On being orchestrated – Michael Wood in LRB:

“The same double logic – inhabiting a fantasy and betraying it – governs the film in many effective ways. In the difference between how aspects of reality creep into Barbieland, for example, and how characters travel between the two zones. The creeping happens because women in reality no longer believe in the old, gendered dreams represented by the dolls. When Robbie on her journey approaches a group of young girls, she simpers and smiles in the way she thinks she is supposed to, and the girls are horrified. They left such dolls behind long ago. One of them calls Robbie a fascist. Again, Robbie should probably not know what this means. But she does, and is devastated. And soon she meets Gloria (America Ferrera), the woman who has brought her here, the source of her trouble at home. Gloria works at the Mattel company as a receptionist – all the other employees we meet are men – and has been returning in her memory to the days when she had a Barbie doll, revising the scenario, sketching anxious Barbies as she might like to have them for company now. This is the imagining that has turned the water in Robbie’s shower cold. Later, Gloria makes a great hyperbolic speech about what it means to be a woman in a world governed by the imagination of men. A sort of riff on the Virginia Woolf of Three Guineas.”

(…)

“Robbie, meanwhile, before she leaves reality, has what is certainly the most interesting encounter in the movie. She meets her maker, although she doesn’t know this is what’s happening. Escaping her pursuers in the Mattel building, she finds herself in a secret apartment where a kind old lady, played by Rhea Perlman, offers her a cup of tea. She says her name is Ruth, and we later learn that she is the ghost of somebody who has been dead for years. Mattel created this apartment for her because she was Ruth Handler, who invented the Barbie Doll in 1959. Later the friendly ghost shows up in Barbieland to help create the new, tolerant female republic.
The film gets a little lost at times, as if it had too many storylines to play with and won’t let any of them go. At the end it offers a well-meaning but rather dogged sermon about how we all, denizens of whatever kind of world, need to learn to be ourselves. Ken can’t be ‘just Ken’, an afterthought to Barbie. We have to learn to say not ‘It’s Barbie and Ken,’ but ‘It’s Barbie and it’s Ken.’ Gosling weeps at the proposition, and so might we, for other reasons.”

(…)

“A person who sings and dances may be just the same person as the one who talks and walks, but we recognise the idealising movement. This is who they want to be or ought to be. Or, more negatively perhaps, who they are programmed to be. ‘Orchestrated’ would be kinder, leaving more doors open for movie reality.”

Read the review here.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the question “what is reality exactly?” is always a timely question.

It should not come as a surprise that reality is based in Los Angeles, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that reality is produced in LA.

And yes, of course we are orchestrated to be ourselves, in the realms of well-produced reality of course.

(“The Trumanshow” is still worth watching?)

Death is just cold water coming out of a shower, much more is too much too bear.

Are we ready to become a deep fake? The answer must be: “Most probably.”

(And yes, I will be watching the movie.)