I saw 3 films on the plane to Athens, Greece, and since I woke up in the middle of the night here in Naxos, let me give you some thoughts:

1. Barbie — honestly, I thought it was awful. It fails on nearly every barometer — conceptually it made no sense, and while I know little to nothing about the Barbie universe, it seemed very dishonest in terms of its examination of its source material. The beginning ode to 2001: A Space Odyssey about mothers and baby dolls-huh? Why is there a “bigger Barbie” and why is weird Barbie like 40 and looks like she’s 60? (I understand there were some Barbie variations later on with older and career-oriented characters, but still?) Aren’t we supposed to examine a world in which Barbie is a thin white blonde Cali teenager with a stereotypical surfer boyfriend, where there’s maybe one (or two) black best friends (Christie? Later Grace?) just like in the typical Hallmark movie, which by the way, are still being made and mostly still dominated by the same racial and sexual formulas? Is there actually an Asian Ken? And I still don’t understand why stereotypical Barbie had to go into the real world to see why she suddenly had feelings — because a real world girl was having problems? And which problems? The real world girl ends up being a know-it-all over-educated Cali teenager (a Hispanic one — triumph!). Even from a feminist perspective, I felt it failed. Okay, so the Barbie world is supposedly ruled by women, while the real world is supposedly ruled by men, and Ken has a euphoria moment when he goes into the real world. Both are highly exaggerated and utterly ridiculous, but even so, I don’t see what it has to say about sex relations that isn’t obvious. And while the America Ferrara speech about double standards about women was spot on, wouldn’t it have been even more subversive to have Ken rant about all the double standards that exist for men (like for example, how society expects us to be aggressive, insensitive and dominant, and then punishes us when we are?). Instead, it’s all just typical, dumbed down stuff for the “universal” audience. Which brings me to why this film was so high-grossing, despite being utterly boring, badly made and intellectually idiotic (even sadder because I really liked Gerwig’s previous film Lady Bird). For the same reason they are making Total Recall remakes — because people are drawn to brands and what they are familiar with. The more original Margot Robbie vehicle Babylon, meanwhile, though also sourced from typical silent movie world info, was an utter flop. Maybe it is time to stop watching overly-marketed movies.

2. American Fiction — this was much different than what I expected, but in its own way, very dishonest too. It was more of a family story about a wealthy African-American man from an upper crust New England family who needs to make sacrifices while dealing with a series of family crises. To get money he creates a “ghetto” black book that suddenly sells, versus his literary books, which are only known to literary circles and marketed in African American Studies sections simply because he’s a black author (this part is funny and spot-on). This is a side narrative, but utterly untrue to reality. Black books that go “Ghetto” these days (and for the past 20 years or so) are immediately shoved into the Urban Fiction section of a highly regimented publishing industry and are unpublishable except to be self-published or distributed by Urban Fiction labels. They certainly would not get this kind of interest from the major publishing industry. The one exception to this is Junot Diaz (remember there can only be ONE), and that’s only because he became big in the 1990s, when we had a real indie grit lit sphere, with Sapphire etc. Yes, this whole scenario could have been plausible in the 1990s and very early 2000s, when indie lit authors had agents and were working through the now bogus traditional model (only reserved for the upper class, apparently), and the original book Erasure (2001) was published by Graywolf (and is nearly impossible to get now because of this) but it’s utterly untrue now. The celebrated black authors are upper crust Colson Whitehead, he of Black Sag Harbor vintage, or people who rant about (and make boatloads of money and endorsements through) anti-racism and reparations platforms. Otherwise, to have a “black” lit book published you have to be a well-educated Nigerian, and God help you if you are born in America! “Ghetto” black authors, subjects and books continue to be discriminated against, despite the fact that they actually depict (if in a steretypical way) the majority of the black experience today. In fact, the class and race dichotomy is worse than ever! Even my own book, Good Americans, a short story collection, won an award in the Urban Fiction category (because it has the “n” word in it?) but bombed in all the short story categories, because it dares to explore the class divide. And my ambitious new book Bad Americans seemed doomed to self-publishing for the same reasons.

3. The Holdovers — this was by far the best film structurally and in terms of impact, although not at all original. It’s the typical story about a teacher stuck with wayward students over a school break and how two become close despite their differences and of course there’s the black cook too, and isn’t it nice that there’s no racism mentioned except that her kid was the only one who died in Vietnam. We learn things about the teacher and we can ponder what being a good teacher means and about the nature of honor and dishonor. At least it was coherent and somewhat moving, unlike almost everything else being produced today.