Our 2023 Wrap-up (featuring lots of Barbie)
Greetings, metamodernism enthusiasts! In our final newsletter of 2023 we showcase some recent content from our website and send some love to a few favorite cultural products of the year. And lastly, we have an exciting announcement!
New Content!
The summer was dominated by the pink and the gray – Barbie, Oppenheimer, and “Barbenheimer.” We each took a stab at writing our impressions.
Greg’s review of the Barbie movie bakes in a hot take on Object Oriented Ontology to suggest why this metamodern film is philosophically meaningful. He also highlights that which detracts from its metamodernness in his article, “The Good, the Bad and the Pretty: A Metamodern Review of the Barbie Movie”
Excerpt: “I went into Barbie hoping I might find some lighthearted philosophical explorations of the lives of inanimate objects; and/or the lives that people imagine into these objects. The previews suggested that the film would humorously turn the physical qualities of the real-world dolls into live-action behaviors. A trailer scene zooms in on Margot Robbie’s Barbie foot, which is stepping out of a high-heeled shoe and retaining its unnaturally elevated form…” [read on here]
Linda’s contribution, “‘I Double Dare You’: BARBENHEIMER as Metamodern Pheno-meme-non” (posted on Medium.com) tackles the question of why this particular movie pairing has so decisively swept the public imaginary.
Excerpt: “In extreme sports, in the creative arts, and in other such activities of meaning making, we love our emotional juxtapositions. Somehow there’s more oomph to personal experiences garnered while fun is rubbing right up against fear, right? The idea of viewing these two films side by side — plastic pink next to gritty grim — comes in the flavor of a quirky dare. And it’s a dare supremely well-suited to contemporary people whose brand of thrill is undergoing ‘cinematic whiplash’...” [read on here]
Some more content…
Greg has this notion that there is some significance not only in the mash-up of Barbie and Oppenheimer, but also in the intersection of those films plus Asteroid City. So, “Barbenheimer” begets “Barbenheimer City.” We share these nascent ideas, penned just at this newsletter’s press time, for your eyes only!
Barbenheimer City
Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City was released just a month before the famous Barbenheimer confluence. So, in a sense the three films could be considered as a Summer ‘23 tryptic. Things that connect them:
1. Each was written and directed by an auteur (Asteroid City: Wes Anderson; Barbie: Greta Gerwig; Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan), with Anderson and Gerwig known for their distinctively metamodern voices/visions.
2. Each involves a small town built in the desert. Oppenheimer’s is Los Alamos, site of the creation and testing of the atomic bomb. Asteroid City’s town (literally called “Asteroid City”) is the set of a play, though in a surreal Andersonian gesture, the set seems to be outside in the actual desert, and nuclear-test mushroom clouds can be seen in the distance from time to time. Barbieland is an imaginally constructed town that exists within a fantasy world and requires travel through a desert to leave. All three towns evoke a metamodern feeling of “depthiness” in which something is formed from the desert’s nothing. A nothing that may ultimately swallow back the attempted something, or may provide the ground for something that endures.
3. Each film reckons with mid-twentieth-century America, a time that still lurks in our cultural consciousness. Oppenheimer and Asteroid City, of course, are both set in that period. Barbie, though partially set in the present day, primarily takes place in a world that is both outside of time and also clearly tethered to the early (pre-psychedelic) sixties world of beaches and surfers and bikinis. The American mid-century straddled a boundary between innocence and chastened maturity, between directed effort and surrender to complexity, and, well, between modernism and postmodernism.
All three films and the approaches taken to their concerns – Oppenheimer’s felt-experience as centerpost within techno-political terrain, Barbie’s surprising way of highlighting sociocultural/gender issues; and Asteroid City’s existential register – incorporate metamodern aesthetic sensibilities.
Best of 2023!
A few metamodern products we recommend: It feels like we spent the year catching up on the amazing amount of knocked-out-of-the-park metamodern content from 2022 (see our list in the newsletter from Jan 2023). Here are some random noteworthies from this past year…
TV standouts:
Ted Lasso (Apple TV) season 3 – Greg found it plodding but Linda persists in begging him to work out his issues and get past the first couple episodes. Soaked in felt-experience narratives, the writers pulled off one of the more satisfying multi-storyline wrap-ups in memory. 5 stars especially for episode 6, “Sunflowers.”
Beef (Netflix) – Comedy/thriller/drama/et al. Chaos begets self-discovery and connection, and not in cliched ways. So metamodern, especially the final episode. Let’s all poke Linda to finish her full-length post on this show already! :)
The Bear (Hulu) season 2 – Two words: Christmas Episode! (This tour de force, episode 6, can be watched as a standalone!)
Music:
Olivia Rodrigo’s second album, Guts. OK granted, we’re kinda old to be enjoying pop music this much, but holy cow, this album hits all the notes: Self-consciously vulnerable narratives combine with a fiercely powerful push-back that recalls artists from e.g. Billie Eilish to Riot Grrrls. It’s the Tiny to the Epic. It’s post-genre constructive pastiche. Awed by it.
Sufjan Stevens’s latest release, Javelin, recalls the orchestrated folky spriteliness of 2005’s Come on Feel the Illinoise, though rendered by a Sufjan who has weathered soul-sharpening losses over the last 18 years. (Speaking of… this brilliant human being has had a rough fucking 2023, and we just really want to wish him the best!)
Pundits are all on about 2023 as the year that women dominated pop culture. Drawing a gender line that may or may not be accurate, they highlight the many contributions of women in arts as bringing more fun, more high vibes, as contrasted with the continual deep-brooding vibe from the products of men. Waaaaay over-determined though that generalization is, we assume the emphasis on jubilance and animatedness (while not eschewing socially relevant issues) comes in part from the influences of metamodernism. And, very likely, from the dominance of the Barbie juggernaut in our lives this year.
Announcement: Metamodernism book series!
Linda is now co-editing, with Tim Vermeulen, an interdisciplinary book series that was picked up by Lexington Books. Under the name Studies in Metamodernism: Theory and Criticism Across the Disciplines, we’ll be curating and publishing single-authored texts (monographs) as well as volumes of essays by scholars across all disciplines that intersect with metamodernism studies. So many texts are in the works! We’ll keep you posted here as these publications come out.