The Political Saturation of Fiction

Are you putting yourself into a box?

I have been reading an incredible memoir, Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi. Nafisi was a professor of English literature in Tehran, Iran, before, during, and after the Islamic revolution in the 1970s.

Recently while taking a flight, I traded my Kindle for a film, a rare delicacy. Movies are terrible nowadays, they say. Maybe so. I scrolled through the menu, tempted by old classics, and movies I have seen before and loved. Or, perhaps, Oppenheimer. But you know what was really calling me?

Barbie.

Barbie and Lolita in Tehran blended together in my mind. I know this might not make sense yet, but I will explain it to you here.

Barbie

In Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi describes the events surrounding the 1979 revolution. It was orchestrated by a mix of different Islamic groups, Communist groups, and other radicals who eventually overthrew the Iranian Shah. As I have described in other articles, and Yasmine Mohammad explained in our podcast, once the revolution was a success, the Islamists edged out the leftists and dominated the new regime. It became the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the outcome is significant to this day.

Nafisi lamented as to how the students in her English Literature class became incapable of reading a story for the sake of the story, the characters, the ideas; and instead, were only able to read the story through political frameworks.

The class puts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” on trial, since it had become controversial to read during the height of the revolution and beyond. The far-left and the Islamist students both had their contestations: It was too decadent, too bourgeois; it was immoral, it was materialistic, it was… Western.

“Mr. Nyazi nodded his head in fervent agreement. “Yes,” he broke in, with smug self-importance, clearly pleased with the impact of his own performance. “And our revolution is opposed to the materialism preached by Mr. Fitzgerald. We do not need Western materialisms, or American goods.” He paused to take a breath, but he wasn’t finished. “If anything, we could use their technical know-how, but we must reject their morals.”

The debates around Gatsby in Lolita in Tehran left their traces in my mind when I saw Barbie as an option on the little airplane screen. How many talking heads and pundits, mostly on the right side of the political spectrum, have had their complaints about it! They called it a feminist film, a woke film, there was a trans actor, whatever. I just wanted to watch it because I was curious. I wanted to see for myself.

I recall reading an interview by the director of the film who is asked about the political issues the film raises, and she simply responded something like, this film isn’t about politics, it’s about Barbie.

So with that in mind, I watched Barbie.

Barbie opens up in a Barbie world utopia, with awesome pink costumes. The main character, or the would-be heroine, Barbie, is living her best life in this feminist paradise.

Then suddenly, she starts to think about death, and she starts to unravel.

I interpreted this as Barbie being a kind of sleeping beauty archetype. She is a doll who suddenly becomes conscious. This is her first step into the human world.

This epiphany of mortality is what makes us uniquely human. There is no other species on earth that has knowledge of their eventual, unavoidable death. This starts to break the fabric of her universe, moving her from fantasy into reality.

And so, she heads into the real world, thinking it will restore the old world; to bring her back to sleep. What happens instead is that she becomes more awake.

I also saw this as a child archetype becoming an adult. She is naive, but the real world teaches her to grow up. She is also individuating— becoming an individual, no longer a carbon copy of a Barbie in a box.

She moves from an infantilized state to one of self-consciousness, when she realizes that other people are admiring her, judging her, laughing at her, diminishing her, or in other words, seeing her.

Thrown into a spiral of shame, she sits on a park bench and looks around her. Suddenly, she starts to see others too. People laugh, and she laughs with them. A man looks depressed, and she becomes troubled. She absorbs all of the human emotion around her, and she finally starts to feel something that holds the key to her humanity: empathy.

She looks beside her, to see an elderly woman sitting on the park bench to her left, and in a whirlwind of overwhelming feeling, she is calmed by focusing on the human beside her. “You’re beautiful.” she says, and a tear rolls down her cheek.

“I know.” says the woman, wisely.

Barbie and the Lady on the Bench

My mind paused here, and I paused the film to take some notes. My thoughts went back to Lolita in Tehran.

I drew on Nafisi’s insights, on how literature is meant to draw out our human capacity for empathy.

“It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . . . If we had learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today.”

If I couldn’t empathize with Barbie, perhaps it meant that the film was just political propaganda. But here, in Barbie’s pivotal moment, where she became empathetic, I could also empathize with her.

This was where Barbie became a heroine, like in all the great classics. This is where she became human.

