It’s August. We’re nearing the end of summer already and also the real, real end of Our Life: Beginnings & Always. This will be the final month where Cove James Holden gets any significant content development. Unreal. At least it should be a good time while it lasts. The bonus art is already very snazzy, haha. And, of course, Our Life: Now & Forever will still be coming along.
But one is a stranger, a woman she notices while she sits on a bench, gathering herself. It’s a type of woman she has never seen before, because there are no old women in Barbieland. When Barbie looks at her, she finds her beautiful and tells her so. The woman already knows. Suddenly Barbie, the fraught aspirational figure, has beheld someone she might aspire to be, and it is a radiantly content nonagenarian, reading a newspaper on a Los Angeles bench, who knows what she’s worth.
“The idea of a loving God who’s a mother, a grandmother — who looks at you and says, ‘Honey, you’re doing OK’ — is something I feel like I need and I wanted to give to other people,” Gerwig says. When it was suggested that this scene, which Gerwig calls a “transaction of grace,” might be cut for time, she remembers thinking: “If I cut that scene, I don’t know why I’m making this movie.If I don’t have that scene, I don’t know what it is or what I’ve done.”
And personally? To be in the tickets booth, and see young girls, teenagers, adult women, coming in to see Barbie,
the most highlighter pink outfits, some of them coming in with the dolls they’re dressed as, laughing to each other, cheering for each other,
to see the men they’re coming to see it with, dressed in pink, cheering them on, taking their pictures with smiles and cheers in the lobby at the photo op
touches something so deep in me
I can’t say any nuances of the movie that haven’t already been said, but like, fuck man, love is so deep and so kind and to be able to see glimpses of it from behind my little ticket desk makes me a little less nihilistic.
