Article

Culture

Music

24 July 2023

6 min read

What was I made for?

Caught up in the Barbie moment, Belle Tindall ponders the haunting depths of the anthem that Billie Eilish has penned for the influential movie.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Barbie stands on a balcony and waves while looking out over her city.

Barbie in Barbieland.

Warner Bros.

I urge you to take the Barbie movie completely seriously - the film itself, the press-tour, the reactions and reviews, the watch-parties, the soundtrack, the costumes. All of it.

This is not a film to be shrugged at. Love it or hate it, Greta Gerwig’s re-imagining of the Barbie universe is a tool with which we can read this cultural moment. This film, fronted by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling (to name just two of an astonishingly expansive A-list cast), is already something of a cultural artefact in that it binds together decades worth of individual memories and experiences with a toy whose impact is truly unfathomable. These micro-stories have fed into what is now a macro-narrative. In binding together such experiences, the Barbie movie will attempt to speak into what has been, what is, and what may be.

You may think that I am being dramatic, but if you’re unaware of the term ‘Barbenheimer’, then I’m afraid that culture is already speaking a language that you’re unfamiliar with. While it's hard to know how this film will age, it's not hard to see how it is a real moment. One that should be given our full attention.

As Lauren Windle has provided a masterful analysis of the movie itself, this article will turn its attention to Billie Eilish’s hauntingly good musical accompaniment.

What is particularly interesting to explore, is who Billie is asking this question on behalf of, and who she’s asking it to.

Anticipation has been building as certain songs have mysteriously been left off the movie soundtrack’s track list: what are these mystery songs? Who is giving them to us? Why are they being kept hidden?

Rumours began to swirl, the most traction being given to the theory that Billie Eilish, the 21-year-old musical prodigy, had something particularly special up her sleeve. And the rumours were right. A week before Barbie’s release date, Eilish released What Was I Made For?, a song written just for this movie. And perhaps, just for this moment. The last time Billie turned her hand to writing a song for a film, she wrote an Oscar-winning anthem for James Bond, so this Barbie offering was always going to be special.

This song, written with her older brother (Finneas) in their childhood home, has already been streamed around twenty-million times. We can therefore assume that it is already residing in Gen-Z’s public consciousness. Simplicity seems to have been the key choice when it came to the production of this ballad; aside from a soft piano accompaniment and a hint of harp in the middle, Billie’s vocals have nothing to hide behind. In fact, her clean and soft voice sounds as though it reaches out of the song, the echo and layered harmonies giving it a truly 3D feel.

The result is ethereal.

But this song is more than beautiful. It is more than its (wonderous) sound. The lyrics are, quite literally, haunting. The title of the song is also the question that ties it together, as repeatedly Billie asks the question: ‘what was I made for?’ This question, and its implications, is where this song becomes more than a song. As so many of the great ones do, it becomes a three-minute-long existential pondering. What is particularly interesting to explore, is who Billie is asking this question on behalf of, and who she’s asking it to.

Of course, this song was written for the purpose of featuring in a film, its primary job being to tell the same story as the film itself (or at least an aspect of it).

Over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold since 1959. Over the years, Barbie has had over 250 professions, she has evolved through the decades to best personify the evolving beauty ideals of the age, she is, to quote herself, everything. But in being everything, is she also nothing? Time recently wrote that:

‘Barbie has no inner life or purpose; children are supposed to project their hopes and dreams onto her blank canvas.’

Considering this, it’s obvious how lines such as -

‘Takin' a drive, I was an ideal. Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real, just something you paid for. What was I made for?’

– hit the brief perfectly. If the song was intended to be a seeking out of Barbie’s more fragile side, it is a job tremendously well done.

But there’s more to it.

Billie Eilish has been under culture’s magnifying glass since she was fifteen years old. Many of her most formative years have been spent in our gaze as she’s become an adult in front of our very eyes. Whether it’s been the ever-changing colour of her hair, the romanticism of her homegrown talent, the fact that her sense of style so satisfyingly defies all the rules of the moment, or that her voice is so delicate it almost feels as though it needs protecting, she’s had us utterly captivated. And of course, such captivation has taken quite the toll. It always does.

