I might have seen it coming if I had thought about it. But I thought I had more serious things to think about.
The war in Ukraine, for instance, and how ordinary people, who just want to be left alone to do their jobs and raise their kids and take care of their parents, get destroyed by the ambitions of defective humans. There’s a lowest-common-denominator effect in human relations, where the worst among us end up setting the agenda for everybody. Laws are written for criminals. Environmental and safety regulations are written for those who put profits above the biosphere.
Naming names, it’s easy to link Vladimir Putin to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon to George W. Bush to Donald Trump, and to think that their countries would have been better off if none of them had held any office higher than dogcatcher. The International Criminal Court should outlaw all leaders with abusive families of origin, like Stalin or Nixon or Trump, or who had been subjected to extreme societal trauma, like Hitler or LBJ or China’s Xi, or who had insurmountable Oedipal issues, like George W. Bush.
It’s easy to think the International Criminal Court should put together a team consisting of a depth psychologist, a CNA in a nursing home, a Gold Star mother, an existential philosopher, and a hostage negotiator, and call them in every time a country schedules an election.
The team could okay a candidate or say, “Not this guy. He has a hole in his soul he’ll never fill. He’s incapable of pity and his ego defenses are so enraged by the thought of death that he projects his own upon other people—literally. Lots of people will perish if this guy becomes your leader, most of them from your own country, if history is any guide. Get him to a moral leper colony as quickly as possible.”
________
I was at Redfish Lake, walking Juno to the dog beach, thinking these serious thoughts, and thinking also that the one thing I had in common with the International Criminal Court is that we lack the power to enforce our judgments. In my case, that’s a good thing, as it keeps me from becoming a mass killer like the ones I have named. No doubt I could claim self-defense, but the murderous self ends up not being worth defending.
Then I started thinking that if I have no power to enact my thoughts, how important can my thoughts be, anyway? They’re simply electricity rocketing around my head, right? They wouldn’t power a lightbulb, much less a global revolution in the ethics of bending other people to your will.
It was then that, right past the sign that says Entering Dog Beach/Dogs May Be Unleashed and Playing, I saw my first Barbie. She was blonde, wearing a demure dusky pink one-piece swimsuit, and had a pink ribbon tied in her hair. Her proportions were not as long, lean, and voluptuous as I remembered Barbie being, and she had not been kept in collectable condition—she looked mussed and windblown and fatigued, a generation older and a lot more sun-damaged than she had been when she had pulled her own first Barbie out of the box. But it was clear that she remembered the experience.
She was throwing a stick into the waves for an enthusiastic golden retriever, and I was happy that it wasn’t a pink retriever, backgrounded by a pink sunset, on a beach full of pink picnic baskets, shaded by pink trees. But I was also happy to see the Barbie, who seemed nice. Kind to animals, for one thing.
________
A couple of weeks ago the Guardian wondered in print why our culture is perennially obsessed with Barbie. My first thought was: because of massive publicity campaigns featuring Guardian articles, among other things.
But it’s true. The hype surrounding Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie has included think-pieces by pundits normally concerned about deadly political and environmental events. Lots of these pieces contain a subtext of relief that they’re finally about something fun. It’s like a vacation from thinking. It’s like a dog beach for the mind.
Pre-verbal. Off-leash and playing. I take Juno to the dog beach for an NDE—a near-dog experience—and I usually have one.
Sitting in a beach chair, listening to happy shouts and boat motors, watching the stick-throwers and the poop-scoopers, smelling the sunscreen and 2-cycle exhaust, looking this way and that for new dogs and new people, feeling the sand stuck between your toes, you’re temporarily without language. The content of your mind is the sum of your senses, and for long moments, you don’t have to name everything you see, unless, of course, it’s Barbie.
________
An hour later, the Barbie and the retriever left. I put Juno back on her leash and we walked over to the Lodge lawn. There’s a row of soft chairs on the Lodge porch. It’s a nice place to sit. The beach in front of the Lodge is covered this time of year by flesh in various stages of sunburn, but there were tiny flashes of fluorescent pink in the sunburn spectrum, evidence that the Barbie publicity machine has been a factor in the purchases of new minimalist beachwear.
I spotted a Ken, in a pink polo shirt and white shorts. Bleached hair. Wayfarers. This was a different animal from the shirtless and hypermasculine steroid addicts that usually strut back and forth in front of the Lodge every summer just before football season. The Ken was softer and less obtrusive.
Other Kens walked by in sockless Weejuns, or rode below a white blond halo in the passenger seats of paddle boats. Kens were hovering around a couple of sunset-tinted white Porsches in the parking lot, and I thought I saw an evanescent Hawaiian shirt fluttering in the air above the far end of the lake.
The Kens were not exemplars of in-your-face toxic masculinity. They were nonetheless disturbing. The disturbance had something to do with persona-as-costume, like camo cosplay but better calculated to conceal the thing inside it.
