By Robert Moran
Among the countless criticisms levelled at filmmaker Greta Gerwig for daring to make a Barbie movie, the loudest one appears to be “sellout”. I didn’t know we were doing this again! All of a sudden, I’m hearing Reel Big Fish ringing in my ears. Like Ken’s neon rollerblades, I feel as though I’ve been transported back to the mid-’90s.
“Has Barbie killed the indie director? Why credible film-makers are selling out,” The Guardian surmised in a recent article, bemoaning Gerwig’s shift from mumblecore star to, supposedly, corporate shill. “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: the art of selling out” ran the title of the New Statesman‘s review of the film, again lamenting that she’d moved so far from the micro-budget projects that defined her early career in films such as Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008).
Greta Gerwig’s being called a “sellout” for making a Barbie movie. Have we fallen into a portal to the ’90s or something?Credit: AP
The whole thing’s bizarre. And not just because everyone’s acting like Mattel is BP or the Sackler family, rather than the company that makes Fisher-Price toys. I can imagine worse things to “sell out” to than, uh, Big Toy, but that’s beside the point.
More intriguing is that the concept of “selling out” is back at all. Besides Gerwig, in just the past few weeks I’ve seen the label lobbed at filmmaker Sarah Polley for taking on a live-action Bambi movie for Disney; at pop singer Kim Petras, for chasing mainstream ubiquity with her new album Feed the Beast; at actor Aubrey Plaza, for an odd commercial she did for cow milk. How did we get back here?
For 20 or so years, it seems, the idea of “selling out” laid dormant. Perhaps we all became a bit more understanding towards the challenges involved with pursuing a creative career and we cut artists some slack? Joanna Newsom’s Sprout and the Bean in a Victoria’s Secret ad for push-up bras starring Miranda Kerr? “Fine with us!” we said. “Better than them using a crappy song to sell bras.” Maybe we became more comfortable with the idea of auteurs wanting access to bigger canvases, resources and audiences? “What do we care?” we said. “Just make us something good.”
Personally, I thought the idea of selling out died for good in 2008. I remember an infamous blog post from David Cross, the alt-comic renowned for the classic sketch comedy series Mr Show (with Bob Odenkirk), where he vehemently defended himself against accusations he “sold out” after taking a role in the 2007 film Alvin and the Chipmunks by suggesting he tried to buy himself a small house in upstate New York with his “indie hipster cred”, but the owner wasn’t having it. “I tried to explain the value of ‘credibility’ and ‘artistic integrity’ but he refused to take it in exchange for the house. This guy was a f—ing idiot! But what could I do? He wouldn’t take no for an answer. If I wanted that cottage I would have to pay him money. Sigh,” Cross wrote, and everyone giggled at his sound logic.
Not to generalise, but to a certain generation, all those ’80s and ‘90s stories of bands like the Replacements drunkenly self-sabotaging their major label showcases, so tortured by the inner conflict of potentially “making it big”, felt laughable, tragic even. By the mid-’00s we all rewatched Reality Bites and scoffed at Winona Ryder’s Lelaina for bypassing Ben Stiller’s sweet, supportive TV exec in favour of Ethan Hawke’s immature slacker. Far from romantic, it felt ridiculous, like choosing chaos.
But when we accuse someone of “selling out”, what are we actually complaining about? That they’ve compromised their values or artistic vision in exchange for money, a bigger audience, a bigger platform. I don’t see it in Gerwig’s Barbie, a film that’s surprisingly subversive in parts and highly personal in its feminist and maternal philosophies.
But even if Gerwig did have to pander to some corporate notes to get the film over the line, so what? Imagine begrudging her the opportunity to play in the film world’s biggest possible sandpit and to see what she could achieve within its constraints? It says something about 2023 that this sentiment has returned now.
Between the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis, and even Hollywood’s historic strikes, we’re living through an especially pronounced realisation of the gap between haves and have-nots. Perhaps it’s understandable that audiences are becoming sensitive again to how their entertainment is being touched by, and benefitting, corporate interests.
In Gerwig’s defence, the Barbie backlash does seem selective: in today’s landscape, when studios and streamers are controlled by the same handful of entities, you could trace the money and argue that all mainstream art is compromised and everyone’s a sellout in some way or another. But I won’t because I don’t need the despair while I’m trying to watch The Bear on Disney+ tonight.
My concern is that we’ll return to an era where good art – such as Gerwig’s Barbie – gets unnecessarily minimised just because of its mainstream, or corporate-backed, bona fides. The idea of the “sellout” was such an annoying thing in the ’90s and early ’00s, such a lazy dismissive, that we’ve spent the past 20 to 30 years reevaluating pop culture that was unfairly maligned just for appealing to the masses or playing in a broader space (never forget, Liz Phair’s Why Can’t I?).
I know how obnoxious it was because I wasn’t immune. By the time I was 16, when Audiogalaxy (RIP, my file-sharing friend) made fringe content more easily accessible, I quickly shunned mainstream rap (Jay-Z’s Vol 2… Hard Knock Life era, forgive me) for the “realer stuff”, backpack labels like Anticon and Def Jux and Rawkus. I listened to artists on Rawkus Records on repeat like their integrity was holy, only to find out years later that the entire label was bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch’s kid! Worse than that, the music was terrible! Revisit that backpack era and barely any of it (maybe Black Star?) holds up, all preachy message songs, self-righteous posturing, and far too many white people. And to think Jay-Z was still releasing an album a year amid all that!
That’s my warning to the sellout zealots: be careful what you wish for. We finally got to the point where fascinating auteurs like Gerwig can control mainstream budgets and studio tentpoles and you’re complaining? I see a lot of backpack rap in your future, metaphorically.
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