Article
Culture
Music
6 min read

What was I made for?

Caught up in the Barbie moment, Belle Tindall ponders the haunting depths of the anthem that Billie Eilish has penned for the influential movie.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Barbie stands on a balcony and waves while looking out over her city.
Barbie in Barbieland.
Warner Bros.

I urge you to take the Barbie movie completely seriously - the film itself, the press-tour, the reactions and reviews, the watch-parties, the soundtrack, the costumes. All of it.  

This is not a film to be shrugged at. Love it or hate it, Greta Gerwig’s re-imagining of the Barbie universe is a tool with which we can read this cultural moment. This film, fronted by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling (to name just two of an astonishingly expansive A-list cast), is already something of a cultural artefact in that it binds together decades worth of individual memories and experiences with a toy whose impact is truly unfathomable. These micro-stories have fed into what is now a macro-narrative. In binding together such experiences, the Barbie movie will attempt to speak into what has been, what is, and what may be.  

You may think that I am being dramatic, but if you’re unaware of the term ‘Barbenheimer’, then I’m afraid that culture is already speaking a language that you’re unfamiliar with. While it's hard to know how this film will age, it's not hard to see how it is a real moment. One that should be given our full attention.  

As Lauren Windle has provided a masterful analysis of the movie itself, this article will turn its attention to Billie Eilish’s hauntingly good musical accompaniment. 

What is particularly interesting to explore, is who Billie is asking this question on behalf of, and who she’s asking it to. 

Anticipation has been building as certain songs have mysteriously been left off the movie soundtrack’s track list: what are these mystery songs? Who is giving them to us? Why are they being kept hidden?  

Rumours began to swirl, the most traction being given to the theory that Billie Eilish, the 21-year-old musical prodigy, had something particularly special up her sleeve. And the rumours were right. A week before Barbie’s release date, Eilish released What Was I Made For?, a song written just for this movie. And perhaps, just for this moment. The last time Billie turned her hand to writing a song for a film, she wrote an Oscar-winning anthem for James Bond, so this Barbie offering was always going to be special.  

This song, written with her older brother (Finneas) in their childhood home, has already been streamed around twenty-million times. We can therefore assume that it is already residing in Gen-Z’s public consciousness. Simplicity seems to have been the key choice when it came to the production of this ballad; aside from a soft piano accompaniment and a hint of harp in the middle, Billie’s vocals have nothing to hide behind. In fact, her clean and soft voice sounds as though it reaches out of the song, the echo and layered harmonies giving it a truly 3D feel. 

The result is ethereal.  

But this song is more than beautiful. It is more than its (wonderous) sound. The lyrics are, quite literally, haunting. The title of the song is also the question that ties it together, as repeatedly Billie asks the question: ‘what was I made for?’ This question, and its implications, is where this song becomes more than a song. As so many of the great ones do, it becomes a three-minute-long existential pondering. What is particularly interesting to explore, is who Billie is asking this question on behalf of, and who she’s asking it to.  

 Of course, this song was written for the purpose of featuring in a film, its primary job being to tell the same story as the film itself (or at least an aspect of it).  

Over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold since 1959. Over the years, Barbie has had over 250 professions, she has evolved through the decades to best personify the evolving beauty ideals of the age, she is, to quote herself, everything. But in being everything, is she also nothing? Time recently wrote that:  

‘Barbie has no inner life or purpose; children are supposed to project their hopes and dreams onto her blank canvas.’ 

Considering this, it’s obvious how lines such as -  

‘Takin' a drive, I was an ideal. Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real, just something you paid for. What was I made for?’   

–  hit the brief perfectly. If the song was intended to be a seeking out of Barbie’s more fragile side, it is a job tremendously well done.  

But there’s more to it.  

Billie Eilish has been under culture’s magnifying glass since she was fifteen years old. Many of her most formative years have been spent in our gaze as she’s become an adult in front of our very eyes. Whether it’s been the ever-changing colour of her hair, the romanticism of her homegrown talent, the fact that her sense of style so satisfyingly defies all the rules of the moment, or that her voice is so delicate it almost feels as though it needs protecting, she’s had us utterly captivated. And of course, such captivation has taken quite the toll. It always does.  

