barbie and all that
or, Marvel ruined media; or, Christopher Nolan ruined movies
The best tweet ever and the point of this whole post. Watch that short video.
I’ve been meaning to write this for over a year and now that there’s a trailer to the Barbie movie and all of this has become surreally real, I suppose it’s time to talk about it. It’s more than Barbie, though. I’m not even going to talk about the Barbie trailer because who cares.
I’m more interested in this:
Playing to win: are Mattel movies about to take over Hollywood? | Movies | The Guardian
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling have signed on to star in a Barbie movie directed by Greta Gerwig, working from a script she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. Lena Dunham is writing and directing a Polly Pocket movie starring Lily Collins. Akiva Goldsman is writing a Major Matt Mason film that will star Tom Hanks. Now, unless I am mistaken, the people named in this paragraph have between them won three Oscars (and been nominated for another 14) and seven Emmys (and been nominated for a further 15). And they’re making films about toys.
The easy thing to do is be sarcastic and flippant about all this, but I find this too depressing and interesting to just be a sad jerk.
The Marvel of it all
Marvel made many correct decisions early on, and most of these were driven by a complete lack of faith from the people upstairs. Iron Man was a test run to see if anyone would sign up for these superhero movies. They made another one to prove it wasn’t a fluke. Despite the stumbling of the Hulk, Thor and Captain America were successful enough that this seemed to have legs, but the big final test was The Avengers.
Comics lived on these crossover events for decades. People went bananas for them, but would the casual moviegoer follow along?
The answer was obviously Yes or I wouldn’t be writing this now.
So this was one part of their success, but the other big component was the buying of prestige.
The Sam Raimi Spiderman movies, much as we all love them, were fun popcorn affairs without any aims at being someday seen as IMPORTANT CINEMA. Secretly, this is why they’re still good. The same is true of those X-Men movies that turned Hugh Jackman into Hugh Jackman.
But when Jon Favreau needed to convince big money people at Disney to gamble on a bunch of comic book movies, he had a good pitch: We’re going to put Oscar caliber actors on screen and Oscar caliber directors behind the camera.
Robert Downey Jr was still sort of down on his Hollywood luck at this point, but he was once a real big star and was quietly rebuilding his career through smaller roles, where he was gaining a reputation as a character actor.
Making him the face of the Marvel movies was an act of brilliance.
Then you grab Edward Norton, already acclaimed and well respected, and throw him into The Incredible Hulk. Yes, it didn’t turn out as well, but it wasn’t a failure. Of course, this is also where the tone of Marvel began to solidify.
The Incredible Hulk was weirder and darker than Iron Man. A moody movie that skips Bruce Banner’s origin story and turns it into a character piece.
Audiences maybe weren’t ready for this in 2008 (2017’s Logan would find success with this same idea, however).
Chris Evans, too, was not yet a superstar despite starring in The Fantastic Four, which was somewhat ironically based on Marvel comics that Marvel didn’t have the film rights to, but he was gaining a reputation for stealing the show. Then, just for good measure, they threw Tommy Lee Jones and Hugo Weaving in.
For Thor, they picked a relatively unknown Chris Hemsworth but put Kenneth freakin Branagh behind the camera and set him alongside Academy Award winner Natalie Portman (who said in some interview somewhere that the reason she signed up for Thor was because she wanted to work with Branagh).
It may be difficult to remember now how big and beloved Joss Whedon was in the 2000s and early 2010s. He had become the internet’s feminist boyfriend and streaming had reintroduced TV shows like Buffy and Firefly to a whole generation of people who were too young to follow along when they were first on.
Put him behind the camera and let him write the script—baby, you got a stew goin now. That this made 1.5 billion at the box office solidified the future of Marvel (and also its tone and aesthetic, for better or worse).
Now, to explain why Favreau knew this would be successful, we need to bring up the true villain of modern cinema:
Christopher Nolan destroyed movies
Haruki Murakami discussed in his Paris Review Interview why he wrote Norwegian Wood, which went on to become an international bestseller and bring him global attention.
His answer was: I wanted to write a bestseller so that people would read my other books.
INTERVIEWER
Did you think of that book as an exercise in style or did you have a specific story to tell that was best told realistically?
MURAKAMI
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book. That’s why I wrote that book. It was a best-seller in Japan and I expected that result.
INTERVIEWER
So it was actually a strategic choice.
MURAKAMI
That’s right. Norwegian Wood is very easy to read and easy to understand. Many people liked that book. They might then be interested in my other work; so it helps a lot.
It worked real well!
Christopher Nolan may not have intentionally copied Murakami’s method, but it worked the same way.
Why, after a successful career as an independent filmmaker, did Nolan make Batman movies?
Babies, to make the expensive movies like Inception and Interstellar that he wanted to make, he needed someone to give him mountains of cash. And the only way to do that in Hollywood is to convince the dragons hoarding enough gold to fill a mountain that you can make their hoard even larger.
