Earlier this week I argued that conservatives are getting Barbie wrong by treating it as a straightforwardly feminist project instead of an esoteric satire. In that review, I also touched on its inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey: Barbie begins with an obvious homage to the film and ends with one far subtler and more interesting. Another possible candidate for inspiration is the 1980 musical-fantasy film Xanadu. As a longtime ELO fan, I had listened to the excellent soundtrack before but could not bring myself to watch the movie itself, which was an infamous flop upon release. After Olivia Newton-John died last year, I finally sat through it.
It’s not a good movie (and definitely not as good as Barbie), though I found some things in it that were not completely terrible, such as its “half-hearted gestures at interesting ideas about the nature of inspiration, the importance of hanging on to dreams, and how to merge the best of the past with the best of the present.” And maybe I only see similarities between it and Barbie because I might be one of the only humans on earth to have watched both within the past year. The initial point of connection I noticed was rollerblading, of which Xanadu has a lot (and I mean a lot). So does Barbie. It even seems to be done in roughly the same area of Los Angeles in both films.
This is the superficial overlap, however. More substantial is what happens to two of the main characters in each. In Xanadu, Olivia Newton-John plays Kira, a literal muse meant to inspire Sonny Malone (Michael Beck), a struggling artist. He chases her around Los Angeles (often on rollerblades), seeking inspiration and eventually falling in love. But muses are not allowed to exist in the real world after their work of inspiration is done, so she is made to return to the realm of the muses from which she hails. Sonny follows her there, begs the gods for her to become human, and they accept. (An aside: One of the gods, who are heard but not seen, is voiced by Wilfrid Hyde-White, who plays the colonel in My Fair Lady. I saw that movie a few months ago and recognized his voice from it, making me probably one of the only people in history to have known him from Xanadu before My Fair Lady.)
Barbie ends similarly, as some kind of supernatural presence fulfills its central character’s wish to become human — not, this time, out of love, but out of a self-actualizing embrace of reality in all its complexity. From which, I suppose, love (and motherhood?) could follow.
Anyway, I’ve now probably thought more about Barbie, and definitely more about Xanadu, than is necessary. So I’m just going to listen to the Xanadu soundtrack again.