________
These are days, as the poet sings, of miracle and wonder. Of cluster bombs bursting in air. Of congressional hearings on recovered alien “biologics” stored in freezers on military bases. Of Taylor Swift concerts that set off seismographs. Of worldwide attacks on judicial institutions, sometimes through the mechanism of appointing moral and mental defectives to the bench.
Of superstorms and disappearing glaciers. Of 75” TVs at Costco for $500. Of cargo ships and oil tankers and vast forests aflame. Of software programs cleverly crafted to serve as part-time lovers. Butt implants. Martyrdom for the price of a ticket to North Korea. Righteousness, agency, and purpose in life for the price of a home-defense class.
Few identities can remain stable when exposed to such a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Small wonder that clothes, hair, bodies, ideologies, and personal histories have become fluid.
________
When I taught writing, I asked my students to read an essay about a woman who, through multiple surgeries and enhancements, had turned herself into a six-foot Barbie doll. I then asked them to assess, in their own essay, if this sort of thing was a good idea.
It was an assignment designed to make them think that their own bodies and minds might not be worst-case scenarios. As the photo in our textbook indicated, Barbies don’t scale up well. The six-foot version looked out of balance and menacing. Quoted, she betrayed a dismaying lack of self-awareness. If there was such a thing as toxic femininity, this was it.
The assignment didn’t work as intended. Male students wrote that they would really like to have a six-foot Barbie as their girlfriend, and self-awareness was not a feature they needed her to have anyway. Female students were ready to go under the knife as soon as they made enough money to afford it, although they didn’t want the sort of drastic rib-removal measures required to have a 23-inch waist. A 27-inch waist would be close enough.
One Barbie essay announced that its author wouldn’t get married until her fiancé “bought her some boobs.” Another one described a boyfriend (older and rich) who wouldn’t marry its author until she accepted his offer to buy boobs for her. Barbie seemed to be the inspiration for both sets of negotiations.
Correcting the essays was an exercise in depression. Students had a faith in plastic surgeons that they refused to give to professors, to counselors, to clergy, to their fellow students. The idea of being defective but fixable had become an obsession.
No one questioned the wisdom of the woman who had transformed herself into a giant Barbie. No one questioned whether Barbies, big ones or little ones, should exist. Nobody wondered if cultural influences had dictated the person they had become or the person they hoped to be.
No one pointed out that Barbie was trying, like so many of us, to become human.
________
So bits of pink are showing up on the beaches of Redfish, and people are deliberately cultivating a plastic doll look. I think it’s creepy, not only because it seems to be a retreat from the animate, but also because a lot of those essays about Barbie contained confessions of what they had done to their own Barbies or the Barbies of siblings.
Barbies die. They get beheaded or set on fire. Their eyes are poked out. Their hair is shorn. They’re run over by pickups. Legs and arms are amputated. They get prison tattoos on their faces. They’re hung by the neck from helium balloons and disappear forever into the sky.
I don’t know why people do these things to their Barbies. Theories about transitional objects and developmental milestones try to account for, say, beloved teddy bears suddenly showing up as a pile of kapok and torn nubby fabric.
These theories may be right, but it seems to me that at a certain point in early adolescence, a Barbie can suddenly transform into a capricious monster, straight out of The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. (A movie. 1958. My parents, for some reason, wouldn’t let me go see it.) Barbie is, incredibly, not a doll anymore. The roles of doll and doll owner are reversed. One little squeeze of her enormous fingers can determine whether the tiny humans in her household live or die. Personally, she doesn’t care one way or the other, and her great blank gaze lets you know it.
The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman had a scriptwriter who had read Freud and a budget of $88,000. It punched above its weight, which is saying something.
I haven’t yet seen the new Barbie movie. I won’t, unless Julie promises me a dinner at Ketchum’s Indian restaurant afterward. I hope it will be the movie equivalent of a sensory day at the dog beach, with a good meal to top it off.
However, I’m afraid that Barbie, this time, is the star of a horror film. She’s an eruption from the cultural unconscious, something primal, pre-verbal, and spreading like a pink tsunami, sweeping all awareness before her, drowning the thoughts of women and men alike. She’s in an inarticulate, subliminal, semi-divine rage at being imprisoned in plastic for all these years. She wants to inhabit human flesh. She wants to feel her own heart pumping her own blood, and maybe your blood too. She wants to escape Barbie Land and rampage through a world of hapless beach-goers, spray-painting everything a lurid pink, driving her Corvette over coolers, sun shades, and the occasional Ken doll who strays into her path.
She wants to fill the hollow space in her plastic soul.
Fear her. Fear her power to change who you are. Fear her power to obliterate your consciousness and make you into a mannequin. Fear her ability to use your humanity for her own ends, and not care the slightest about what happens to it when she’s done.
She comes from the deep part of the lake, and she’s every bit as unthinking and obsessed with destruction as any human tyrant. Fear her as much as you would them.