Monday
Two weeks after its release and Barbie is still sold out in Manhattan so that, even outside peak times, finding a seat is a challenge. On Monday night, in front of a movie theatre on 67th Street and Broadway, women of all ages dressed in all shades of pink mix with a surprising number of Kens – men attending the show in neon pink singlets, white shorts, and white socks and sneakers. One wears a T-shirt with the slogan “Future Trophy Wife” printed across it. Everyone exchanges glances and smiles. There is a giddiness I haven’t seen for a long time at a movie, not even for the reboot of Top Gun.
As the success of Barbie has grown – it made $162m (£128m) in its opening weekend in the US and $26m on its first Monday, making it the biggest opening Monday in the history of Warner Bros – so too has the backlash. I know of men and boys leaving halfway through the film because they didn’t like the “feminist lecture”.
Ginger Luckey Gaetz, the wife of the Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, slammed Barbie because it “neglects to address any notion of faith or family,” which is true, and applies equally to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. And Elon Musk got involved with the tweet: “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends.” Very good!
Greta Gerwig, the writer and director, is clearly brilliant but the real credit for the movie lies with Margot Robbie, who identified the idea, bought the rights from Mattel and bussed the project through multiple false starts including the one that involved Amy Schumer (I can’t think of a worse steward for this particular story). And while Robbie’s performance is a joy and Ken-love grows apace – it seems genuinely possible that Ryan Gosling will get an Oscar nomination – for my money, the movie belongs to Kate McKinnon’s wild-eyed and legs akimbo rendition of Weird Barbie.
Tuesday
The best story of the week, out of China on Tuesday, involves a bear in a zoo with some skin folds. This is Angela, a four-year-old Malayan sun bear caught on camera standing on her hind legs, feet flat to the floor and a wassup look on her face, paws flapping as if she’s about to do standup. These details, along with the excess of skin at Angela’s rump that falls in folds just like fabric, trigger speculation so frenzied that, by the end of the day, the video of Angela has been viewed 30m times and Hangzhou zoo, in eastern China, has been forced to put out a statement denying Angela is a person in a bear costume.
The Washington Post, with the crack reporting approach we’ve come to expect from them, won’t take the zoo’s word for it and calls in a bear expert from Borneo. In a tone we can assume is one of some weariness, Wong Siew Te of the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center tells the Post, “this just shows how little the public know about the species”, and after viewing the video, adds: “Sun bears stand on their hind feet for a broader view of their surroundings.” With impeccable logic, meanwhile, a zoo spokesperson tells a TV reporter that, in any case, Angela couldn’t have been a man in a bear outfit because the weather in that part of China is so hot at 40C that “a human in a leather and fur suit would pass out in a few minutes”.
Wednesday
Another day, another indictment for Trump, this time the big one: four criminal counts unveiled by the justice department, charging Trump with trying to overturn the 2020 election. If coverage in the US on Wednesday has a hysterical tinge, it is in recognition of what may be the final, jaw-dropping proof of something long suspected: that there is nothing Trump can say, do or be charged with that hurts him in the Republican polls. The practical implications of this concern whether a convicted felon can run or serve as president (nothing in the constitution explicitly bans it), but it is the broader meaning that, as ever with Trump, serves to depress the spirits: namely, what is wrong with the people who continue to support him?
One small reason for cheer in the wake of the indictment: the spectacle of the last mad dash of rats from the ship. Before Wednesday, Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president and a man so devoid of appeal as to act as a kind of black hole to Trump’s nebula explosions, could barely scrape enough donations to reach the threshold for the first Republican debate. After the indictment, things look slightly different for Pence, who may pick up support from Trump critics within the party who admire his belated willingness to squeal on his former employer.
Thus motivated, Pence appears on Fox News and admits in stronger language than he has used before that in the run-up to January 6 2021, Trump urged him “essentially to overturn the election”. It wasn’t, says Pence, that Trump and his allies merely “asked for a pause. The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.” One looks forward, in the coming weeks, to Pence advancing on “crackpot” up the scale of invective.
Thursday
No better swearing on telly right now than on the Aussie show Deadloch, the best thing on TV and the subject of a low-level internet campaign directed at Amazon to renew it for a second season. A parody aimed at Broadchurch-style murder shows, Deadloch is written by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan and is set in a fictional town in Tasmania inhabited mainly by bougie lesbians, all of whom, of course, have dated each other. When the town falls prey to a serial killer, all the victims are blokes.
The senior detective is a character you see frequently played by men, the disheveled, chaotic, repulsive boss – think Gary Oldman in Slow Horses – but in this case is a woman called Eddie Redcliffe (brilliantly and repulsively played by Madeleine Sami), who swaggers around in a filthy vest, Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and sandals. British writers pride themselves on their world-class affinity for compound swearing, but in Deadloch the Australians have it. For reasons I urge you to watch to find out, the funniest line involves a breakfast brioche, a watermelon and mint smoothie, and a clingy woman called Cathy who likes to bring her wife snacks while she polices the crime scenes.
Friday
Deep into midsummer and, with more than a month of school holidays still on the clock, the first sightings of the other side in the form of an email about autumn term paperwork. As always, it triggers mixed feelings: relief that these structureless days will be over, and regret at time passing. As a hangover from my own school days, years of life have always, for me, run from September – and the end of summer brings on a Barbie-style crisis about where all this is ultimately going. We can only think pink and enjoy it.
