The Curse of Expecting Perfection

How the Barbie movie continues to speak to our political moment

I’ve been thinking about perfection. Mostly, this is as it relates to my perfectly imperfect old house, which I wrote about in my last letter, but it also speaks to the current political moment. Which is to say, I’m going work up to saying a little something about Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and Taylor Swift’s endorsement of her, but I’m going to get to all that via a brief detour through my thoughts on the Barbie movie.

Forgive me, I know it is a year-and-a-half old now. But sometimes, as a writer, thoughts get stuck in my head and keep surfacing, demanding to be let out even as the rest of the world moves on. I’m going to proceed as if you’ve already seen it, and if you haven’t, you really should. It is a beautiful, wonderfully bonkers movie, exactly the right expression for a woman of my particular age, and on top of that it contains the best fever-dream dance sequence I’ve seen since Singin’ in the Rain and the most heartbreaking line I think may have ever been delivered in cinema, when Ryan Gosling’s Ken tells Margot Robbie’s Barbie — desperately, mournfully — “I only exist within the warmth of your gaze.”

I almost never rush to see a new movie, and my expectations were way too high for Barbie. So, I waited to watch it when it was available to stream. I watched it three times in a row. I think many people really misunderstand the point of the movie, which I think isn’t a Girl Power movie so much as it’s a sort of send-up of a certain kind of 80s and 90s Girl Power aesthetic. During my childhood, Barbie the doll became one of many avatars for telling little girls they could be anything they wanted to be. That “anything” quickly became "the fulfillment of everything.” Barbies were envisioned as presidents and astronauts and surgeons, and so the children who played with them could imagine themselves achieving all of those heights when they grew up. Barbie was almost never envisioned as the happy and fulfilled middle-aged woman who lives down the street, with a regular old job and a regular old house.

There’s a reason Barbie lived in a Dream House. At some point we all grow up, and when we do it’s in the real world. Barbie the movie veers from what we might first mistake as a coming-of-age story toward one that is a celebration of regular old adult female life through America Ferrera’s character, Gloria. Life is not made of glitter, and it certainly is never perfect, even if we do achieve our dreams. When Gloria imagines a Barbie with cellulite and other human woman characteristics, she tears the thin fabric separating her world and Barbie’s world: the reconciliation is a celebration of the magical unremarkableness of the everyday. “I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made,” Barbie tells Rhea Pearlman’s Ruth Handler during an achingly beautiful sequence. That’s all women have ever really wanted, to be the authors of their own stories, and that can mean trading a sense of perfection for realities that are sometimes harder but are always better.

There are some cultures within the United States where women are expected to be perfect rather than real. I think of it every time I get sucked into Bama Rush TikTok, as I did this fall. During the weeks leading up to rush, the entire internet gets a behind-the-scenes view of what it’s like to try to join a sorority at the University of Alabama. Sororities are competitive, and perhaps Southern sororities are especially so, and within that Bama is the most extreme. There have been plenty of writers who dissect the phenomenon through a sociological lens, Anne Helen Petersen and Tressie McMillan Cottom prominent among them. But you only need to watch a few videos of young women getting up at 5:30 in the morning to devote hours to hair and makeup and spend thousands decorating their dorm rooms to understand that these women are auditioning for a certain kind of perfect life. They’re looking for husbands, they’re looking for lives where they will keep their houses and bodies and faces perfect to appease everyone around them. They are tasked with creating a dream land.

I think that tension, between the expectation that women remain perfect and the realities of a messy life, is why many remain so uncomfortable with female leadership. Americans have often required female leaders to be flawless, which is likely part of the reason we’re one of a few of our peer countries yet to have a woman head of state. It’s why Harris, as Biden’s number two, has been forced to answer for his perceived errors. And it’s why Taylor Swift’s endorsement of her is more consequential than you might otherwise think. In a thoughtful piece in The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber writes:

More important, her music is about the state of being female, unmarried, and childless. Over the years, her songs have portrayed her as a bright-eyed romantic searching for The One but continually getting disappointed by men—shifty playboys or taciturn sad sacks—who don’t meet her standards.

The idea of what it means to be a powerful woman and what people want from them will surface again and again through November, and likely long after if Harris wins.

House Update

I don’t have a huge house update this week except to say that we have been forced to embrace imperfection. We are hanging wallpaper in our dining room. Our walls are plaster — not drywall — which means they’re very bumpy and speckled and would have traditionally papered over rather than painted. Indeed, the entire house was covered in very dated wallpaper when we moved in. For the office, we covered the entirety of each wall with two skim coats of joint compound in an effort to get a smooth, easily paintable layer. That was expensive and difficult, and we did an ok job, but I don’t want to do it again.

For the dining room, we’ve decided to go with a wallpaper I think of as Granny Chic. It was expensive, but I’m not sure it will cost more than all of the layers of joint compound and paint we used on the office in the end. Unfortunately, we were unfamiliar with what hanging it would require from us as DIYers, and so we chose a very busy pattern that is very difficult to match. There is a corner above one of our doorways that is off by about 1/32 of an inch. We finally had to decide that no one, literally no one, is going to come into our house, climb a ladder, look at the seam, and have the audacity to say something about it. (There are jokes online about how women fear this.) At least I should hope not. Learning to live with it is our new goal.

Book and TV Corner

Right now I’m reading The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron. I’m reading it on Kindle and also have it on audiobook, which allows me to continue listening while I’m working on the house.

Herron wrote the Slough House books, which are incredibly fun and worth a read. But if you’re not into reading them you can skip straight to the astounding TV series based on them, Slow Horses. I could go on about how great this show is, but I will let other people explain why it’s the best show you’re probably not watching.