Barbie: A Kind of Review

I just watched Barbie for the third time, and I have to say that the film gets better with each viewing. The jokes are still funny, and I always find something I didn’t catch before.

Greta Gerwig excels at capturing details as a screenwriter (she co-wrote Barbie with her partner Noah Baumbach) and as a director. Her loving attention to detail was present in Little Women (her masterpiece), too, which you can see in the way she shot the March family home during and after the sisters’ childhood—during there’s a fulness, as people are always crowded in and using all the rooms; after there’s an absence, someone (or some unnameable thing) is always missing.

She uses that same attention to detail in Barbieland, a place we can think of as a village in Sweden where all the Barbies (and Kens) live separate from yet are vaguely aware of the Real World (that’s our world). And because the film has the tone of a screwball-comedy, the “portal” that opens between Barbieland and the Real World doesn’t come across as a cheap and completely stupid plot point.

Barbie doesn’t just get you thinking about what it means to be human, but what it means to have and be an idea. Is the capacity to make meaning really what distinguishes us from Barbie? Are human ideas just as limited as a doll’s understanding of our world?

3 things I think you should know:

• Ryan Gosling’s facial expressions, alone, are worth the cost of a ticket.

• Greta Gerwig is so smart, and listening to her talk about her movies is sometimes as enjoyable as watching them.

• Stereotypical Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) last line is still funny, even after you watch the film a second or third time and know it’s coming.

Party Girl: A Kind of Review

I watched this 1995 indie film starring Parker Posey twice in a row I loved it so much. What’s not to love? There’s 90s club music, references to Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, and the wild outfits Posey’s character (Mary) wears and I covet. Plus, the film is not only a love letter to public libraries, but the field of library science. Whether you’re a library nerd or just a Parker Posey fan, Party Girl is worth checking out on the Criterion Channel.

3 things I think you should know:

• While Mary is blind to her privilege, she’s just so absurd that she’s lovable.

• Mary knows that she needs to find a direction for her life, which is why she rejects her godmother Judy’s and Mustafa’s suggestion that she get a job as a waitress.

• I recommend watching the movie like a fantasy or fairytale. Don’t expect anything that happens to make sense.

Notes to Self Vol. 1: Fragments of Thought Collected in a Bulleted List

• Buy art to remember momentous occasions

• Ideas don’t have human rights

• On traveling without taking pictures

• On sending voice messages to friends

• Start a travel publication focused on the development of self

• Travels in potato chips

• Hikes and pre-packaged sandwiches

• “It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” - Edmund in O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night

• “Some things are whole only when they shatter”

• Find out vs. reason

• Write about myself vs. my self

• “My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.” - George Orwell on the thoughts he had after being shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War

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On Strass’s Streams of Time

According to Berlin-based infographics scholar and concept developer Sandra Rendgen, concepts for timelines were only starting to be developed in the late 18th century, as time posed a greater challenge to visualize than space. “There was no well-established approach to visualizing time-based information,” she writes. Hard to believe in this modern age, when all our apps present our memories, activity, and other data to us in the form of a timeline or feed.

In the early 19th century, German writer and professor Friedrich Strass attempted to present world chronological history as Streams of Time, citing that we tend to its progression like the flow of a river. Of course creating a visualization of time requires reducing it. How else could Strass depict the course of human history from around 4000 BCE to his present day in 1803? A “universal history of mankind” is what Rendgen writes he was trying to show in a meter-long poster that was “clearly influenced by [then] contemporary cartography,” as can be seen in the artistic style of the streams. But the Public Domain Review is right to point out its obvious failings:

“Working with a hodgepodge mixture of Biblical, classical, and imperial accounts of world history, his chart begins with large, vague springs like ‘Chinese’ and ‘Assyrian,’ which themselves have no precursor, while Europe flows forth from the exclusive roots of Italian an Greek civilizations.”

A dangerous map, perhaps, where streams begin in the abstract realm of sky and cloud but flow down through the natural, human realm. And they stop at what was Strass’s present day, another indication that all this really maps is a 19th-century German mindset.

Both PDR and Rendgen call attention to the blank spaces, to the streams that go nowhere, to what’s missing. What can’t lines cover? As PDR points out, Euclid defines a line as “breadthless length” in his book Elements. A line is one dimensional. In Streams of Time, Strass works with the dimension of time while neglecting space, which is why we see so many gaps.

But, then, what can we expect from a timeline that plots the beginning of mankind and the 19th century as points that can be connected linearly?

Does a river really run through it?

The Banshees of Inisherin: A Kind of Review

From its opening scene, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin makes you feel like you’re watching Beckett. Set against the backdrop of Ireland’s civil war, the film is as bleak and absurd and tragically funny/sad as any story that aims to capture the complexities of Ireland ought to be.

