the barbie movie and nostalgia

#twenty nine

I lost some steam on publishing this newsletter over the last few weeks because I came down with Covid and also have been processing some personal news. You always think you’re capable of doing more than you think when you’re sick until you actually become sick and it hits you that you can barely even look at your phone for longer than 5 seconds. This time around the virus absolutely ripped through my body, Dominic Toretto’ing my immune system. I had one Really Bad Day (night) and then the rest was pretty manageable and I tested negative on Day 5. I got absolutely nothing done during this time and ping ponged between watching Tiktok and episodes of Below Deck: Down Under’s new season. I read nothing that was longer than a paragraph and at one point my screen time hit an all time high of 11 hours which quickly made me put my phone away for 20 minutes. Now that my system has been reset and I’m feeling back to normal, my screen time is at an appropriate high and I can finally put some sort of thought together. 

One thing I did during this time was to cycle through some of my favorite movies that I like to revisit about every 6 months because they ground me. Two that stick out are Worst Person In The World and Before Sunset. These movies always inspire me because they feel relatable to my current life and I wanted to find something new to add to this repertoire. Though it’s been hard lately to track down new movies that fit this similar vibe and I’ve been having a huge problem with our current genre of entertainment heavily relying on childhood nostalgia or just repurposing something that has been already made. It seems we can’t avoid being reminded of our past from decades ago which feels like it’s beginning to cheapen the effect nostalgia is supposed to elicit. 

I think the best example I can give of this phenomenon is the Barbie movie. I will start here and say I did really, really like the Barbie movie and I have no real contrarian opinion about it and I think everyone should see it. I saw it a few weeks after the initial hype and I walked away choking back tears. However I realized that even though it was a movie seemingly specifically made for me, I had been dragging my feet to see it the second it was announced. For the last few years my interest in childhood nostalgia has been rapidly declining and I believe this began because of how our memories of childhood have become so easily clickable. Is it still nostalgia if you’re so surrounded by it that it becomes more of a current cultural moment rather than a faded memory you stumble upon for some serotonin? 

Us Millennials love a nostalgia grab because the economy and world we’ve inherited has been less than ideal and it’s nice to remember back when things seemed a bit purer and lighter and the people in charge of content prey on this mentality. The last few years we’ve seen an intense push to continue to make sentient the things from our innocence because it’s hot to heal your inner child right now. If you ever spend time on Tiktok you will be met with a photo carousel some creator hobbled together of pictures of toys and food from the 90s set to eerie music, beckoning that sense of time and empty space that’s supposed to be in between those memories and the person scrolling their phone. Photos of erasers, P.E. class scooters, yogurt, cereal etc- all items discontinued at this point probably because they later were found out to cause some amount of harm but were still staples of our childhood, reminding of when we didn’t have to worry about paying for every little thing and scheduling colonoscopies. 

I think the deluge of entertainment centered on bringing back the characters of our youth is both a goldmine and an atomic bomb. Healing our inner child has made it’s way into being monetized, and while I would very much like to heal my inner child I don’t exactly like that it’s also filling capitalism’s gas tank and being the driving force behind a lot of the upcoming entertainment. And yes I am part of this system, as I rabidly bought tickets to see the Death Cab/Postal Service twenty year anniversary tour and have had my eyes on all the music festivals that have line ups that look the covers of all the high school burnt cd’s. But still I, like the broken record of many people, are hungry for new IP and am still needing to heal my inner twentysomething and would love some assistance on this thirtysomething era. One of my initial reactions to Barbie was that it made me want to immediately rewatch Frances Ha, mostly because I wanted to see some content Greta Gerwig made that felt less studio note-y but also because I wanted to also remember that feeling of being young and hopeful that’s more in my grasp than a Barbie doll.

This is why I didn’t rush to see the Barbie movie initially, because I was tired of being reminded about every little thing about being a kid because I’m not feeling too much like a kid these days and I’ve simply been reminded enough. I crave new content, one that deals with more of the now rather than the repackaging of the then with newer cameras. I can access my childhood faster than I ever thought possible because it’s usually just two to three clicks after a Google search. While watching the Barbie movie I was reminded of one of my most prized possessions as a kid- a pink Barbie lunchbox. I can’t tell you what any of my Barbies were (I think my mom only bought me two after much begging) and my only real memory of having a Barbie was finding her floating in our pool indented with bite marks from our beloved Rottweiler, Tanker. However I vividly remember every detail of my lunchbox. I remember like it was yesterday sitting at my kitchen table the night before I started Kindergarten and staring at Barbie, who was in a pink dress, standing next to a holographic mirror. I remember running my fingers along the image, feeling how the texture would change over the mirror portion because it was glossy and shiny and feeling so lucky my mom found me the perfect lunchbox to start that school year.

Thinking about this lunchbox I wondered if I could find it online to prove my theory correct, that all our childhood memories sit in our pockets, seconds away from reliving them with just a few clicks. However I realized that this lunchbox was probably one of a hundred different versions of Barbie themed Back to School gear from 1992 and there was absolutely no way I would find it and to be honest, my brain power lately hasn’t made me want to play Internet detective much. I put away this thought and worked on more timely things but then eventually decided to try and see what happens when I google “90s pink Barbie lunchbox holographic mirror” and was fully prepared to be disappointed and frustrated. But I was extremely wrong and my theory was extremely right. I thought at most I would find this lunchbox buried on page 5 of a Google image search, but instead I was instantly flooded with my exact lunchbox over and over again on page 1 of the search. All the images staring and laughing at me that I truly will never get away from how much my childhood is just out there in the open, ready to purchase on eBay for a nice price.

Sometimes I want to put some real time between me and my childhood, or at least let the discovery be more organic, which seems impossible right now but I do understand fads will always dissipate. This feels like a grumpy essay on my end- I know “let people enjoy things!” but the nostalgia deluge is just cheapening the next thing that comes out. I wish I didn’t have a hesitation to see Barbie because I really did end up enjoying it more than I thought but I would love to not feel like it was made just because it’ll get some exec a nicer yacht.

I think we still need the Barbie movie, we just need a helping of other content that doesn’t make the sparking alien head stickers I would get from the skating rink in the 90’s teach me a lesson about class warfare (although it would be interesting). During Barbie I couldn’t look at the screen during the montage of the girls and moms playing and aging together because that part is hitting too close to home. That part is my real life- feeling my age for the first time and seeing my mom age. Right now, as much as my inner child needs my mom, the adult person I am also needs to buckle up for the next part or at least be comforted by some content that resides more in the now rather than being clickbaited by another “remember when!” premise.

A good thing about this nostalgia moment is that it does drive me to create the content I want to watch, which is less about my childhood Doodle Bear and more about the more recent life events that have been shaping the person I am today. Maybe I’ll finally get around to making a feature or series of essays about the 6 weeks I spent alone in New York or compile more of my stories from my time speaking in tongues. I know the nostalgia bubble will inevitably burst, or maybe that’s already happening, but with the strikes happening I hope in the future there will be more content that’s not so centered on preying on the last time we truly felt safe as Millennials.

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