Taking a moment to imagine how the world looks from Billie’s viewpoint, it becomes obvious that a song which was written for a toy is also profoundly autobiographical. She too is an ideal, she is something we’ve paid for. Through writing this song, Billie offered us her profound vulnerability. And what’s fascinating is that she did so without even realising it. When speaking about the song, Billie recalls how,  

‘I was purely inspired by this movie and this character, and the way I thought she would feel, and I wrote about that. And then, over the next couple of days, I was listening… and I do this thing where I’m writing for myself, and I don’t even know it… this is exactly how I feel, and I didn’t even mean to be singing it.’ 

So, this song has two profound levels to it. And yet, I can’t help but feel as if it has even more to offer. The chances are that neither you nor I are a twenty-one-year-old mega-star, and we’re certainly not a sixty-four-year-old doll, but I wonder if this song was written about us too.  

It hints at a belief that she was made with some kind of purpose and intentionality weaved into her existence. 

This cultural moment is asking a pertinent question, it’s certainly not a new one, in fact, I would guess that it’s as old as time itself. But every now and again it is as if the volume gets turned up and this question rings out above all others: what does it mean to be human? Or, to borrow Billie’s phrasing: what were we made for?  

The interesting, albeit obvious, thing about Billie’s particular wording, is that it implies a kind of faith that is hidden in plain sight (for, as far as I know, Billie has no religious faith). It hints at a belief that she was made with some kind of purpose and intentionality weaved into her existence. This is one of the most faith-filled things one could think, and naturally, Christians would heartily agree. Of course, it’s perfectly possible that this is simply emotive wording that Billie has crafted, for the sole purpose of getting people to listen to her song. However, I would argue that this question is asked all day every day, by people who have an intuition that there is more to their presence in the here and now than mere chance. And I’m willing to bet that the Barbie movie is going to have a lot to say about it.  

Are we in a cultural moment where we’re wanting to re-find our humanity in its truest form? So much so, that we’re willing to shirk falsehoods, pretences, and presumptions? Are we disillusioned by anything less than our most authentic selves? It is interesting to ponder where such questions are prompting us to look for answers: inward? Outward? Upward, even?   

What Was I Made For? is a soundtrack for a movie, a particularly interesting movie at that. But I would suggest that it’s also the soundtrack of an existential yearning, a song of a human working out what it means to be such. And I suppose that makes it a song that tells our story, as well as Barbie and Billie’s.  

Article
Belief
Books
Comment
Film & TV
5 min read

I’m not sure Christopher Nolan has actually read The Odyssey

The director has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and done so deeply
the head of a classical statue looks up amid embers around it.
The odyssey poster.
Universal Studios.

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. I feel like ‘hubris’ isn’t a word you hear very often anymore. It means excessive pride or self-confidence that leads to a downfall, in case you were wondering. “Boris Johnson’s hubristic underestimation of the effects of ‘Partygate’ was the final nail in his political coffin,” we might say.  

In one myth, Icarus is imprisoned, but given wings held together by wax in aid of his escape. He is warned not to fly too close to the sun, because the heat will melt the wax. Guess what he does? Yep! Flies too close to the sun. The wings melt and he falls to his death. Hubris

Another myth tells the story of Prometheus. No, not the slightly underrated Alien prequel. (That’s right, I said underrated, but that’s another article for another day). Prometheus defies the Greek gods by stealing fire and giving it to humans. As punishment, Zeus ties Prometheus to a rock and has an eagle eat his liver, only for it to grow back overnight so the eagle can come back the next day and start again. Hubris. 

Greek myths are full of hubris. Full of it. 

And so, this is why I find the new poster for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Greek epic The Odyssey so … bizarre. But then I’ve been nervous about Nolan’s adaptation since it was announced. Nolan is a wonderful filmmaker, but he’s also deeply naturalistic in the messages he conveys. By this, I mean that all his films suggest that nature – the physical, material world of atoms and things – is all there is. Even when he has opportunity to explore themes of the mystical, or magical, or the supernatural, he only does so when a purely ‘natural’ explanation for such things is possible.  

