A real feminist film that deconstructed seriousness——Barbie and the missed Oscar nomination

A real feminist film that deconstructed seriousness——Barbie and the missed Oscar nomination

on Margot Robbie's Barbie

Ever since the American Film Institute announced the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards on January 23rd, naturally there is no shortage of fans of commercial blockbusters applauding for Oppenheimer and The Killers of the Flower Moon, and there is no shortage of cinephiles applauding Glazer and Triet for their first Oscar recognition, while the highly touted global box-office winner Barbie, despite seven nominations and seemingly full recognition from the AFI, unexpectedly dropped out of the two key categories: Best Actress and Best Director. With those in favor of the film decrying the AFI's corrosive, old-white-male tastes as exclusive of women and feminism,another group of voices insisted that Barbie was no better than the other films nominated and taunted those who were upset by the drop for ignorance of the cinema.

There are two arguments that are popular among these cinephiles. One is that: Barbie, like Wonka, Marvel and other "theme park movies", is a product of the "infantilization" and "entertainment" of cinema, and a degeneration of cinema. (as exemplified by the statements of old filmmakers such as Oliver Stone) - Obviously we can hardly expect such a closed-minded audience to pick up on the complex, almost thesis-like machinations of Barbie's fairy-tale skin and pseudo-fairy-tale.

In contrast, they favor films with so-called "serious themes" or technical pursuits: they relish Martin Scorsese's long epic narrative formulas, and the way the genre film master has buried the mysteries in every shot reverse shot; they gushed about how the sound system of The Zone of Interest, populated with the ghostly screams of the concentration camps, which constituted the presence of that horrific historical memory, and how the wide - angle lenses of the digital age scrupulously scrutinized every inch of the frame — so powerfully ironic in its contrasts! They certainly exchanged praise for the graininess of Oppenheimer's 35mm IMAX cinematography rendered on the big screen, and reveled in the blinding flames that erupted from the highly recreated nuclear explosion scene - People celebrate Nolan's creation as if they were witnessing Prometheus bringing fire to earth.

But what does all this serious cinema show us beyond what it presents? These audiences, believers in the auteur-cinema god, don't ask what Glazer brings to the table in The Zone of Interest beyond peddling empty concepts of contrasting ironies and fresh horror experiences, or how much guilt “The Killer of the Flower Moon” conveys towards the Osage people under the unobstructed appearance of an over- acted face, nor will ask if "Oppenheimer" has even a less instrumental relationship with its countless names of people and dishes - I don't think Nolan incarnated Prometheus so much as he incarnated Strauss himself for the movie.

So much for the serious narrative beloved by cinephiles who struggle to defend cinema as a serious art, so pale and so clichéd that one wonders if there is a more politically correct, tedious, cynical, clichéd expression in the world than the "old white man self-reflection" - and after we've clearly seen countless The Wolf of Wall Street, The Social Network, Apocalypse Now, Barry Lyndon, and so on.

This is how the sickly serious movie-obsessed confidently monopolize the right to interpret the film. On the one hand, they criticize "slogan-message film" such as Barbie, which only superficially fill themselves with straightforward slogans, while forgetting another kind of "mannerism-storyboard film", which sell the so-called "cinematic experience". As Serge Daney criticized Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover, except that the "long, vacant close-ups of the shoe"* has been replaced by CG particles, digital wide-angle scavenging of the everyday, and the dazzling flashbacks created by precise and sharp editing — which have evolved into a kind of modern cinematic syntax.

Analysts-cinephiles calling for serious expression may have forgotten that there have been genre films that understood the fictional-abstract nature of the genre film and the spirit of playfulness: the screwball comedies of Hollywood's Golden Age, the gift of trouble (Bringing Up Baby, Hatar!) or the game of relationships (Design for Living, Trouble in Paradise); and many of the nonsense B- horror films, such as Wes Craven's Scream series, which utilizes a meta-horror structure to fuse horror syntax with comedy grammar. These films don't claim to be smarter than the audience, "This is why the great audience manipulators-from Hitchcock to Tati, from Chaplin to Lionel-are also great logicians"**, and the logics of cinema start from not image-message but image-sense, the latter about how an imagination involves the viewer in an elegant game of reciprocal sensory payoffs rather than the SM game of manipulation and submission.

I am not here to argue that Greta Gerwig is as great an audience manipulator as Hitchcock or Tati or anyone else - after all, in the eyes of some cinephiles, juxtaposing a female director of contemporary commercial cinema with the aforementioned legends of the past would be treasonous. Nor do I want to equate support for Barbie with support for feminism/respect for women and promote a black-or-white ideological abduction. In fact, even within the feminist community, the debate over the film has never subsided. On the one hand, similar to the aforementioned criticism of "infantilization", the film is considered to be a symbol of capitalism/consumerism's incorporation of gender issues. On the other hand, many of those who affirm the film's political significance are still hesitant to consider it a "good movie". If we leave the question of "what makes a good movie" and its implied question of "what is a movie" as a boring ontology of movie, and look at what Barbie does, it is easy to see that it quite successfully provides a living example of how politics can successfully intervene in and transform traditional commercial genres without compromising its own expression - a problem that has long been faced by almost all "political films" and "realist films".

