The New Yorker: The Year of the Doll

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Vanity Fair

Arts

4.2 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 December 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

In the highest-grossing movie of 2023, Barbie, a literal doll, leaves the comforts of Barbieland and ventures into real-world Los Angeles, where she discovers the myriad difficulties of modern womanhood. This arc from cosseted naïveté to feminist awakening is a narrative throughline that connects some of the biggest cultural products of the year. In this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how 2023 became “the year of the doll,” tracing the trope from “Barbie” to Yorgos Lanthimos’s film “Poor Things,” whose protagonist finds self-determination through sexual agency, and beyond. In Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” a teen-age Priscilla Beaulieu lives under the thumb of Elvis at Graceland before finally breaking free, while in Emma Cline’s novel “The Guest,” the doll figure must fend for herself after the trappings of luxury fall away, revealing the precarity of her circumstances. The hosts explore how ideas about whiteness, beauty, and women’s bodily autonomy inform these works, and how the shock of political backsliding might explain why these stories struck a chord with audiences. “Most of us believed that the work of Roe v. Wade was done,” Cunningham says. “If that is a message that we could all grasp—that a step forward is not a permanent thing—I think that would be a positive thing.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Barbie” (2023) “M3GAN” (2023) “Poor Things” (2023) “Priscilla” (2023) “The Guest,” by Emma Cline “The House of Mirth,” by Edith WhartonNew episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Radika Jones, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair.
0:05.0	If you enjoy binge watching the best TV shows and love hearing from the actors and showrunners who make them happen,
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0:14.7	Our Hollywood reporters take you behind the scenes of the year's most anticipated projects,
0:19.7	the industry's biggest moves, and the hardest fought awards races. From the
0:24.3	crown to the real housewives we've got the inside scoop. As a special thank you to
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0:47.0	subscription to everything you want. Hi everyone. Thanks so much for listening to Vanity Fair
0:59.2	still watching over the last year. We're taking a break for the holidays and we'll be back in early January covering the fourth
1:05.8	season of True Detective.
1:06.8	We're really excited about it.
1:07.8	Spooky, exciting, all that.
1:10.0	Yes, and it's even more exciting because it's starring the one and only Jody Foster, a return to the small screen, very stern, very intense.
1:18.0	Chris is Jody Foster's publicist, but yes, no, we actually are all very excited about this.
1:23.5	We hope you're going to come back after each episode drops, listen to the podcast.
1:27.0	We're going to be releasing it on Sunday starting January 14th.
1:30.1	But in the meantime, we wanted to share a great year in conversation from our friends at the New Yorkers critics at large podcast.
1:36.7	It's in the Conde family. Host Vincent Cunningham, Nomei Fry, and Alexander Schwartz are, they're really smart they're funny and they really have a great
1:45.8	view of everything going on in culture really.
1:48.7	Yes in this episode they take a look at the successive movies like Barbie and Megan.
	...

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