PicoBlog

There’s spoilers for the Barbie movie and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2  in this newsletter.

It probably goes without saying that I loved Barbie. I’ve been thinking about what the theme of this newsletter is lately, as it has clearly transitioned away from being only about non-fiction books by women. Although I still plan to cover that, I’m mostly inspired by my ongoing campaign to defend and honour girl culture, to be the CEO of sparkle commentary. There are many other parts of my personality and my interests but they don’t need a knightess in shining armour to defend them. Barbie blended girl culture and feminism and nonsense together in a way that mapped so closely to how I think that I believe Greta can read my dreams.

I thought the feminist messages of Barbie were great, very affirming and a rare straightforward statement about how patriarchy functions for women and men, and horses (“horses are extensions of men”). I thought the ending was fine: Barbie chooses real life over remaining forever in Barbieland. She wants a chance to feel real happiness and sadness. There were two elements that struck me in the final scenes: the music changes from Dua Lipa sugary pop bops to a pretty Billie Eilish piano ballad. The transition from no thoughts music to many thoughts music signifies that Barbie is becoming a more serious person. I don’t know how to explain this but no thoughts music is more feminist than many thoughts music. The performance of thoughts is a male-coded thing to do: ancient Greek philosophy, motivational speaking, any job that involves being a “director” unless you are Greta herself - these jobs were invented to platform people whose thoughts are important. That’s why there’s a sense of coming full-circle when you listen to a no thoughts song. If you can’t be a thoughts-coded person then why not just enjoy life in Barbieland.

The film and the reviews of the film explore the tension between extreme performed femininity being designed for the straight male gaze and somehow also being repulsive to actual straight men and embraced by women and gay men. I had a sense of what the film would be like from Peter Bradshaw’s opening line in the Guardian: “Are Barbie dolls demeaning or empowering?” HaHA. Yes that is the big question Peter, especially for film. Is any given representation of women from film history demeaning or empowering? Then there’s the demeaning we do ourselves. It’s old news by now to point out that hair and makeup companies sell products to women by advertising them as a form of feminist self-care, rather than snake oil that promises to make you look like the model in the advert, who is most usually very young and very thin. The concession to wellness culture is that some adverts now feature women in a mid-size, or an older woman. There will always be a thin young woman in the mix. And the truth is that you don’t need to smell less, have shinier hair, or less body hair to “feel confident”, but in a pragmatic sense they are selling something to relieve the tension they as an industry created, and it can, in the short-term, make you feel more empowered. From where is this scrap of power coming? It’s just being doled back out from the patriarchy that stole it from you, in a floral can that costs 34% more than a blue one aimed at men.

Makeup isn’t “empowering”. Pandering to how society/theoretical men think you should look is demeaning. Demeaning beyond belief when you think about it. It’s also the big story of how women are trained to do womanhood. But “glam” (makeup, nails and hair) is an area where women, gay men, and non-binary people have been able to carve out a niche where they can gain clout, and a career. This is especially true in the social media era – in Finland of all places I saw a lot of very heavy false eyelashes this summer, so physically heavy I couldn’t see the girls’ eyes. These lashes look amazing in photos, overbearing in real life. I wondered what the lashes signified. In Finland, light blonde hair isn’t a statement the way it is for the England Lionesses for example, whose matching super-light blonde hair makes me feel a bit weird? Any space with a majority of bottle blondes pings a red flag because it is an obvious reach for “old-fashioned feminine values” of youthfulness and of course whiteness. Which brings me back to Barbie.

Image: Warner Bros

Barbie’s femininity throughout the movie is campy and unapologetic. She doesn’t give a second thought to the fact that she is beautiful when she’s living in Barbieland. It’s only when she’s out in the real world and experiences street harassment that she feels any ambivalence about being a woman. Throughout the film her outfits have been structured, bright, blingy and festooned with bows. Very me to be honest! Then in a pivotal scene towards the end of the movie, when she has become a sadder and wiser Barbie, she appears in a bias-cut yellow tea dress. I gasped. GSASPED in the Vue Picadilly, London’s worst cinema. The yellow dress is the symbol of the sadder and wiser girlboss. I have spent years thinking about the meaning of the final yellow dress that Katniss wears in the final scene of Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. When left to her own devices, Katniss has been wearing variations on armour or at least practical Robin-Hood style hunting gear for the entire run of four movies. But at the end, when her work is done and she can finally rest, she appears in a yellow bias cut tea dress. Hers looks more like it belongs in the Depression-era photos of Dorothea Lange than Barbie’s, which feels extremely 2020s does 1940s. The luxury to sit in a field in a pretty dress, because she isn’t a soldier anymore, is part of her happy-ish ending. That’s one thing I love about it. When women are free from war, we can do things like this, ideally with a G&T in a can. But it does also imply that a domestic feminine identity is the best-case ending for Katniss.