For example, in The Prestige (and HUGE spoilers for the film here: it’s incredible, please watch it if you haven’t), Nolan tells the story of two rival magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. Robert Angier (Jackman) is trying to work out Alfred Borden’s (Bale) teleportation trick. The secret? (Seriously: big, big spoilers here). Science. Nikola Tesla has invented a device that can clone someone but send the clone to a different location. The trick – the mysterious MacGuffin at the film’s heart – has a natural, scientific explanation. Magic isn’t real and you’re a fool if you think otherwise. 

Perhaps this is also why Nolan directed the wonderful Dark Knight trilogy. After all, Batman’s superpower is just wealth: it’s entirely naturalistic, with nothing that can’t fit into a scientific way of understanding the world. Or we could point towards the science fiction that underwrites Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. For a filmmaker so gifted at tension and intrigue, he has surprisingly little truck with mystique, mystery, and the divine. But this is a problem when it comes to The Odyssey. A huge problem.  

Let’s return to that poster I mentioned earlier. It shows the head of a classical Greek statue, flames ember underneath it. The caption? Defy the Gods. And it’s at this point I start to wonder if Nolan has actually read The Odyssey. Because The Odyssey takes questions of divinity and their authority very, very seriously. Like many Greek myths and poems, the message of The Odyssey isn’t ‘defy the Gods’. No: it’s ‘trying to defy the gods is an unbelievably stupid, futile, and dangerous thing to do’. Nolan would seemingly have us raze Mount Olympus to the ground.  

Look, all we have is a poster so far. Nolan might prove me wrong. But we shouldn’t be surprised if Nolan reworks The Odyssey in such a way that ‘defy the Gods’ becomes its central message. Because Nolan is a quintessentially modern filmmaker.  

In a 1965 book called Freud and Philosophy, French philosopher Paul Ricœur described the modern period as dominated by a climate of suspicion or scepticism. Within this ‘climate of thought’, the straightforward understandings of things are actually deceptive, instead hiding hidden, deeper, and ‘truer’ meanings. He described Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Mark as the ‘masters of suspicion.’ And so the world around us is to be approached suspiciously, to uncover the ‘truer’ meanings about our subconscious (so Freud), our false, religiously imposed morals (so Nietzsche), or our exploitative economic systems (so Marx). 

Each of Ricœur’s ‘masters of suspicion’ might be mapped on to one of the villains in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Liam Neeson is Ra’s al Ghul, a Freud-like figure who helps Bruce Wayne navigate the psychological effects of his parents’ murders in childhood. Heath Ledger’s mesmeric Joker is Nietzsche’s stand-in, exposing our misguided systems and structures of ethics, tethered to a religious framework we no longer hold to. Tom Hardy’s Bane is Marx, freeing Gotham’s proletariat from the economic structures that oppress them so. 

It's not a perfect fit, but I think there’s more than enough evidence to say that Nolan has drunk the Kool-aid of modernity, and he has drunk so very deeply. And this would be fine – absolutely fine – if he wasn’t planning to adapt The Odyssey. Because, as a quintessentially modern filmmaker, Nolan’s work emerges out of and celebrates a culture wherein ‘defy the gods’ is a slogan that can only be heard as heroic, courageous, and noble, rather than dumb and futile, as The Odyssey would stress to us. 

Defying divinity is not heroic. The Odyssey knows this and knows it well. Defying the gods never ends well for humans stupid enough to try in Homer’s work. Our modern sensibilities encourage us to be suspicious of institutionalised power, especially when that power takes a religious shape. We are predisposed to imagine that invocations of the divine are nothing more than thinly-veiled power-grabs. And sometimes they are. But The Odyssey is right to say that divinity itself is not to be trifled with. Renounce your creator at your peril. 

Like all his other films, Nolan’s The Odyssey is likely to be tense, wrought, and cinematographically immaculate. But also like his other films, I worry it will be deeply naturalistic in the way it handles the inescapably divine and supernatural elements present in Homer’s epic. The Odyssey has an important message for our increasingly hubristic society. I just worry that Nolan’s not the man to convey it as it deserves. 

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief