Ian Warden: Supermoons and one super movie

The spectacle of Tuesday night's vaunted supermoon in Canberra's clear, clean, moon-enhancing skies (the first of two supermoons excited astronomers are promising us for August) was an awe-kindling thing.

And the previous day your columnist had sat in stupefied awe (a state sometimes broken up with spasms of delight and laughter) through a morning screening of the vaunted Barbie movie.

If saying Barbie stoked in me a stupefied awe sounds like a gushy extreme then it is an extreme I'm sharing with Fanfare magazine's Jessica Lahitou who opens her intelligent long-read piece about the movie: "Sitting in stupefied awe during an early morning showing of Barbie..."

In my daily New Yorker, too, I find fiendishly smart writers carrying on like sparkling pork chops about the glow the movie has given them.

Of course for teeming worldwide millions of us some of this awe has to do with Barbie being the movie we have chosen to break the COVID-caused tyranny of only peering into the impoverishedly teeny screens of our devices. The re-discovery, with Barbie, of the entrancing majesty of a cinema's silver screen is an awe-triggering thing in its own right.

But then there is the Barbie movie itself, this pinkly glittering poignant triumph. Where to begin to sing its praises?

A surreal weirdness within the overall surreal weirdness of Barbie is that the film's Ken (Ryan Gosling) rather steals the show, steals the movie from its Barbie (Margot Robbie).

This is especially, wondrously weird because in the real Barbie World of Mattel's dolls, Barbie is celebrity-huge and Ken, poor, dull, personality-challenged, involuntarily celibate eunuch, is just one of her world's accessories. For every one Ken it sells, Mattel sells seven Barbies.

And yet for her Barbie movie, director Greta Gerwig gives Ken almost as much devoted attention (in time, in song and dance, in soliloquy and especially in costumes) as she, Gerwig, gives Barbie. Yes, Gerwig emphasises Ken's superfluousness (to Barbie herself, perhaps to the world in general) but makes his superfluity essential to the film's tale.

Ryan Gosling rises to this weird challenge beautifully and touchingly.

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How and why has Gosling's Ken knocked this columnist's socks off? Why may they, Ryan and Ken, similarly impact the hosiery of millions of thinking, Ken-like men?

Perhaps it is quite a treat for the very average man (a poor, weak, bewildered thing) to see something of himself in a movie's male star.

Tom Cruise's valorously war-fighting, hero-saintly, chick-magnetisingly-manly character Ethan Hunt of the Mission: Impossible series (the seventh of them, Dead Reckoning, is in cinemas now) dismays me. We, average and below-average men, see nothing of ourselves in Hollywood's usual male heroes (any more than we see ourselves in craggy, overly-gushed-about Victoria Cross winners).

But Greta Gerwig's created and Ryan Gosling's portrayed Ken, quietly desperate, unfulfilled, bewildered by who and what he is, is someone all bewildered, unremarkable men can identify with.

Ethan Hunt has never known what it is to be superfluous to the world, especially to the world of a woman he so desperately wants (in vain, because it is never going to happen, however hard this tragic Try-Hard tries) to notice and admire him.

On social media, Gosling's Ken is being derided (probably only by males) as a "loser" but the intelligent, feminist Gerwig wants to say that all men, all Kens, are lost in banal societal expectations of who and what men should be, of what we have been made for.

Every unremarkable heterosexual man who has ever tried and tried in vain to sexually impress remarkable women (and who has felt that that is life's purpose for him) will see himself in Ryan Gosling's unhappy, clueless Ken.

Barbie (though guffaw makingly funny, too) is making sensitive filmgoers cry a lot and this unmanly columnist shed some of his tears for the movie's Ken. If you see the movie and don't cry for Ken then you may have a plastic heart.

My adoration of/identification with the movie's Ken has me wishing there was a range of mature-age Ken dolls for men like me (I am 77) to dote on and to play with.

Last week's New Yorker piece, Barbies I Wish Existed When I Was Growing Up, has Pepita Sandwich imagining such doll companions as an Overcaffeinated Barbie (a frazzled-looking eight-cups-a-day Barbie), and a Forever-Renter Barbie doomed never to own her own home.

Mature-age men might appreciate from Mattel a Frail Elderly Decaying Ken series.

An Erectile Dysfunction Ken might be a bit fanciful (given that, as we're poignantly reminded in the Barbie film, Ken has no penis). And yet an Arthritic Ken (his plastic joints could rasp and creak when manipulated) might be popular.

For part of the Barbie movie, Barbie is Irrepressible Fear Of Death Barbie and old men might find companionship in an Irrepressible Fear Of Death Ken (I see the doll's plastic face etched with lines of worry) who has, like them, one foot in the grave.

But then, to finish on a happier, pinkier, more Barbie Land note, I see an Astronomy Enthusiast Ken.

His head is tilted skywards and his handsome, ageless face is etched with stupefied awe as, forgetting beyond-his-reach doll-like earthly Barbie girls for the moment, he ogles a supermoon that belongs to everyone - even to superfluous him.

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