"Barbie" and Other Serious Fun
August 2023: A letter for people who seek meaning in fun stories.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
Last week, Ed and I attended three days of Gen Con, which is an enormous tabletop game convention (board games, RPGs, card games, etc.) that spills over into sundry types of nerd-dom. We had a good time, and tried fun games like Bunny Kingdom and The Fox Experiment. We ran into friends from church and met up with other friends deliberately, if briefly. We talked to, and played games with, strangers. We made paper hand puppets. I bought art prints and fancy enamel pins, and painted a small part of a giant collective mural.
It’s not like we’re huge board-game geeks, but something about the nerdy chaos delights me when we go. I appreciate art, story, semi-complex games, and positive interactions with other people—all things Gen Con offers in abundance.
Art, story, games, and people are becoming recurring topics in my Substack letters, though the games tend to be electronic rather than tabletop, mentioned for their stories and art more than any gameplay. While I didn’t start this letter project with any recurring topics in mind, patterns have begun to emerge.
This month’s letter is entirely about the stories I’ve been enjoying lately, beginning with the big, pink summer blockbuster.
Barbie!
I rarely go to the movie theater anymore and I rarely see anything opening weekend, but some friends organized a girls’ night (well, afternoon) out to go see Barbie its first Saturday in theaters, and I went.
First, if you want any background on my lifelong affection for Barbie, this post I wrote in college for my old blog is exactly the place to start. The only thing that’s changed in the intervening 13 years is that my mom’s Barbie Bazaar back issues are now lurking about my house somewhere.
I began that blog post with this:
“I was raised without a hint of cynicism for Barbie. There were no philosophical questions about whether her proportions gave girls a bad body image, or whether we were getting brainwashed by Mattel, or whether Barbie was too privileged or too happy or too unrealistic or favored pink too much.”
Now Mattel, and writer-director Greta Gerwig, decided to cover the topics I was not raised with and had zero interest in because Barbie is not for critical thinking, Barbie is for fun in the form of imaginative play.
I had not seen the trailer for the movie when I went in. I’d seen images from the movie, and parts of the trailer without sound, and I knew from the internet that 1) Barbie has an existential crisis, and 2) this movie was designed for adults.
I’d hoped I would like it. I loved it. The movie was extremely ambitious and was done well. I know some people have been missing the meaning, and the depth, so I’ll point out what I saw in it. I’m keeping it general, here, so no major spoilers.
Barbie manages to:
…thoughtfully explore Barbie’s relevance, not just as a doll, but as an idea, for modern girls and women, as well as the controversy long surrounding the dolls. Our relationship with dolls and other “story toys” doesn’t vanish as we age; it becomes part of us, as do the narratives we associate with them.
…address how real life affects the products we consume, and how the products we consume, in turn, affect real life.
…touch on the inherent value of humanity even with its failures, even with the brevity of human life, even with the decay that comes with being human.
…begin critiquing the kind of feminism that treats men as superfluous. The tagline for the movie is, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” I don’t think it went as far as it could on this note, which is confusing some people, but it seems clear that it does not condone this type of feminism, which leaves men lost and women tired.
…start a lot of conversations beyond the movie theater on healthy and appropriate ways for women and men to function together in society.
…have so much fun in the process, with effervescent acting, dancing, music, jokes, vivid pinks as a background for serious topics, and references to not only Mattel’s occasionally wacky product history but also to cultural touchstones like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and The Matrix.
No, it doesn’t champion Christian family values; it’s not a Christian movie and the world sees everything through its own lens. It does echo the Genesis story of the creation and fall of mankind, but from a fully worldly point of view. It has a Jesus-shaped hole in its ideology, which is itself an essay for another time.
But for what the movie is, I appreciate it.
Other media that mattered to me this month:
TV Show: The Chosen
Ed and I finally started watching The Chosen, and I understand the hype. It isn’t just “good for Christian media”, it’s good. I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but by the third episode I was totally sold. The attention to detail especially stands out. The ancient Jewish culture, and the lives the characters live in that setting, feel tangible and present. I had thought made-up stories about Jesus’s disciples would bother me, but the choices of the writers make sense, and the dialogue draws heavily from the text of the gospels, as it should.
We’re watching it slowly, often stopping in the middle of longer episodes, partly because I want to savor it instead of rushing through. Each season has just eight episodes.
Video Game: Final Fantasy VII (not the remake)
I bought Final Fantasy 7 for PC in Steam’s summer sale, and have spent so many hours on it in the last few weeks. I didn’t buy the remake with the fancy graphics for two reasons: it was way more expensive, and the reviews indicated that the story and dialogue were worse, somehow, compared to the original.
I bought it because I’ve wanted to know for years why people love its story so much. Can I learn from it for my novel-writing? Final Fantasy 9 was always my favorite; I think I was too young, somehow, to get much out of 7’s story and deeper themes when I tried it the first time. And I was frustrated by how much worse the graphics were, going backward from 9. Now I’m starting to see how it was not only a good story but, in 1997, a groundbreaking game.
Novel: Silence by Shūsaku Endō
When Martin Scorsese’s movie Silence, based on the novel by Shūsaku Endō, arrived in theaters in 2016, someone from church invited Ed and me to go see it. We did; it was heavy and dark and I had feelings about it. Sometimes that unexpectedly makes me want to dive deeper into the things that created such feelings. It took a while to result in action, in this case, but I am reading the novel now. It is beautiful; it is heavy; it is dark. It is historical fiction, set in 17th-century Japan, and it follows a Jesuit priest from Portugal trying to fulfill his mission in the midst of the severe persecution of Christians of that era. I may write more on it when I’m done.
Writing Updates
This month, I worked on my novel, this Substack letter, and an essay on Barbie (I wasn’t kidding).
Housekeeping/Mail
I received some lovely feedback for July’s letter, and all of it was through alternate channels—people I know who texted or emailed me directly. If you tried to reply to the email, please know that I did not get it and am not ignoring you. If you can contact me some other way, I would like to know when this happens so I can contact Substack about the issue.
Things I didn’t expect about life in Indiana
We moved here at the end of 2015 and for a variety of reasons, I just love it. There are a few things I did not expect:
For a business to prove it’s really local, it must have at least one Kurt Vonnegut reference, preferably as a menu item. I’m still not sure if this is specific to the Indianapolis area, or if the whole state delights in the famous Hoosier author.
A certain odor on the highway means you’re behind a pig truck. You may not even be able to see that truck yet, but it’s definitely there, and you want to pass it to get upwind quickly.
It’s only a matter of time before your natural response to tornado sirens is to run outside to look for a funnel cloud. Something in the water here, I suppose.
That’s it for August! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae