and celebrated that Carpenter really was a fat cow, she would have been fine.
Do you want a live fat cow or a dead anorexic? Huh? Huh?
The Guardian describes anorexia as "fascism of the body". That's one type of fascism they can't pin on Trump. He's a role model for all those brave citizens of America who are fighting this type of fascism.
The new Barbie movie looks playful. The Ken stuff, with him having no purpose except to support Barbie's dreams, is funny commentary. I haven't seen it yet, but I intend to.
The Carpenter Barbie is different. Barbie's wasp waist as a symbol of beauty was a brilliant avatar for Karen's anorexia. It's a garage movie way before TikTok and YouTube. It's great to bring it back into consciousness for this generation, but I don't see it as having a parallel message.
Ah Barbie providing your daily dose of transinsanity from Althouse. Of course. Be ready to explain to your daughters why "Doctor Barbie" has a wiener but not feminine features. Hint: the approved prpgressive spin is that some little girls play with Barbie because they want to grow up to be men doctors who wear makeup.
"these mirror-image imperatives of consumption and suppression"
Yup, it's the human condition. If you want to eat, you have to sh*t.
Like, so what? Can you imagine all this drama about a Ken doll?
I think this is probably why all those twisted male perverts pretend to be women. They want their bodies to be the center of everyone's attention, including their own.
Superstar is brilliant and sad, like Karen Carpenter herself.
Sea Monkeys were a great disappointment of my youth.
Jupiter is expressing the Bruce Jenner theory of transgenderism: how could anyone, or anything, retain maleness in that palace of estrogen? Body-altering sports and an obvious addiction to other plastic surgery don't help.
I get the new trend to equate anorexia with the mass hysteria driving young girls to declare themselves male. It's an exellent argument for treating youthful gender dysphoria as a disease, rather than indulging it, hard as the New York Times may try to square that circle.
The important thing about Barbie is no pussy, if you're a guy.
I for one would drink Margo Robbie's bathwater, but shan't see Barbie until I get more information. Sounds like a bait-and-switch woke pr0n-fest thus far regardless of the trailers.
Sometimes a doll is just a doll and a singer is just a singer. Making it about the ills of a capitalist society is just boring.
That article is a fine example of authentic prog gibberish.
1992. I am in the 4th year of being a single Dad. My 5-year-old son, in a break from dinosaurs, asks if he can have a "Barbie". I say "OK" and buy him one. A week later, I discover the Barbie under a pile of dinosaurs, stripped naked, pubic hair and nipples drawn in with a black marker.
"Barbie was first conceived of to provide children with a female role model who worked outside the home."
My sister was into Barbie many years ago. If Barbe was "first conceived" to provide a female role model outside the home it's news to me.
IIRC the Doctor Barbie and others were long after the conception phase.
By the way, has anyone ever seen a plumber Barbie or a high tower linesman Barbie?
Thought not.
Oso Negro, had it been ten years later, there wouldn't have been pubic hair drawn in.
Barbie was conceived to sell Barbie clothes, Barbie friends (Ken, Skipper, etc) and their clothes as well as vehicles and other must-haves. That's where the money was, is and always will be. There's no Barbie without Barbie's world.
"Barbie was first conceived of to provide children with a female role model who worked outside the home."
Revisionist nonsense. Ruth Handler conceived of Barbie when she noticed the popularity of paper dolls, which let girls dress up and choose the fashion of the dolls, while most actual dolls were meant to replicate babies. She also was aware that kids like to dress up as adults. I don't know if she understood that when girls play (or choose literature or movies/tv) they project themselves into the characters, but she and her husband Elliot certainly understood that making a doll for which they could also sell clothes and accessories was a solid business idea. Later, when Elliot Handler wanted a toy to sell to boys, he came up with Hot Wheels, which also encourage repeat sales and collections, just like Barbie, her variations, and her fashions/accessories.
By the late '50s, the Handlers' toy company was doing well enough that Ruth and Elliot started to travel to Europe regularly. It was on a trip there that Ruth came across a German fashion doll on which she modeled Barbie.
Similarly, Elliot Handler's idea for Hot Wheels was inspired by the Matchbox and Corgi diecast model cars that they'd bring back from Europe as gifts for their boys. While those models were detailed, their crude axles and suspensions didn't let them roll very fast. According to lore, a Mattel engineer used piano wire left over from an unsuccessful attempt to sell toy guitars, to make sprung axles on which plastic wheels could spin freely. Making model cars that had low friction wheels & axles allowing them to go fast meant that Mattel could sell track and other accessories.
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