Barbie
is like Buca di Beppo.
According to an Italian friend of mine, “Buca di Beppo” means “Joseph’s Hole.” The restaurants, though generally very large, simulate a hole-in-the-wall experience, with Italian kitsch covering the walls and fluorescent lights in the colors of the Italian flag. The menu includes fettuccine alfredo, huge platters of spaghetti and meatballs, a “colossal brownie sundae,” and a red cake with white icing and green sprinkles, the colors of the Italian flag in sugar-coma-inducing saturation. And, of course, garlic bread.
But Buca di Beppo, despite all appearances, is not Italian. It was not founded by Beppo, or Joseph, for that matter; it was founded by Phil Roberts from Illinois. Buca di Beppo was Roberts’ attempt to recreate the aging “red sauce joints” of the American Northeast, and he was self-conscious about the image he was attempting to project—“a sleeves-up restaurant where you don’t have to tie your sweater around your neck and blow air kisses throughout the dining room. I wanted a restaurant people could look down on.” Buca di Beppo, with its glowing lights and its “pope room” and its black-and-white photos of Italians, was in fact founded in Minneapolis, where Roberts already had other successful restaurants.
Buca di Beppo wasn’t exactly a caricature of those real holes-in-the-wall. It was an earnest re-creation in many ways; the original cook was from Milan, bringing his family recipes with him. The architect scoured flea markets for old-fashioned prints and Vatican souvenirs. And the formula worked; by the 90s Buca di Beppo had multiple very successful locations, despite its apparently idiosyncratic concept. All this was built trading on both Italian stereotypes and the natural human appeal of feeling just a bit too good for something. Roberts reportedly said, “I knew that I had succeeded when a woman was on her way to her table and she spotted this plaster Roman statue and gave her husband an elbow and said, ‘I would never have that piece of crap in my house.’”
Though the Bon Appetit article on Buca di Beppo calls this attitude “postmodern,” it is in fact metamodern. Metamodernism is the successor to postmodernism, marked by the natural rebound from an overabundance of irony: a sort of self-aware earnestness. Buca di Beppo has a healthy dose of postmodern irony, for sure, but the wholehearted enjoyment people get out of Buca di Beppo—whether or not they participate in the restaurant atmosphere with the restauranteur’s many layers of awareness—betrays it as a metamodern-style return to sincerity. In “Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction,” “metamodernist” Luke Turner describes metamodernism thus:
Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism.
It is what Turner calls metamodernism’s “yearning for utopias” that Buca di Beppo represents. Buca di Beppo presents the ideal Italian restaurant of a certain time and place that we know perfectly well never really existed at all, because in being so perfectly exaggerated in every detail, it betrays itself as a facade. But it’s the facade itself that appeals.
It’s like the fun of an indoor space simulating an outdoor space. An indoor space presented as an outdoor space reifies the outdoors (The Bass Pro Shop can be a good example of this). It contains outdoorsiness in more potent quantities than the outdoors itself, causes you to think about the outdoors with an intensity and fervor that actually being outside does not always inspire. My favorite part of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland was always looking out at the foggy fake sky, because the sky inside was a novel sky. There’s some kind of Italianness available in Buca di Beppo I’ve never found in Italy at all. And for that very reason, like the inside sky, it has a peculiar charm.
Whether you enter a Buca di Beppo with the fervor of a Disneygoer belting out “yo ho, yo ho a pirate’s life for me” or do it with a healthy dose of irony doesn’t matter much. The space is willing to fully commit to the bit so you don’t have to—you can entertain yourself by distancing yourself from it, or you can entertain yourself by going all in and order tiramisu for dessert. I’d recommend the latter, but if you’re incurably ironic or actually Italian, the former works too.
On December 16, Warner Bros dropped a first teaser trailer for Greta Gerwig’s new movie, called simply Barbie. The teaser immediately met with acclaim, and for good reason: “Barbie” the teaser trailer could be a masterclass in metamodernism. The teaser trailer is built around a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a voiceover telling the story of girls and dolls throughout the ages. A two-story tall Margot Robbie, dressed in Barbie’s 1959 bathing suit, dominates the scene.
The scene, despite being absurd, takes itself unflinchingly seriously, then in the last ten seconds splinters into a succession of eyewateringly saturated clips, with a smiling Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, beautiful in an almost-surreal-but-not-too-surreal plastic way, flouncing through scenes of pink and blue. The pacing is brilliant, because the rapid-fire clips at the end, crowded with human faces, give an impression of breathless speed. You’re left watching and rewatching the clip, wondering what the movie could possibly be about, but certain that you want to know what’s behind Robbie’s wink in the last frame.
The teaser was the coup de grace in a PR campaign for the movie by Warner Bros, which started dropping pictures of Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in vivid pink back in June. The internet immediately went crazy over the pictures, which communicated (as the trailer did) only one thing: that the Barbie movie was here to commit. This would be no gritty remake or low-saturation millennial interpretation of the classic doll. This would be Barbie as the children of the 80s and 90s knew her, in vivid yellows and pinks and painful geometric prints.
Though I’m a child of the 90s myself, I wasn’t allowed to have Barbies. Barbie originated as an adult doll with sexual overtones, and it’s no secret that the sexual overtones have persisted in the doll’s shape. As a girl whose legs nowadays give way if I attempt to wear heels for even one day, perhaps it’s just as well for me that 90s conservative discourse was skeptical of Barbies as projecting a certain ideal of feminine beauty, looked askance of at feet that never unmolded from the shape of a stiletto, like the visions that flash before your eyes when your foot cramps.
I did play with Barbies in kindergarten sometimes, at a friend’s house when I climbed over my backyard fence to visit, but I haven’t seen many troubling side effects (well, I did dye the ends of my hair pink the other summer). The fact is, though Barbie does embody a certain kind of objectification of women, what the Barbie movie seems well on track to get right is that Barbie was never really about women at all. Barbie is about the heels, and the fluorescent clothes, and the glowing roller skates. Barbie is about the idea of being a grown-up woman whose collared dresses slip on like rubber and who always carries a handbag.
Barbie is about being a child in the 90s who imagines herself growing up to be a woman who is still in the 90s. Inherently, Barbie is impossible. Like Buca di Beppo is about the idea of Italy, Barbie is about the idea of womanhood. And like Buca di Beppo’s Italy, Barbie’s womanhood doesn’t exist anywhere at all.
Maybe that’s why everyone is going so crazy over the Barbie trailer. Seeing Margot Robbie dressed as Barbie is like seeing a glimpse of that imaginary Italy that Buca di Beppo depicts so well, seeing in 2022 our 90s fantasy of being grown employed women with eyelash extensions and poodle dresses.
Real Italy can disappoint—I’ve had some of the worst pizza I ever had in my life in Rome. Whether it disappoints or not, it is always real life, incurably rooted in the present of jet lag and cigarette smoke. But stepping into Greta Gerwig’s Barbie universe or a Buca di Beppo in Minneapolis is stepping into a self-consciously alternative reality, where the rules of “real life” don’t apply. The very fauxness of the atmosphere satisfies some small part of our hearts that longs for many things that we know don’t exist anywhere on earth.
Many thanks: to all my subscribers. This is a free 50-subscriber special; we will return to our regularly-scheduled programming next week with a patron-only newsletter on why the aurora borealis are like earbuds. For real, though, I could never have expected hitting this milestone before the end of 2022, so thank you!
In honor of: the Substack outage on the day I wrote this piece, here’s a podcast episode about someone hacking Chase Bank. Substack wasn’t hacked. I think. Actually, as I write this, I have no idea.
For the season: An essay by Clare Coffey on the role of Mary Bailey in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, with the killer line “It is certainly pleasant but not unduly extraordinary to be a popular and beautiful woman who can marry a rich and popular man if she chooses.”