Ironically, even conservative critics apply a kind of critical theory (leftist) lens to fiction when their political notions saturate their vision. Deconstructing fiction, as the Islamist and Communist revolutionary students in Nafisi’s world did, shuts down a crucial part of our humanity: empathy.

It also blinds them to significant cultural insights weaved into Barbie. For example, one of the characters who criticizes Barbie most harshly is the archetypal social justice warrior named Sasha, a teenager who gives Barbie a mouthful:

Sasha : Okay, Barbie, let's do this. You've been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented.

Barbie : I think you have that the wrong way around.

Sasha : You represent everything wrong with our culture. Sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals...

Barbie : No, no, no. You're describing something stereotypical. Barbie is so much more than that.

Sasha : Look at yourself.

Barbie : Well, I am technically Stereotypical Barbie.

Sasha : You set the feminist movement back 50 years. You destroy girls' innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.

Barbie : No, I'm supposed to help you and make you happy and powerful.

Sasha : Oh, I am powerful. And until you showed up here and declared yourself Barbie, I hadn't thought about you in years, you fascist!

Barbie is about to get lambasted by Sasha

Barbie later lamented, “She thinks I’m a fascist? I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce.”

Barbie director Greta Gerwig kept this dialogue in the film, despite Mattel being allegedly disgruntled by it.

Gerwig’s personal political biases, whatever they are, are kind of irrelevant, because she was trying to tell a story, one reflecting the modern world in which we live.

A good story allows the reader or listener to interpret it in their own ways. And this is where another critical interpretation came in for me.

Ken is a character who is clearly smitten on Barbie for the first part of the film. He is constantly rejected by Barbie, who, in her feminist utopia, has a “girls’ night every night.”

The dejected Ken, who follows Barbie into the real world, eventually picks up as many cues of shallow, stereotypical maleness he can find, and races back to Barbie world to turn it into what can be only described as a world of toxic masculinity. Actual toxic masculinity. The patriarchy.

He basically turns the feminist utopia into a patriarchal utopia. And you know what he tells Barbie?

“You failed me.”

He blames Barbie, her rejection of him as a man, or even more broadly, feminism’s rejection of men, for driving him to an extreme.

He kicks Barbie out of her own house, claiming it as his own, and says it’s “guys’ night every night.”

Here, I could empathize with the now villainous Ken too.

Ken occupying Barbie’s house, renamed the “Mojo Dojo Casa House”

Ken becomes a toxic male douchebag because his society, and the woman he loves, reject him— not for who he is, but for his maleness.

So Ken rejects Barbie, in large part because Barbie rejected Ken, and they both show deep hurt in their eyes. They are both relatable characters because we can see their feelings, and try to understand them and their complexities.

When men become useless because of feminist ideology, the ‘patriarchy’ that the feminists denounce is a reaction formation. The utopia, as all utopias attempted in fiction, and in the real world, inevitably becomes dystopia.

I don’t know how the film ends. I missed the last 36 minutes of Barbie because my plane was landing. But the ending didn’t matter so much— it just mattered that this was a story, and could be watched as a story. It was the beginning of a new practice for me— or rather, a return to a practice from a time when life was not saturated by politics—, to disentangle myself from viewing everything through a political lens. It was a return to an inner world where my mind could be free of the political realm, and attune to fiction as an individual, empathetic human being.

When I got to my destination, I finished reading Lolita in Tehran. I highlighted a couple more passages to add to this essay:

“I was not about to put another novel on trial. I told her that it was immoral to talk about a great novel in this manner, that characters were not vehicles for pedantic moral imperatives, that reading a novel was not an exercise in censure.”

And finally, a reminder as to how we can keep our humanity intact when the regime creeps into every aspect of life, not least our hearts, souls, and minds:

“Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances… is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place— the foreground.”

Politics do not have to engulf every aspect of our lives. Digesting fiction for the stories they tell and the characters that stir our humanity is an act of imagination that is incorruptible and untouchable. Reading fiction this way is ultimately an act of freedom.

Get Into The Box!

At some point in the film, Barbie is offered a way back into her utopia— she just has to get back into her box. Tempted to return to her sleeping beauty slumber, she steps in. As the giant tie wraps tighten around her wrists, she breaks free, and makes a run for it.