Taking a moment to imagine how the world looks from Billie’s viewpoint, it becomes obvious that a song which was written for a toy is also profoundly autobiographical. She too is an ideal, she is something we’ve paid for. Through writing this song, Billie offered us her profound vulnerability. And what’s fascinating is that she did so without even realising it. When speaking about the song, Billie recalls how,

‘I was purely inspired by this movie and this character, and the way I thought she would feel, and I wrote about that. And then, over the next couple of days, I was listening… and I do this thing where I’m writing for myself, and I don’t even know it… this is exactly how I feel, and I didn’t even mean to be singing it.’

So, this song has two profound levels to it. And yet, I can’t help but feel as if it has even more to offer. The chances are that neither you nor I are a twenty-one-year-old mega-star, and we’re certainly not a sixty-four-year-old doll, but I wonder if this song was written about us too.

It hints at a belief that she was made with some kind of purpose and intentionality weaved into her existence.

This cultural moment is asking a pertinent question, it’s certainly not a new one, in fact, I would guess that it’s as old as time itself. But every now and again it is as if the volume gets turned up and this question rings out above all others: what does it mean to be human? Or, to borrow Billie’s phrasing: what were we made for?

The interesting, albeit obvious, thing about Billie’s particular wording, is that it implies a kind of faith that is hidden in plain sight (for, as far as I know, Billie has no religious faith). It hints at a belief that she was made with some kind of purpose and intentionality weaved into her existence. This is one of the most faith-filled things one could think, and naturally, Christians would heartily agree. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that this is simply emotive wording that Billie has crafted, for the sole purpose of getting people to listen to her song. However, I would argue that this question is asked all day every day, by people who have an intuition that there is more to their presence in the here and now than mere chance. And I’m willing to bet that the Barbie movie is going to have a lot to say about it.

Are we in a cultural moment where we’re wanting to re-find our humanity in its truest form? So much so, that we’re willing to shirk falsehoods, pretences, and presumptions? Are we disillusioned by anything less than our most authentic selves? It is interesting to ponder where such questions are prompting us to look for answers: inward? Outward? Upward, even?

What Was I Made For? is a soundtrack for a movie, a particularly interesting movie at that. But I would suggest that it’s also the soundtrack of an existential yearning, a song of a human working out what it means to be such. And I suppose that makes it a song that tells our story, as well as Barbie and Billie’s.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

11 October 2024

5 min read

Cartoon villains: who's the real baddie?

What kind of villain do we want?

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A cartoon chase sees a car driven by a cow escaping from a car of baddies under a giant poster of their villainous boss.

Jazz Cow vs. Dr Popp.

“Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy”. That’s a phrase I often use when helping people write situation comedies. It’s always useful to have a strong antagonist who gets in the way of our hero. But the villains tend not to consider themselves to be evil. In fact, they are offended at the suggestion.

The Batman universe has turned the interesting villain to new levels. The Penguin is Gotham’s latest production, a brand-new TV series on HBO. Colin Farrell plays a highly nuanced anti-hero, exploring The Penguin’s “awkwardness, and his strength, and his villainy, yes, his propensity for violence”. Farrell told Comicbook.com he was attracted to the role because “there's also a heartbroken man inside there you know, which just makes it really tasty.” Audiences are often invited to have sympathy for the devil. Should we be worried about the blurring of the lines between good and evil?

I’ve been asking myself this question as I’ve been writing a new animation which involves a villain called Dr Popp who is trying to take over a city. But what kind of villain do we want in 2024?

Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker back in 1989 feels like pop-culture ancient history. His Joker was an embittered agent of chaos without many redeeming qualities but mercifully lacked the nihilism of later versions. It was an old-fashioned story of cops and robbers which has its own simplistic charm. But have those days gone forever, having been shot in the head and dropped off a bridge into a river?

