Por her 40th birthday, Greta Gerwig made cinematic history by becoming the first female director of a film to gross more than $1 billion. And if Barbie is a huge blockbuster heralded by an entire year of promotional campaign more expensive than the film itself, it is at the same time, undeniably, a work of authorship.
Beyond the debate consisting in determining the degree of feminism of the film, we want to highlight here the prowess of the director, who managed to keep the course of her vision in the face of pressure from the firm Mattel as well as from Warner Bros. studios. Whether in the field of fine arts or for infinitely reproducible works, an artistic production is always shaped by the balance of power between the artist’s vision and the patron’s desires.
Greta Gerwig has been criticized for a lack of radicalism, a dilution of militant words in a general public discourse with capitalist overtones. However, never the female gauzethis woman’s gaze posed on the world through the eyepiece of the camera, has imposed itself on hundreds of millions of spectators with so much force, nor in so many shades of pink.
Polite attention
At a time when we keep repeating that cinema is dying, the noise aroused by Barbie and, by extension, by Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan, reminds us of its full force of cultural impact. And even if, as Gerwig has the character of Gloria (America Ferrera) say in a monologue – the half-time bravura piece of the film –, as women, “we always have to be extraordinary, but no matter what, we always do it wrong”.
This statement is updated by the film’s own critics, both professional and amateur. The vast majority of them celebrate the aesthetic qualities of Nolan’s film and as such excuse the stereotypical, even misogynistic, representation of the rare female characters; when, for Barbie, the exact opposite is happening: most articles focus on the depth – or shallowness – of the “message” and have given only polite but distracted attention to the thirty-three films claimed by the director as sources of inspiration.
Contemporary popular culture is steeped in quotes, these “Easter eggs” that enchant fans of Quentin Tarantino like those of Marvel or Pixar films. Those of Greta Gerwig for Barbie testify to her vision as a postmodern author, eminently personal and constructed over the course of the viewings: the female gauzeit is also the look that the spectators have on the works.
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