An ambiguous and deeply conflicted rest zone is somewhere I would definitely like to inhabit. Try as I might, I have never managed to track down and buy something that is quite like Katniss’s. That’s because these yellow dresses are the platonic ideal of the delicate, soft midi-length dress, and were both custom-made by the costume designers. Most dresses are made of polyester these days, or viscose if you’re lucky, while Katniss’s is cotton and Barbie’s is silk. Katniss and Barbie enter the ambiguous yellow dress zone from very different directions: Katniss is a tough working-class rebel whose life has been constantly under threat until now. Her iconic hairstyle is a long braid. In her yellow dress scene, she sits in a meadow rocking her baby while her partner and older child play nearby. She is not in bliss. Her final lines, to her daughter, are: “Did you have a nightmare? I have nightmares too. Some day I’ll explain it to you. Why they came. Why they won’t ever go away. But I’ll tell you how I survive it: I make a list in my head of all the good things I’ve seen someone do. Every little thing I can remember. It’s like a game. I do it over and over. It gets a little tedious after all these years but… there are much worse games to play.” Giving Katniss a safe place to exist is as happy an ending as she’s going to get. But it really hit me hard to see the braid unravelled and her hair flowing prettily over her shoulders, the crown pulled back so we can see her softly smiling face clearly. Is this really Katniss? Suzanne Collins is one of the best writers on clothing in fiction, it is far more than decoration in the Hunger Games series and is taken seriously as a profession and a form of communication and even political resistance. The soft yellow dress is a huge statement that Katniss is now permitting herself to no longer be a fighter.

Barbie has arrived from the opposite direction. Nothing has yet happened to her and she’s excited to start experiencing both happiness and suffering. She’s also arriving at womanhood, having been a girl forever. For Barbie it’s about making her own choices, and learning to deal with the realities of a human body. The costume designer for Barbie, Jacqueline Durran, said “The Barbies have gone through all of that stuff [reclaiming their kingdom from the patriarchy] and they’re now the most fulfilled versions of themselves.” Of the material construction of the dress: “We wanted a soft yellow and wanted it to have less pop. So, we printed that yellow onto white silk, and because of the cut, it clings to the body. That’s not really a Barbie characteristic – the Barbie characteristic is to be cut straight and to create a shape that falls away from the body.” Suddenly the shoulder seams are dropping off Barbie’s narrow shoulders. There’s a pretty, cascading ruffle at the hips. It’s a “modest” length. I’m afraid to me the yellow tea dress will always feel polite. If I was Barbie, I would also pick the high heel (metaphorically – I am currently wearing sheepskin Birkenstocks) and vanish back into a world of endless coordinated dance routines and hair bows. Barbie and the Hunger Games movies are great fashion films that ultimately seem to decide that maximalist sparkly looks are a prison for women. It’s a tricky one. Glittery, fitted looks can be a display of wealth and objectification, like the model girlfriend on a gross old man’s arm, or they can be a form of resistance to the timid, submissive femininity that is preferred by society and the male gaze, like the members of a girlband or a cabaret performer. Shoulder pads and sequins intentionally take up more room and garner more attention. I love the gloriously unapologetic Barbies of the beginning of the movie who both wear pink and say they deserve their Nobel Prize because they worked really hard. There’s a lightness to their self-belief that would require warrior ferocity to embody in the real world. If you think the idea that feminity and seriousness are oxymoronic is of the past, it isn’t.

My many years of life experience have also made me a sadder and wiser Barbie, so I can now see the appeal in letting yourself drop out of warrior mode. The yellow dress represents how tired women are and how we’re allowed to just not slay sometimes. It’s the path of least resistance and you deserve that! Even Katniss had days off from fighting for her life. It’s a site of great tension though: the bias-cut tea dress is soooo traditionally feminine that it would be the number one pick for a lazy article telling you what to wear on a date or to a wedding. This dress does not empower, because it doesn’t threaten. Barbie makes the point that Barbieland is for girls but operates for the benefit of men. No one wants to be the curmudgeon who says girls and boys aren’t equal but the real world does hit many girls hard if they were raised to think they could achieve anything if they just worked hard enough. You’re not Barbie out in these streets. You’re just a shape that represents a woman. The soft yellow dress is for women who don’t want to represent anything any more, they just want to exist. For both Katniss and Barbie, that’s a territory they have earned. For me, I can’t wait for Barbie to come out on streaming so I can re-watch the first hour on loop, and have the luxury of living in Barbieland forever.

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