© K Roussos, 2023
This is a guest post by artist, curator and barrister-at-law Koulla Roussos*

I watched “Barbie” the other night. I took my mother, sister, nephews and a 5 year-old niece and two friends, and left the cinema with a brain in toxic shock convulsing with mixed messages. It has taken a few days to make sense of the swirling plastic vomit made of pastiche, a vomit dominated by lurid pastel pink.
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I try to understand film firstly through the conventions of genre. A comedy. A parody. A horror movie. Or sci-fi.
Forgetting for a moment our historical context, I saw “Oppenheimer” on the eve of Hiroshima day and left the cinema thinking the score was so loud it drowned out important bits of the dialogue.

Not to mention the fast paced editing. Not a moment in the cuts did the montage provide me for a moment of reflection.
Yet, I left the cinema content, that at least a historical film was rooted squarely within the issues affecting our own time. Science and great-power politics. You know, the instrumental logic of maschinenmenschen enmeshed within scientific political power games- armed with syringes or bombs- reckoning the annihilation of civilians- human fucking beings- disfigured, maimed or reduced to corpses- for “the greater good”. A tragedy, sadly playing out in our own time.
So, how do I reconcile “Barbie”?

Barbie is a sci-fi horror snuff film.

Anyone who knows me should accept the following: growing up I read books. I did not play with dolls. I liked sport, collecting long-playing records, travelling and watching film. I considered myself a “tomboy”. Wedding dresses were not for me. I propelled myself towards the claim of becoming and being a “renaissance woman”.
I never figured and refused my identity to be anchored by the weight of “victimhood”.
I extracted enough capital from my parents to spend on my “cultural self-education”. A self-actualiser. I saw them and their immediate history as giants and I wanted to stand on their shoulders and look and see further. I possessed the will to be who I wanted to be. I educated myself with texts- books, fiction and non-fiction, music, film and art and travel into the unknown to help me navigate and express myself in the world.

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Thank you mum and dad, grandparents and all my aunts and uncles, teachers, colleagues, friends, male and female for indulging in my whims and for spoiling me.
I consumed cultural products and experiences until these made me sick. Still, I remain grateful.
So, to me, every cultural form is up for “interpretation”. Thanks to semiotics, I force myself to look at surfaces to discern a greater meta-narrative.
My eye frames, my inner eye analyses. I study what is left out of the frame, and what is framed. I try to understand the language of conjecture and juxtaposition. Furthermore, I allow myself to posit an interpretation with a strict caveat- that I will allow myself a revision, or more importantly that I am free to entertain differing interpretations and subsequently posit and express another opinion that at times can and does contradict.
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“Barbie” the movie is a sci-fi horror snuff film.
A conspicuous yet subtle celebration of all the fetishes that hyper-consumerism—zombie-capitalism (or HCZC) can produce, aiming to sever biological and historical time by normalising a science non-fiction meta narrative within the overarching frame of sentimentality to make dystopia palatable.
I had to resort to the religiosity of the high priests of apocalyptic academia—the sexless Butler, Haraway and Harari to make sense of it all.
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The opening scene, sheer horror, wherein a group of deranged young girls smash baby dolls, a not to clever “intertextual” reference to Kubrick’s “2001 A Space Odyssey” set in train the thrust of the film- the destruction of humanity. If AL was the villain in Kubrick’s film, AI is the hero in “Barbie”. Imagine this- mannequins with a capacity to have an existential crisis!
Still, schmaltz sentimentality aside, this movie also fits squarely within the snuff film tradition.
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I saw a documentary once on television, about the snuff film industry. I was a young lawyer and had to confess to my Senior the next day, my crisis during our morning walk to the Katherine court house. A live human being was depicted being raped and killed for gratification was an industry? Worthy of and re-presented as documentation?
How do I reconcile my overwhelming faith in the sanctity of all human beings when somewhere off-Hollywood, women, and they were almost always women, were being killed for porn?
He listened to me.

A “He”, a forty-something bearded larrikin, sucked on a cigarette and on that walk, without condemnation, listened to me, rationalised it, condemned it, and apologised and thanked me for trusting in him enough to verbalise my despair.
Look, I am a woman of the world. Most of the detritus that comes across my eyes as a criminal defence lawyer would send shivers down one’s spine. Yet, mostly, I reconcile examples of the fall of men and women without resorting to tropes of hell, fire and damnation.
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So, I return my gaze to “Barbie” the movie, a sexless orgy between castrated males with an insatiable penis envy pining for horses. Horses! As if I was not aware of the inquisition of Joan of Arc who had her hymen examined by the Church inquisitors to prove that it was impossible for her to remain a virgin if she rode horses so vigorously in the heat of battle. As if I did not know that medieval iconography depicting noble women with unicorns (hymen-busters) did not symbolise virginity.
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While hysterical females filled the screen, de-contextualised from biology and history, I wondered why third-wave feminism has produced frigid viragos, content to parade their independence as porn stars do- albeit as accomplished professional types lacking in warmth and desire.
Just as porn film stars are lacking in character, these were reduced to cliches without sexual organs and libidinal force. Caricatures- all signifier, no substance and devoid of all significance.
With its denial of the physiological reference points, the female and male binary biological forms, as essentially irrelevant- cunts, vulvas, cocks, and scrotums- the forms that give and nurture life- the apotheosis to the void without these was offered—the medico-pharmaco-corporate-oligarchical State—the merger of cartels and the State, fascism, replete with benign actors motivated by profit- fascists presented as comical dimwits.
Presented as a group of farcical characters, these grifters, a group of Mattel board of directors, HCZCists wearing the ubiquitous suits of company men, who having highjacked the mind with propaganda through advertising, are now intent to complete corporeal colonisation by reducing gender into readymade bite sized bioproducts.
Humanity as sexless cyborgs and androids, reduced to clones, purchasing fake penises, and resorting to vaginoplasty, manufactured wombs, to supplement manufactured identities, saturated inside a confected puerile pink pop culture intent in keeping them confused, dissatisfied, hysterical, castrated, yet comfortably sedated by snuff sensual-free porn.
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I want to thank my mother and father for allowing me to extract enough knowledge from their labour and sacrifice to see through this shite, and rely on my extended family and friends to add or challenge me towards other interpretations.

You can read more of Koulla’s thoughts at her earlier posts here at the following links: