Barb-believe: N M Browne
As you may be able to infer from the pic I recently saw 'Barbie' at the cinema. I went with my daughter and we both laughed a lot. I loved Barbie and Sindy as a kid and the script in its silliness and cleverness was a joy. I loved that it referenced a shared cultural past of play and film and that some critics have seen it a retelling of the myth of the goddess Inanna.
Although the story follows many script writing conventions: the heroes journey, the fish out of water and I suppose the transformation narrative of Pinnoccio etc it was clearly written by a human being so that it isn't just a retelling of a myth, a reworking of a story archetype.
I was horrified and unsurprised to learn that Netflix are intending to get round the writers strike and the pesky business of human writers requiring money to live by employing someone to work with AI to generate original scripts. How great is that.
I am sure they could eventually produce something not unlike Barbie but 'Barbie' has now been done. Perhaps it is possible to specify a recipe for a quirky film, with instructions about where precisely the script should include a double entendre, a film reference or some commonplace of human experience, but I wonder whether it will be worth watching. Already the predictability of certain made for streaming films and block busters has become off putting. Already both in film and book publishing people want whatever worked last time but with bigger explosions or more extreme violence, crazier sex, whatever it is that characterises the last successful film, but as we all know making a story work isn't always about more, sometimes it's about less, it's about the unexpected, the moment when the story line we think we are writing turns into something else, when a feminist story about a doll becomes a film about death being the price of life (and getting a vagina.)
I suppose what I want to say is that I believe in the power of stories to look at the familiar from a new perspective to be new even when they follow old patterns. I believe in story telling as a human business that even when it is vastly commercial (even when it is an extended doll commercial) good story telling connects with our real lived experience. Until AI lives ( which is a scary idea in itself) it will always be ersatz, second hand. I hope that means that we will fight for the right to write. In Barbie world the doll world is a crude pink vastly appealing simplification of the messy human world. I hope we don't want our scripts to be like that.
This post was created by human Granny Barbie.
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