I have a childish reactionary habit of finding it impossible to engage with items of cultural mass popularity after they reach a certain point of total market saturation; when they have become as much about the surrounding discourse as about themselves. I’ve never seen Avatar or Inception, for instance, because in both cases I had absorbed enough opinions and aggressive hype that I was pre-emptively exhausted by the thought of actually watching them.
I can feel the same thing taking hold with the forthcoming Barbie film. For months every leaked photo or casting tidbit has sent the internet into overdrive, then the day-glo visual opulence of the trailers, and in the past few months a positioning of Barbie in friendly competition with the new Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer, which comes out at the same time. It seems I am not totally alone in this – J Cameron Smith of Succession fame tweeted: “Is anyone else feeling bullied into being excited about the Barbie movie?”