The Batman movies of the 90s were successful but they were very silly and critically reviled. Nolan had no interest in superheroes but he wanted to retain his reputation as an Auteur even while making superheroe movies. I don’t think he had any interest in elevating superheroes. His interest was the same as a mercenary’s. He saw the path to making Inception was lined with superheroes, but because he wanted to be the author of IMPORTANT CINEMA, he had to make Batman into High Art and he did it by filling his movie with IMPORTANT ACTORS who have won or would go on to win a bunch of awards for their performances.
Batman Begins was pretty successful. Successful enough to be a proof of concept for Iron Man and all other future superhero movies.
But a few months after Iron Man came out, The Dark Knight made a billion dollars and Heath Ledger went on to win an Academy Award for his role as a supervillain, which transformed our relationship to comics overnight.
Christopher Nolan prepared the world for superheroes to become IMPORTANT CINEMA, and while he now complains a lot about everything having to do with the plebians buying tickets to see his movies in IMAX, I’d say that his path to becoming one of the last big budget independent directors created the demiurge destroying everything he cares about with regard to movies, theatres, and beyond.
Then there’s whatever this is1.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has now grown up to the point that they throw buckets of cash at Oscar winning directors and actors in order to make people care about, like, whatever the Inhumans is.
Barbie to Rule them All
So why is Matel hiring people with all these awards on their shelves?
Well, because now you care.
You wouldn’t see the Barbie movie if it was written by some random lady and directed by some other random lady and staring a bunch of newcomers with maybe a cameo from someone like Pamela Anderson or whoever and pitched to 9 year old girls. You’ve spent the last week talking about the Barbie trailer because it stars Academy Award nominee Margot Robbie and Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner Ryan Gosling and is written and directed by Academy Award nominee and indie darling Greta Gerwig (Noah Baumbach, another indie darling and Academy Award nominee, cowrote the screenplay).
It’s also deliberately not aimed at children, since the rating is PG-13.
So who is this for?
Well, you aging hipster: it’s for you, you big dummy! This movie and the upcoming Pollie Pocket movies were designed in a lab to make adults who saw Vampire Weekend at Bonnaroo in 2008 go nuts.
They’re banking on enough of you to make this into a massive hit.
So what?
I find this whole thing quite sad, honestly. I’ve watched Disney pick up any SFF writers gaining some acclaim and throwing cash at them to stop writing whatever it is they’re writing and start churning out Star Wars books or start writing Black Panther comics or whatever.
Disney and companies like it already own most media you’re likely going to experience in your life. Companies like Disney or Paramount or Warner also own publishers of novels and comics and they own record companies and videogame publishers and every station where you get your news and on and on and on.
They own everything.
And we wonder why art and media more broadly has become so similar and it really is as simple as this: almost all the media you experience in life is owned by a handful of companies. And everything they don’t own, they’re in process of buying.
But I’m just some idiot on the internet. I don’t have a solution. And while I have no interest in the Barbie movie and I’m sure it’ll make enough money to lock Margot Robbie into the role until she turns 40, it also doesn’t really matter what I think because this, unfortunately, is a political problem, not an aesthetic one.
How’s that for an unpopular turn on what’s sure to be an unpopular essay!
The problem with media is monopolies.
Anyway, I find all of this just such a bummer but when I began to talk about this Barbie movie, my wife said, “It looks good!”
And probably she’s right.
Who knows, maybe even I’ll go see it.
It sure is funny, though, that Barbie releases the same weekend as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, so we’ll see if the man who launched a thousand ships of cinematic horror can beat the monster born from his hubris at the box office.
Someday I may write about this idea that comic books are our modern day myths, but my short response is this: no one owns myths.
One of the reasons I became disenfrancised lecturing in film and have retrained as an English teacher is because of the fact that, increasingly, my first year students would //invariably// either love Marvel, Star Wars or Disney... and the male students in particular would almost always cite Tarantino, Edgar Wright or Nolan as their favourite ever director. And this was okay - they were teenagers - teenagers are gonna teenage!
But it felt like they were increasingly resistant to filmmakers who 1.) Didn't employ pastiche 2.) Used narrative techniques outside of Hollywood cinema 3.) Tended towards moral complexity and ambiguity. And that increasingly these things would elicit a kind of righteousness or even anger. Not in all students - occasionally there would be a student who would click with Iranian New Wave cinema or Tsai Ming-liang or Jane Arden etc. and that was amazing. But over the five years of me lecturing (and the five years of being a post-grad teaching assistant before that) it really did feel less and less... and I honestly believe that is because of what you are describing here.
Because I have children in my life I have seen animated movies more than I would on my own. They seem to require a gamer, comic fandom that eludes my generation. (Late Boomer).