'Do you guys ever think about dying...?' - Barbie

Pat Allerton reflects on the Barbie movie, the societal questions that it answers and the existential question that it doesn't.

Pat Allerton

Pat Allerton is vicar of St Peter’s Notting Hill, sometimes known as 'The Portable Priest'.

Margot Robbie as Barbie in Greta Gerwig's Box-Office smash hit movie

So I’ve just got home from watching the brand new and much acclaimed ‘Barbie’ at the cinema (don’t worry, I also watched ‘Oppenheimer’ last week). It’s 11pm, my wife and our 8.5 month old daughter are asleep upstairs and despite having church in the morning, I feel stirred to write some thoughts.

First and foremost, huge congratulations to Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, the whole cast, crew and team. It’s an absolute belter! Full of laughs from beginning to end. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and would encourage anyone else to go and see it.

But secondly, far from being the shallow, plastic cliché that you might expect, what you actually get is an intelligent, searing critique, albeit somehow gently done, of the world we live in and what’s predominantly wrong with it. Which is, you guessed it, men. Or more specifically, patriarchy.

The film begins in ‘Barbieland’ where everything is seemingly perfect, as encapsulated by Barbie when she describes the day we first meet her as, ‘the best day ever. So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever.’ That is, until we meet Ken (played by the excellent Gosling). It is here that the first inkling of imperfection or wrinkle in their world is detected. As the narrator (voiced by Dame Helen Mirren) makes clear, ‘Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.’ (We’ve all been there guys). His niggling insecurity and consequent competitiveness towards other Kens however, still aren’t enough to wake Barbie from her dream-like state and reveal that all is not well in paradise.

Issues of equality, respect, independence and identity are addressed in a way that left this 'pale, stale male' challenged but not condemned.

That moment arrives unexpectedly, during what appears to be a standard evening with ‘a giant blowout party with all the Barbies, and planned choreography and a bespoke song’ to which Ken is told he should ‘stop by’. The dance is breathtaking, the happiness palpable, and yet suddenly, as if from nowhere, Barbie blurts out the pivotal line in the film, the hinge on which the whole (Barbie) world turns, ‘do you guys ever think about dying?’ Cue the DJ’s vinyl record screeching to a halt, the choreography closing down, the dancers looking at her in disbelief, and the general sense of a serious buzz-kill. ‘Dying to dance’, she disingenuously adds, desperate to keep the party going, to shrieks of relieved delight and Dua-Lipa's return. Disaster averted, reality restored.

Except it’s not, it’s simply avoided. Avoided by everyone that is, bar Barbie. Something has changed for her, she knows it, and she must somehow find out why. That wrinkle in her world (along with the wrinkle on her thigh) turns out to be caused by a tear in the fabric separating her plastic world from the real one.

Long-story short, avoiding spoilers where I can, Barbie and Ken then embark on an eye-opening, perspective-shattering, journey from their world to the real world in order to find out where such unnerving questions (and cellulite) were coming from. Major issues with (or norms within) our world are encountered, from the objectification of women (Barbie receives immediate unwanted attention from all kinds of men), to the totally unmerited respect of any man (with someone even asking Ken if he had ‘the time’). They each go on an existential journey of discovery, with Ken delighted to learn that in the real world, men rule the roost (except for a brief time when he thought that horses did). Inspired with fresh vision, he quickly returns home in order to make some fundamental changes to and establish much of the best practice that he’s witnessed in patriarchal L.A.

I won’t say how things end up, but suffice it to say, issues of equality, respect, independence and identity are addressed in a way that left this ‘pale, stale male’ feeling both challenged but not condemned. Kudos to the team for getting that balance right! However, as big and important as these issues are, and as satisfying an ending as was reached from a social justice warrior’s point-of-view, it struck me that the biggest elephant of all was still left there in the room, or at least charging around on the beach. Because the very question that began her journey, the deepest one that woke her up, is the very one that’s just left hanging, unaddressed and ungrappled with.

The music stops and that is it. And yet don't our hearts long for more?

It’s almost as if that moment of existential angst on the dancefloor (and who hasn’t had one of them), realising the fragility of our own mortality, did nothing more than focus Barbie on the need to lay hold of everything she can in this life, rather than exploring the reality (or not) of the next. Our culture has a word for it. YOLO, if you didn’t know, standing for ‘you only live once’. Which of course is true, whether you’ve got faith or not. But the Christian worldview would go further, saying that whilst indeed you only live once, the Scriptures tell us that you also live forever (or YALF, to coin a phrase). Which sounds ridiculous on the face of it (the concept, not the phrase, although granted, YALF might not catch on). After all, as the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, tells us in the film, ‘ideas live forever, humans not so much.’

Unless, of course, they do, or can, which only our creator could possibly make possible. And so Ruth’s appearance raises another interesting question, if she made Barbie, who made Ruth? Only when we’re dealing with questions of this nature can we be positioned to take on the big mama (I was tempted to say ‘daddy’) question of, ‘do you guys ever think about dying?’ Which, of course, every one of us does. You can’t be human and avoid doing so. You’d have to be a doll in a made-up world.

But it’s a frightening thing to do, whether in Barbieland, in England’s green and pleasant land or anywhere for that matter. Because it all just looks so final. Like the music stops and that is it. And yet don’t our hearts long for there to be more? For one more song, for the beat to continue? Dare we hope for resurrection where life and light beat death and darkness? Because as beautiful as this life is, with all its opportunity for growth and freedom, be it in self-revelation and actualisation like Ken (the film ends with him wearing a hoodie that says, ‘I am Kenough’), or greater progress and equality on a socio-political level, experience tells us that until we have an answer for Barbie’s first and biggest question, then our own days here on earth, however good, happy and choreographed, will always be rudely interrupted by the reality of death and its long shadow. Find an answer for that... and let the DJ’s music play.

Article

Culture

Mental Health

Music

25 October 2024

5 min read

Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.