I haven’t made as much progress on the outlaw appropriation/money as novelist project as I would have liked over the past summer. In part this is because I remain undecided as to what genre of writing the project belongs to, whether it is a blog post, literary essay, or an academic article; but also whether it is a standalone piece or if it has the potential to initiate a broader series on imaginary labour and non-reproduction. However, I have mainly taken a hiatus from outlaws and their ambiguous refusal and remythologisation of work as I have been preparing to relocate, which has both consumed time and energy, but also motivated a return to some older pieces of writing which I would like to revise into a more complete form before leaving – for the sake of closure, if nothing else.
To that end, rather than repost an article on the refusal of work and alchemy in Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole and Chester Himes’ A Rage in Harlem, which has been held up in the peer-review process for over 15 months (and has now survived whatever ambitions I had for a career in academia) or repurpose notes about season one of what in my memory was the very bad sci-fi/suspense show Salvation (Craig Shapiro and Matt Wheeler) (spoiler, the season ends with a plan to inseminate the universe – only a slight exaggeration, I promise), I thought I would do something even more hackneyed and derivative and share a couple of brief comments on Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig).
One of the arguments that recurs throughout Jason Read’s The Production of Subjectivity: Marx and Philosophy is that every mode of production also necessitates a mode of subjection that is not merely supplementary to but constitutive of production. If the mode of production in its most expansive sense refers to the economy and the production of things and services, the mode of subjection refers to ideology and the production of desires, habits, behaviours, languages, gestures, and affects – that is, the production of subjects. Rather than suggest a hierarchy within this pairing of reality and the imaginary, Read argues that each to immanent within the other, that they are both causes and effects of the other, that the imaginary makes itself felt in the real and the real within the imaginary.
The intersection of the scene of the imaginary and the scene of reality is central to Barbie, which considers how both scenes affect and are affected by the other. In the film, this interrelation is presented through ‘Barbie Land’ and the ‘Real World’, territories of play and work that can be crossed over if a certain sequence of actions has been performed, a series of movements that pay homage to the horizontal frame in cinema history. As its dramatic opening sequence makes clear, ‘Barbie Land’ is structured around and conceptualizes its existence through myth. Stereotypical Barbie’s cosmic entrance breaks up – quite literally – an older configuration of play, one in which young girls were attached to baby dolls and limited to playing at – or is it rehearsing – the role of the mother. Barbie is a tool for smashing the up the naturalisation and teleological inscription of women solely into mothers, and introduces new inorganic forms of communication and desire through which girls can imagine themselves as becoming anything whatever (although usually this transformation takes on the shape of a career and empowerment at work, as a boss, entrepreneur or virtuoso). Whilst fantasy has no history in ‘Barbie Land’s’ self-mythologised creation story, for the myriad of Barbie’s who call it their home, this destruction of older habits and the introduction of an abstract indifference to the content of play and a new focus on the production of capacities has emancipated women in the real world from oppression and violence at home and in the workplace. From the perspective of ‘Barbie Land’, the gender equality that they believe has been achieved in the real world is an effect of Barbie’s example in the imaginary – or so they have been told.
To her dismay, Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie discovers that the relation between the imaginary and the real travels in the opposite direction too. The imaginary far from being timeless becomes an effect of the real world or, in this instance, is affected by its sadness, and affective current which disturbs stereotypical Barbie from her frictionless – but ‘sense-less’ – paradise, with the intimation of death, decay, and most horrific of all, flat feet. Through Barbie and Ken’s traversal from the imaginary to the real and back again, the film has much to say about gender, work, social reproduction, and Hollywood itself. For now, I want to conclude with the suggestion that, at least on my one viewing, Barbie remains confined to the realm of ideas, despite itself. That is to say, whatever else the movie engages with, it elides over the substance and matter of stereotypical Barbie, her plasticity: both in terms of the offshored mass production – a form of labour, with its destruction and proletarianisation of the individual into mechanical gestures, is unimaginable from within ‘Barbie Land’ – but also, and more importantly, as the very synthetic material which supplies and feeds mass production. Considered in such a light, it becomes apparent that one of the common threads running through the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon is a kind of apocalypse, that both movies dramatise a world being set on fire. For Barbie this does not involve the libidinal satisfaction of the bomb, with its explosive climaxes, but with the slow violence of the envelopment of the planet with plastic, of the waves of microplastics that are warping and altering the structures of organic life, that continue to rely on the extraction of oil. If Oppenheimer is a film that emerges from and addresses atomic culture, Barbie is an instance of the culture of petrochemicals, a culture which is heading towards disaster.
Thomas Travers 