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Greta Gerwig Unplugs the Matrix
And it turns out we're all wearing costumes
I threw a Barbie-themed birthday party for Sloane last night at our place and it was off the patent plastic chain. Barbie hasn’t ever been my thing, and I’ll happily admit that my hesitations about the recent film grew with each new trailer the studio released. It felt from the sixty second clips like it was going to be incredible, but the often-reductive and preachy realities of big budget projects these days made it impossible to believe it was going to deliver on any of the promises the cuts seemed to be making. My only hope was knowing Greta Gerwig was steering the pink, 23% scaled down ship, and to say that she safely docked both the film and its philosophical cargo in the theatrical harbor would be an understatement. It was astonishing on every possible level to me, and Gerwig’s ability to hold a compassionate mirror up to so many opposing viewpoints was a masterclass in both cinematic self-exploration and zeitgeist wheelie-popping.
I was one of the millions of goobs fawning over The Matrix for years after it came out. It explained everything to my ninth grade brain and helped direct much of my aggression and frustration into a decades-long rant about the evils of the system. All the bad stuff was huge, external, and potentially escapable, and all the good stuff was waiting on the other side of a single moment of cord-unplugging enlightenment. But I hadn’t thought about it much in a number of years until I was walking out of the theater after seeing Barbie for the first time. Barbie felt connected to it but evolved, and I wondered on the drive home what would have been different for my friends and I if we had seen this at age 13 instead of the other. Like its predecessor, it still unveils the sterilized machinery cultivating modern humanity’s histrionic behavior and the dependency models it employs as its tools. But alongside that more expository thread runs another one that feels much more compassionate and introspective than anything the Wachowski sisters cooked up. A type of tender, hedonistic ache which begins by posing something to the effect of “why do I feel like this?” before continuing into the deeper, and perhaps more sacred realization of “it’s OK for me to be where I am right now.” In a world obsessed on all sides with doctrinal correctness and min-maxing our way through emotional discomfort, and escaping a past illusion of The Way by replacing it with a new, supposedly more real version of The Way, it felt refreshing to watch a carnival troupe of characters mess up and wander into different philosophical costumes and decorations before eventually admitting either their mistakes or the times when something didn’t feel quite right. It’s easy to find an expensive movie these days straw manning the latest bad guy, but it’s much harder to find one reminding us that we all have quite a bit we could work on when we’re honest about it and our various stages of personal growth and the mechanics of our own self-discovery don’t need to alienate us from the people we disagree with.
Maybe there is a big bad wolf out there, and maybe some of our dorky spiritual architecture is keeping us safe from something. But what seems more likely is that much of what we think is broken about the world is fundamentally an indication of what needs to be healed in ourselves. It’s sexy and presentable to decide to fight a faux-war of liberation against a vague and all powerful enemy out there somewhere named things like “the patriarchy” or “feminism” or “capitalism” or “socialism” or whatever else your thing is. But the goofy combat and moving self-discovery of the Barbie world indicate an awareness from Gerwig that the real mission any of us are on begins with figuring out who we are and taking deep, meaningful care of whoever that person is. After that, the marching orders appear to be extending the same level of constructive sympathy to the people around you who’ve been operating in your world as an enemy while maintaining your healthy boundaries. You can call that a plastic, manufactured truism that can’t handle the weight of the modern world if you want, but the point of toys has always been to introduce us to ourselves and Stereotypical Barbie, as the name would seem to imply, has something in her story here for each of us. I’m sure it will be in theaters for a hundred years, but if you haven’t seen it yet I strongly recommend it. Happy Saturday all, lots of love from the boiling oil of Austin’s summer.