There is a film out called Barbie, which I went to see with my friend Susie on a warm evening last week. The weather had been odd that day, a dense hot rain fell in the afternoon adding to the feeling that society, or the world, or the suburbs from which I emerged around 5pm with an umbrella but no jacket, was perhaps an idea whose time had gone. Which is why I did not blink when an eccentric neighbour, riding into town at the other end of the tube carriage, started telling his seatmates that the world was ending. “Get plastered tonight, because,” he sang, over and over, in a fairly jolly tone considering, “The world ends tomorrow!”
It was quite good advice, actually, I thought, reminiscent of mindfulness and all the other modern self-helps. Live in the moment! Seek pleasure! Death comes for us all! “Do you guys ever think about dying?” said Barbie, in one of the many trailers I watched in the months leading up to the screening, a thrilling line from anybody’s mouth, and even if I hadn’t been completely tenderised by the blunt force of the movie’s marketing campaign, that alone would have been enough to drag me to the cinema. “Get plastered tonight, the world ends tomorrow!” sang the man. I recognised him from the time my daughter was selling her old toys and books for charity from a table outside our house, and he’d got angry with her for not providing a card reader. On the tube he usually avoided my eye.
I got off at Leicester Square, its own oily microclimate, walked through three separate European school trips and a hyperventilating beat-boxer and joined Susie in the queue. All of life was here, waiting, as it does. It was an early screening of the film, to which invitations had been sent to press (blankly ingesting Greggs sausage rolls because it was almost dinnertime), influencers (tipsy and very alive in pink eveningwear) and proper film critics (utterly and visibly bewildered by both the queue and the eveningwear), and as we slowly snaked our way towards the cinema a voice boomed across the pavement through a public address system. “IF YOUR FATHER HAD HAD A VASECTOMY ALL OF YOUR PROBLEMS WOULD BE OVER.” Warily, we turned our heads.
There, beside someone selling charcoal caricatures of Angelina Jolie and friends stood a man in an orange T-shirt which read: “Sterilisation For The Nation.” He leaned on his bike and shouted generously into the evening. His thesis was: people are idiots, they should not procreate, Barbie makes people have more babies (the logic here was unclear, but I trust he had a point), so we should not watch the film. “You look like a sensible man,” he yelled at someone near the front, “Why are you queueing to see a stupid film about DOLLS?” I was reminded fondly of the “BE A WINNER NOT A SINNER” man who used to shout into a megaphone at Oxford Circus before being given an asbo by Westminster Council, and all the other preachers whose sermons about the apocalypse used to be as much a part of the fabric of the city as its billboards or buses. As the queue shuffled forwards, the sterilisation man shouted to the people behind us in their pink halterneck dresses, a little boastfully perhaps, “I have made the ultimate mistake of bringing people into existence three times.” Three times? I muttered. “Three times!” He turned his gaze to me.
In the cinema there was Barbie-branded popcorn on every seat. A friend in another row bit into an unpopped piece and chipped her tooth – she will have root canal treatment next week. Et in Arcadia ego, I thought with massive wisdom, later, when she told me. And I enjoyed the movie. I did! I enjoyed it, a lurid Toy Story for grownups, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the people sitting next to us. Two women, ruched pink gowns, they laughed, they gasped, they talked back at the screen – there is a polemic about the patriarchy three-quarters of the way in, and wow, these women were moved! Radicalised perhaps. They applauded, they shouted: “Yes!” and “Amen!” And at the end they cried, deeply, before filtering out into a square now lit by phones.
I got home at 9.30pm, and there at the station was my eccentric neighbour again. He was still singing about the end of the world, but his voice was a little gentler now, perhaps because midnight and tomorrow, and the end, were approaching. I lingered for a moment by the library shelf at the station, one of my favourite places on earth, a place that recently delivered me a guide to poltergeists and a little book from the 1920s called How to Write Correctly, which I humbly gave away. “Get plastered tonight, because the world ends tomorrow!” he sung to an unplaceable tune, again and again until a fellow passenger stopped, and leaned in on his way to the street. “How?” the passenger asked the man. “How?” “How does it end?” The man thought for a moment, before saying, with confidence, “Asteroid.” And everyone nodded sagely and moved on.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
