Two movies played in two equally packed-out theatres this week. One featured the atomic bomb, war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The other a doll, shirtless Ryan Gosling and cellulite.
One movie, more than the other, had people crying in their seats. Their misty eyes noticeable even in the dark, their sleeves dragged over their thumb as they dabbed away at their face. The movie responsible for the most tears was not the movie about the bomb.
Oppenheimer is a good movie. Cillian Murphy deserves the praise heaped on him. Much is made about his weight loss in preparation for the film. Because eating less is seen as an artistic sacrifice for men but silently expected of women playing the role of normal adult every day. It’s a profound movie but that’s expected in a movie about nuclear weapons and death.
The Barbie movie lured audiences in with knowing humour about being a woman delivered with an obvious wink. We were expecting cellulite jokes, jokes about getting old and ugly and therefore useless to society. That’s been the bread and butter of white middle-class female comedy from Lucille Ball to Golden Girls to Joan Rivers to Sex and the City.
Brianna Parkins: ‘The Irish have a natural instinct for nosiness’
Dublin Bus drivers are practised in the art of soundness. Sydney could learn from them
Brianna Parkins: ‘The cat popped into my life when grief had knocked me off my feet’
I feel like I’ve hit the lottery with my partner: I make the money, he makes me lunches
But what we weren’t bargaining for was a too-close-to-the-bone depiction of what it means to belong to a gender consistently on the back foot and who can’t ever seem to do enough to get society to accept them. All from a doll that doesn’t even have genitals.
“You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood,” monologues America Ferrera in the film.
“It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”
In Barbie Land the dolls believed that girls can do anything and things are better now. Barbie’s shock discovery in the real world that men are still in charge and their creepy comments about your body could leave you feeling shame, instead of feeling good, was the same crushing realisation lots of girls have in adolescence.
Our parents, teachers and sports coaches can instil as much confidence, positive affirmations and reassurance that we are as good as the boys as they like. But the outside world will always have men yelling at us from cars as we walk home in our school uniforms, the wage gap and sexual assault victims being cross-examined about what they were wearing at the time.
Women’s interests were about unserious things such as the complexities of relationships and human condition . . . Men’s books were about serious things such as play-pretending to be spies
The movie extends an understanding hand to men and their navigation of modern masculinity. How can men feel “Kenough” if women don’t technically need them to live in a practical sense but rather want them instead? Although it is telling that while the Kens felt oppressed simply by being ignored by the Barbies, the Barbies had to fight against the Kens removing their rights in the constitution.
There were jokes by women for women, like the almost universal experience of having a man play an acoustic guitar at you while expecting your rapt attention and awkward eye contact for four minutes straight. The movie navigated mother-daughter relationships, gender, capitalism – all under the limits imposed by Mattel, the owner of Barbie’s trademark.
Some reviews were glowing, some were not. Which is fine, movies are made to be liked by everyone (except Maid in Manhattan, as any true film connoisseur would agree). But the criticisms featured an interesting bouquet of words. The Barbie movie was described with words like “squealing”, “hot-pink mess”, “very pretty but not very deep” and “good-natured but self-conscious”.
[ Barbie reviews: What are critics saying about Greta Gerwig’s doll comedy?Opens in new window ]
Which sound remarkably like the criticism often levelled at women themselves or the things we like.
No demographic has their taste mocked more than teenage girls. If you are an artist and don’t want to be taken seriously by “true music lovers”, just be overwhelmingly popular with younger female audiences. Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, Spice Girls and even Abba were all mocked as “not real music” despite still continuing to sell out stadiums even as holograms.
We witnessed older women returning to watch Westlife, singing along gleefully, free from the shackles of having to pretend it was “uncool” because some older lad in a band T-shirt on the bus home told them so.
We are used to books that touch on what being a woman might be like, being shoved into a category called “women’s interests”. Books about men doing things are regarded as literature, or a thriller if they are spies or a biography. Women’s interests were about unserious things such as the complexities of relationships and human condition. They had lipsticks on the cover. Men’s books were about serious things such as play-pretending to be spies.
The Aosdána, the invite-only group honouring artists who have made “outstanding contributions” in their creative field in Ireland does not include Marian Keyes or Maeve Binchy in the list of members past or present. The best-selling authors not only wrote about addiction, abortion and women’s inequality, but could make us laugh doing it.
Through their craft they made us look these issues in the eye at a time when it was expected by polite society to look away. Despite their international recognition, millions of books sold and influence on literature, they are not members of Irish art’s most prestigious body.
It matters in a way. Symbolically. Morally. But to the millions of women (and some men) who read their books, it also doesn’t matter what critics and art’s councils think, they don’t need their approval to know they love and find recognition in these books.
That is validation enough. To know that a large number of women saw their struggles reflected back in your work and found comfort. Do we even care about trying to get society to take the things we like seriously any more?
Probably not. As America Ferrera says in the film: “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.”