Friday reflection

Hidden lessons in entertainment

Hello on this last Friday in August! How can it be?!

If you are white, like me, I highly recommend You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism, by comedian Amber Ruffin and her sister, Lacey Lamar. It’s a Trojan horse covered in tinsel and googly eyes that carries a truckload (horse-load?) of true racist stories into your consciousness. It might make you feel sick, but as Ruffin says,

“I have never been able to understand why white people have such a low tolerance for hearing about racism. I mean, we have to live it! The least you could do is nod your head.”

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

No other piece of media has given me a stronger sense of what it must feel like to face a constant barrage of hatred and judgement for being Black. It’s a testament to my ignorance that I was shocked by so many of the stories, many of which depicted levels of vitriol and discrimination that I associate with cartoon villains.

The authors deploy their wit, charm, and sisterly banter to wrap their horrific personal stories up as “entertainment,” which keeps the book from feeling like a depressing essay in The Atlantic but (and) which somehow also made the stories land more powerfully.

…Which reinforces something I’ve talked about so often here before, which is the power of the stories we tell in popular culture, often categorized as “entertainment,” to deliver real and very important messages.

When the standard sitcom features a dumb, boarish husband and his long-suffering, patient, exquisitely coiffed wife, for example, and when we consume these shows over and over again, what impressions form in our psyches about the roles of men and women, or about the nature of marriage? (Side note: the show Kevin Can F**ck Himself upended this trope in hella interesting ways…I wrote about it here.)

(Please recommend Mighty Forces Express to a friend!)

I could list thousands of examples here, but rather than launch into a tirade about the power of media representation and the ways in which popular culture shapes our cultural norms, allow me to pivot to… the Barbie movie.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of reading about this particular cultural phenomenon — which, according to most people I’ve talked to/read, is either a feminist masterpiece or a grand example of shallow corporate marketing trying to dupe us all, or possibly both. But because of how many people have seen Barbie, how much money it’s made, and how much people are writing and talking about it, please allow me a brief weigh-in, now that I’ve finally seen it (covid derailed my plans to see it opening weekend and for a couple of weeks after that). Actually, scratch that, I’m under no obligation to keep it brief — forcing ourselves to be brief is something I wish women would stop doing. We don’t serve ourselves well when we are the ones ready to pounce with a hook and pull ourselves offstage.

Anyway: Ultimately, I found You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism far more impactful than the Barbie movie, and that’s only in part because it told me something I didn’t already know. The other reason? It didn’t try to draw grand conclusions about racism, or offer a parable about racism — it told specific, true stories about racism, anchored in real people’s voices. By contrast, it felt like Barbie tried to be About Patriarchy™, as if any one movie can adequately depict such an enormous and intersectional topic. As a result, every time its depiction veered from my own experience, or my own sense of what is most important to convey about patriarchy, I found myself feeling cheated, angry, judgmental: “You got it wrong!”

…But writing that makes me realize that I’m not being fair. Just as we put so much cultural scrutiny on Barbie DOLLS, we are (I am) putting so much (too much) scrutiny on the Barbie movie, coming from a place of scarcity (“This is our only shot at a movie about patriarchy!! We have to get it right!!”) versus abundance (“Oh cool, this is Greta Gerwig’s masterful, personal take on patriarchy, and there will be more films that will offer additional perspectives”).

…Except that, ironically, patriarchy breeds scarcity thinking, for us women, because female-driven storytelling is, indeed, so scarce.

So where does that leave us?

The success of the Barbie movie is a great sign, but longtime students of Hollywood remain understandably skeptical that it’s a silver bullet that will lead to a more gender-equitable storytelling on the big screen. The pace of long-term systemic change can feel glacial. Which doesn’t mean that we give up, not by any means (and for examples of solutions to entrenched gender inequality across industries, I urge you to follow my client, Pivotal Ventures, on social media, or check out their website, which highlights solutions). But it does beg the question, “What else can we do?”

Poster for the Barbie movie

And that is where everything I advocate for via Mighty Forces comes in. Because, despite so many people’s efforts, access to the big screen for women and people of color remains offensively, obnoxiously limited. But access to the little screen — your phone, say, or a tablet — is easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Just pick a social network and post something, and then post something else. And, boom: Women’s stories are getting told, and our ideas are being amplified, on a medium that reaches all across the globe.

You can go further, too: You can make a point of sharing other women’s stories and ideas, whether it’s books by women, or films, or articles, podcasts, social media posts, photos…

The bottom line is this: We don’t need Barbie to save us (and thank god for that). We can all be like Greta Gerwig, and Amber Ruffin, and Lacey Lamar, and take the time to share our vision — and ourselves — in public.

And together, we can create the story of the world.

You are a mighty force.

Amanda

P.S. Thanks to my friend Catherine, I just started reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, and hoo boy, does so much of this book resonate with me. It feels highly appropriate to leave you with this quote:

“The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning.

As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing.

I also needed to hear other women's stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman's story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven't seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illumine my conflicts. Her resolutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.”