3 things I think you should know:

1. It’s best to be in the middle of reading a work of Irish modernism when you sit down to watch Banshees. I’m reading Joyce’s Ulysses.

2. The landscape is breathtaking, which makes the tragedies of Inisherin and the hope that there’s more beyond it all the more bleak.

3. The way the feud between Colm and Padraic escalates is equal parts hilarious and horrifying.

The Second Person

Suddenly, the perspective shifts when I’m writing in my journal—no longer I but you. The second person takes over. I continue moving my hand along the page, but a consciousness outside my own subordinates me, treats me as you. But who is I or you or me? Who’s in control…who’s not?

The second person doesn’t know me well enough to narrate my life: It may reveal glimpses of my past, but it doesn’t see the future before I do. These limitations make this point of view good for stories where the narrator needs to be as close as possible to the protagonist without actually being them. But it subordinates the protagonist with its instructional tone. In Lorrie Moore’s essay “How to Become a Writer,” the second person is Moore’s present self looking back on her journey as a young writer and guiding that person through it based on the conclusions she’s made over the years.

Through the second person, perhaps one can make peace with past selves.

What shows up in my journal, though, is more present, more urgent. Less a voice of experience than one of punishment. Punishing me for what, you might ask. Punishing me for who I am not. Nowhere is this voice more prominent than in my lists, a format where I will no longer do. These lists are usually about what I must do, and what I’m not doing. Who I am, and who I am not. The you aims to be a bridge of self-improvement. In the many lists of books and films and art works I hope to read, watch, and see, “you must” could be read before each one, even when absent. Instructions from the second person.

But where do I go?

It’s not that I disappear…I just become I, etcetera, like the title of Susan Sontag’s 1978 short story collection. The narrative voice in each story is disembodied, struggling to place events in a coherent flow for the reader (and the writer herself). I know from Benjamin Moser’s brilliant biography of Sontag that she demanded self-improvement. She sought to bridge the gaps between the many versions of Susan Sontag. She sought to bridge the gap between the writer she was and the writer she wanted to be—not become but be.

Sontag was a master of lists. She knew when they were needed in her work and could drill any subject down into items grouped based on some loose relationship they have to one another. A list is a body in how it brings together limbs of thought. Sontag wouldn’t approve of that metaphor. But she’s attempting to bring together disparate things in her lists. “Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached” (24) she writes in her short story “Project for a Trip to China,” which could almost be read as literary nonfiction.

“Somewhere, some place inside myself, I am detached.” — Susan Sontag

There are at least 42 different lists in “Project for a Trip to China,” though the entire story could really be read as a list. Sontag is trying to distill this trip down to an itinerary based on memory, imagination, and history. Finally, she will be able to link her imagined China (a place tied to her father, who she never knew) and the real China. “Mythical voyage” (27). Her trip will result in “literature” more than “knowledge.”

In our personal writing, can we be both the psychoanalyst and the patient? Sontag’s feelings about psychoanalysis were that we tend to rely on it too much. We seek a reason for why we want to go to China and what that trip would mean to us before we even go. We overanalyze for meaning, interpret instead of experience; and as the title of her famous essay collection makes clear, Sontag was Against Interpretation. But in “China,” I wonder if she’s trying to bridge analyst and patient, and that’s the project that fails in the end: “Perhaps I will write the book about my trip to China before I go” (29).

Literature over knowledge.

The limitations of the second person come from the directions this point of view gives the protagonist. You not I. I, etcetera, which doesn’t mean “I, plus” or “I, and so on.” It only means that the I is constantly being overthrown. Overthrown by a narrative consciousness that analyzes and interprets experiences for me.

The second person takes over.

Cocaine Bear: A Kind of Review

I heard an interview with Elizabeth Banks, the director of Cocaine Bear, about the true story her film is based on. The bear, sadly, dies in the true story, after all its organs atrophy from devouring massive amounts of cocaine. Banks sees this film as the bear’s revenge story, which made me want to see it as much as the title.

3 things I think you should know:

1. Justice is done by the bear—all her victims had it coming.

2. There’s a heart-wrenching scene with crying bear cubs.

3. While the bear gets her revenge and it’s great, you also remember that now she and her cubs are cocaine addicts.

The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Kind of Review

I’ve never read a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not one I can recall, anyway. I bought a biography of Millay called Savage Beauty that I hope to get around to reading—”savage beauty” says it all.

I have a habit of reading about interesting writers before I read their work. Is this a moral failing? Perhaps. I will say that the documentary Burning Candles: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay makes me want to finally seek out her poetry.

3 things I think you should know:

1. You can watch the documentary for free on YouTube.

2. Millay could be as mean as she was brilliant.

3. It’s amazing how much popularity she achieved as a poet!