Alternative Editorial: State Of Play
This week saw the release of two Hollywood blockbusters - Oppenheimer and Barbie - on the same day. The contrast was not lost on the wider public who named the event Barbenheimer and many reviewers took them as a double act (see here for Pat Kane's piece in The National). The first film chronicles the crisis of male agency, where one man's genius (for splitting the atom) is harnessed by the authorities, and accelerated for its game-changing impact (the atomic bomb), while he looks on horrified by what he generated. Women barely make an entrance, other than to demarcate the margins of male power.
The second film, Barbie, chronicles the crisis of female agency. It starts with the depiction of Barbie's world - where men (all called Ken) are appendages and mere decoration - and women are free to fulfil any profession they can find the outfit for.
Triggered by new and sudden thoughts of death, Barbie makes a journey into the 'real world', hoping to identify who’s playing such dark thoughts into her. This world (contemporary LA) is one where men control most of the outcomes and women protest. This gives the directors - and Mattel by association - the chance to steer into the wider controversy, in which their fantasy world of managed (though now, of course, culturally diverse) dolls live. By many accounts, director Greta Gerwig does a very thorough job of representing the complexity of American feminism today and how far it has come.
On returning to Barbieworld, having imbibed the deep-seated sexism and patriarchy of the human world, boyfriend Ken-doll stages a brief macho uprising. Due to some feminist consciousness-raising and a constitutional rebellion, all the Kens are quickly returned to their place in Barbie-Dom - looking all the more hopeless for it. Turns out that male liberation could not be achieved by cowboy outfits alone.
Between these two films one might imagine that all is well in our up-to-the-minute conduct of sexual politics. Hollywood clearly grasps that the edifice of patriarchy is crumbling, and is not shying away from naming and shaming it. In Oppenheimer, women are nearly entirely absolved of all responsibility for nuclear war (though at the cost of occupying traditional feminine roles). In Barbie they are freed, each one, to choose their own unique path for life.
Maybe Hollywood is at its most powerful when it can suggest that, as a human race, we’ve “finally got it”. After a turbulent history, things are beginning to right themselves between men and women. With all things feminine in the ascendent and dominant masculinity in freefall, we're heading in the right direction.
Except we’re not—not yet. This Hollywood production somehow dodges the system-wide impact of what's left unexamined. The more obvious omissions from Oppenheimer would be the unquestioned, continuing dominance of military culture and industry. Mass populations are to be “kept safe” by the nuclear deterrent: ritually pacified by the possibility of an arrogant man “losing it” and pushing the button. Our current news agenda leans towards war as soon as international conflict surfaces (see Taiwan) and buries peace efforts. We try to identify and bring down toxic masculinity in advance, but it still seems to require tragic episodes - the rape and murder of women - to trigger change.
There are obvious gaps in the Barbie proposition, shown up by actual reality. Girls and women rarely have the freedom to choose their own path - that's a privilege. In some parts of the world - not hidden from us in media reporting - women are rarely allowed out of their own homes. In other parts of the world, they are forced out of their own homes to do menial jobs for below the living wage, unable to spend time with their own families. Even those women with privilege enter into a public space historically designed by men. They’re required to compete on the old, male terms that caused us all to be in the state we are in.
Below the top lines of both movies, their narratives have unacknowledged problems that are storing up future pain, common to both. The first of these would be the newly problematic principled shaming of men. At the extreme end of this problem is holding individual white males personally accountable for all of our problems.
Some will say: dear Alternative editorial writer - isn't that exactly what you were doing in the paragraphs above? But we would say no, there is a difference between the person and the action they took. Each of us are capable of good and bad causes, but it is the bad effects that we are holding accountable here - the macho culture and structures we all, men and women, live under.
Men themselves are the greatest victims of the toxic culture they’ve created: 96.2% of people in prison are men. Male suicide has always been significantly higher than women. It is high majority of men that go or are enlisted into war. Those that manage to come back are often permanently injured, traumatised, ruined. Yes, men earn more money: and far more end up alone and die younger.
Living in a world so down on men takes its toll on vulnerable young boys (of every colour). Without a parent at home, they take refuge in gangs where they find solidarity, or in virtual porn where they are seduced by fake promises of control. Or they get ensnared by online movements like that of Andrew Tate where their adolescent pursuit of risk turns into abuse of women. If they are not lucky enough to find a good relationship in life – from parents, friends, girlfriends - these teenage tendencies can get worse for males throughout their lives.
These problems end up being all of ours to experience and address. Those in the caring professions - overwhelmingly staffed by women - might say that care, rather than profit, needs to be at the centre of how we design our societies. What we call social infrastructure - families, communities, neighbourhoods - all offer relational architecture and culture. This helps both boys and girls grow up more easily able to get their emotional needs met, in balanced ways. But until now this has been the unpaid work of mostly women, squeezed into an hour or so at each end of the day.
This argument doesn’t hark back to an age when women stayed at home: in fact, there may never have been a time in history when this ideal was on offer other than to the upper classes. Instead, a balanced life requires both men and women to have shorter working weeks and - in the interregnum at least - a universal basic income. UBI makes it possible for everyone to step away from life as a cog in the machine. Longer term, we need a 'care economy' of the kind Riane Eisler has been working on for decades. But just as important, we need a life of creativity and play that invites everyone to foster more fulfilment.
However, the politics of this are difficult. If it’s played out in the traditional party-political space, and we trust that one party or another will have the vision to move towards a more wholistic future, we’ll likely not make the shift. Moreover, being wrapped up in the old antagonisms leaves us in hock to the successes and failures of the growth economy. Few politicians demur from the orthodoxy that a greater quality of life is directly linked to economic growth. This is a story that films like Oppenheimer and Barbie fail to dispel. Whether through class or merit, it is only the privileged that have choices.
Imagine a Hollywood or Netflix series that gave the social initiative back to every one of us. How can we cultivate stories of how one individual gets him or herself back on track with their own life? These narratives would be about individuals taking themselves on, and could have a discernible wider impact. This is what, in literary studies, is called the bildungsroman - tales of individuals doing difficult internal development to end up changing conditions for everyone. Yes, such novels and films exist, but mostly as retrospectives of historic figures. But they are portrayed as exceptional, with qualities that most of us couldn't dream of.
A modern bildungsroman example would be the recent South Korean film 'Return to Seoul'. It’s about one woman's grappling with being adopted in the aftermath of the years of conflict that led to the Korean divide). As she struggles to find an identity beyond the trauma of her abandonment, she reshapes her circumstances with a strong will, eventually even working in the arms industry—styling herself as an agent of peace.
Maybe we should demand more psychosocially-transforming experiences from mainstream Hollywood productions. Not simply how Marvel figures overcome their ambiguities to conquer evil. How about the true life of Clark Kent or James Bond, where each grapple with the impact of all that violence on their minds and bodies. Doing the emotional work that has them choosing a different way of being with power, then causing ripples of change through the police force or foreign office?
Or a Barbie sisterhood that discovers new expressions of womanhood outside those set by the patriarchy? Maybe like the sensuous knowledge of black feminism that Minna Salami is teaching. In so doing they redesign both home and public life life to mean so much more than tasks and agreed rules of engagement, to become the very place of aliveness and wholeness.
We'd watch it.