The problem is it is so easy to humanise evil. You just give it a human face. The arch-villains of the twentieth century – the Nazi members of the SS – are rather sweet when portrayed by comedians Mitchell and Webb. A nervous member of the SS Unit (Mitchell) waiting for an attack from the Russians looks at the skull on his cap and asks his fellow comrade-in-arms (Webb): “Hans, are we the baddies?”

Any student of World War Two will know that it’s never as simple as good versus evil. Many terrible things were done by people who felt justified in their behaviour. Moreover, ‘the goodies’ also felt compelled to do morally dubious things – like the bombing of civilians in cities – in order to defeat ‘the baddies. After all, they started it.’ The truth is always far more complicated than the war films suggest.

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission.

Ten years ago, I was researching real life baddies for my sitcom Bluestone 42 about a bomb disposal team set in Afghanistan. At times, I had to think like the Taliban who, in their own minds, were entirely justified in leaving bombs by the side of the road, to be triggered by British soldiers or Afghan children. They were pretty relaxed about the outcome. It’s hard to sympathise with this way of thinking, but it made sense to them.

My internet search history from that time probably put me on some sort of Home Office watchlist. Maybe a small dossier was started on me. More recently, that dossier would have become thicker as I’ve moved sideways from sitcom into murder mysteries, having recently worked on Death in Paradise and Shakespeare and Hathaway. To work on shows like these, you need to be thinking of good reasons for good people to commit murder. Someone would need a very strong motive to commit a murder on an idyllic Caribbean island where the local detective has a 100 per cent resolution rate. You also need to research ingenuous methods for murdering people in a way that escapes detection. I’m surprised I’ve not yet had a knock on my door, or enquiries made to the neighbours to call a number if they see anything suspicious.

But what about cartoon villains where nothing is real? The bold colours and the larger-than-life characters might suggest that there is more clarity about goodies and baddies. But there isn’t. Evil villains – that is, villains who realise they are evil – are extremely rare. Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comes to mind. This kind of demonic baddie can be entertaining with wit and charm, like Hades in the Disney movie, Hercules. This character had some brilliant one-liners and was superbly brought to life by the voice of James Woods. Overall, however, purely evil characters are hard to write.

Cartoon villains need proper motivation. This is either a character flaw or a backstory. In The Lion King, Scar is consumed with envy that his brother is king – and a good one at that. In The Incredibles, Syndrome is playing out his sense of injustice that he was not allowed to be Mr Incredible’s sidekick, Incrediboy. In The Simpsons, Mr Burns is essentially Mr Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s a Scrooge-type figure who doesn’t care about love and respect. He just wants to own the town.

The cartoon villain I’ve been thinking about is for a new animation project I’ve been working on called Jazz Cow. The eponymous hero is a saxophone-playing cow and a reluctant Bogart-style leader of a bohemian band of misfits. They are trying resist the advance of the all-consuming algorithm created by Dr Popp, the villain. But what’s his motivation?

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission. He’s trying to make the world better, easier, safer, cheaper, more efficient and convenient. Why would anyone want to refuse his technology, reject his software and keep away from his algorithm?

This is why Dr Popp has to silence Jazz Cow, literally, by stealing his saxophone. He simply cannot allow Jazz Cow to delight audiences at Connie Snott’s with live improvised music. There’s no need for this music! Dr Popp has all the music you could possibly need, want or imagine. Why improvise when we have artificial intelligence?

Dr Popp is a cartoon villain for today when relativism is still alive and well. ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ are still concepts or points of view rather than absolutes. However, there is good and evil in Jazz Cow. But the evil doesn’t come from Doctor Popp. It comes from the user or consumer. That would be us.

‘The Algorithm’ is always learning and always trying to give us our hearts’ desire. And that’s the problem: our hearts frequently desire that which they cannot – and should not – have. Dr Popp’s algorithm is like a mirror held up to our faces. In it, we see the real baddie: ourselves. Not even Jazz Cow can save us from that. But what this horn-playing cow can do is to make the world a more humane place.

For more information about Jazz Cow, and information on how you can make the show happen, take a look at our Kickstarter – and don’t worry. Jazz Cow would approve, as it’s the creative’s way of sticking IT to the man.