BARBIE'S LATEST CREATOR ON THE CREATOR
Greta Gerwig's interview
with the NY Times reveals a deeply spiritual reflection as she discusses her new Barbie movie. Here's an excerpt.
Gerwig loves Barbie, but she knows Barbie has made people feel bad, as if they don’t measure up. And so she has made this 113-minute love letter to Barbie that is
also an earnest attempt to make amends. This is the most subversive thing about the movie, this extratextual notion that Barbie might have things to make amends for.
There is no reason Gerwig in particular should be the one trying to make those amends, except that she wanted to — to take an
immense, divisive toy brand and bend it to the heartfelt and counterintuitive purpose of making women feel good.
It’s a testament to Gerwig’s singular earnestness — a level of sincerity unavailable to many of us — that using Barbie to affirm the worth of ordinary women feels, to her, quasi religious. She told me that when she was growing up, her Christian family’s closest friends were observant Jews; they vacationed together and constantly tore around each other’s homes.
She
would also eat with them on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner, where blessings were sung in Hebrew, including over the children at the table. May God bless you and protect you. May God show you favor and be gracious to you. May God show you kindness and grant you peace. Every Friday the family’s father would rest his hand on Gerwig’s head, just as he did on his own children’s, and bless her too.
“I remember feeling the sense of, ‘Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever
you did or you didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,’” Gerwig told me.
“‘You are a child of God. I put my hand over you, and I bless you as a child of God at this table. And that’s your value.’ I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough.”
She imagines people going to the temple of the movies to see “Barbie” on a hot summer day, sitting in the air-conditioned dark, feeling transported, laughing, maybe crying,
and then coming out into the bright heat. “I want people to feel like I did at Shabbat dinner,” she said. “I want them to get blessed.”
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