Actually, if cinephiles object to Barbie on the grounds that it's "not cinematic enough in the way it uses a lot of blunt language/slogans", then they should object to all Godard films and most Rohmer films as well. With regard to the possibilities of political cinema, it may be useful to recall Susan Sontag's comment on Godard's films***: "Not only does Godard not regard cinema as essentially moving photographs; for him, the fact that movies, which purport to be a pictorial medium, admit of language, precisely gives cinema its superior range and freedom compared with other art forms." Certainly as the contemporary artist who has probably gone furthest in his exploration of cinematic form, Godard's films have always been filled with a great deal of fragmented language and aberrant pragmatics. It is often assumed that Godard's political cinema holds some sort of firm left-wing position, but Godard often juxtaposes contradictory elements, and almost every argument that is thrown out is immediately followed by a rebuttal, from La chinoiserie to Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, what always runs through the main axis of his political expression is not so much a firm stance as a dilemma, is it a fixed position that the issue film is exporting, or is it the issue itself? If the movie is understood as the "allegory of contradiction" discussed by Jacques Rancière, then it can be said that the issue itself is the position. A movie's position emerges from a clash of languages. And so we find that Barbie has almost inherited this dangerous shortcut to political, in which language has been reappropriated as a powerful media weapon - of course in a pragmatics that is almost too blunt to be superficial and is more in line with the logic of commercial films - As vulgar as it may seem, it is with a full awareness of the sloganeering of this pragmatics and the feminist issues behind it that this dialectic leads to a true feminism rather than a generic narrative of the awakening of the female subject. There is naturally no shortage of excellent examples of the latter: "Mad Max: Fury Road" portrays a group of women fleeing from a patriarchal hellhole to a Herland in the desert-except that the "Herland" metaphor as an element of the genre films/instigating event can be replaced almost equally with something else. The appearance of "Barbie" formally announced the evolution of feminist expression in the realm of commercial cinema from the topicalization of a genre film to the Genre cinematography of topics, where an idea finally stops carefully intervening in media containers that seem irrelevant to it and consciously begins to transform the media containers.

This is what makes Barbie so exciting, as it demonstrates unprecedented creativity in its conscious transformation of the genre paradigm. On the one hand, it successfully revives the abstract qualities of classic Hollywood and the 2000s chick-flick genre, and its playful, plastic gestures provide an opportunity for films that have long been criticized as bad and disappeared from the mainstream blockbuster landscape - such as Legally Blonde, Freaky Friday, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Miss Congeniality. The criticized slogans and sermons are quickly absorbed into the genre and Chick Flick's concise and exaggerated genre qualities fit seamlessly into it. Cinephiles have mostly criticized the film as a drama that lacks rounded characterization and motivation, However, it's clear that looking for a traditional drama character’s growth arc in a chick flick that emphasizes the "inhumanity" of its characters is only a form of misguided spectacle -- Because that's pretty much what "Barbie" is trying to get away from and rebel against. Paradoxically, people don't tend to criticize a Disney or Pixar animation for this reason; abstraction is a widely accepted grammar in the context of animation, whereas people are always looking for the "real" in live-action imagery, forgetting that "realism" can also be stylized, dogmatized, and reproduced in bulk.

This dialectic between fiction and truth is even more clearly outlined in another female director's work this year: Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. The trial in the film as a fictional allegory constantly misinterprets and tortures the truth, while the movie's revelation of the truth is always postponed, constituting a defense of the unreadability of the truth in a fictional gesture, which is similar to David Fincher's most outstanding film, Zodiac. In Barbie, Barbieland symbolizes the appropriation of the real by the fictional, and the film exposes the collapse of this fictional narrative by designing a three-act play of 'power flips' that quietly shatters the capitalist fictionalization of the "female" subject within it. The movie knows it can't offer any truly effective solutions to the classic thesis of how the politics of female reproduction can avoid the trap of essentialism while respecting sexual difference, but it cleverly offers two endings: a more egalitarian and inclusive Barbieland 3.0, and a stereotype Barbie who chooses to step out into the real world and "become a woman" - the movie can't predict how gender issues will evolve in the real world, but it's confident that more Barbaras will choose to wear flat Shoes——Doesn't a "Barbie Girl," who wants to become a real person facing her destiny, constitute a powerful counterpoint to the myth of female subjectivity peddled by Mattel-capitalism behind this movie?

It may still be difficult to say what the significance of Barbie is, but as a milestone for female auteurs and feminism in the commercial genre, its political significance has already been highlighted through countless memes and controversial battles on the social networks - an achievement that it deserves. In my opinion, regardless of whether its aesthetic/artistic value is still to be assessed, this is an opportunity to pry and reshape the Academy's aesthetic system, which has long preferred to praise seriousness, with stagnant and closed view of cinema and evaluation system. Regardless of how the Academy's own credibility will fluctuate in the future, as a movie award, it should give Barbie enough credit.

Note:

* Styles of Radical Will — Godard, Susan Sontag

**/***Falling Out of Love, Serge Daney,Sight & Sound 1992, July

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