Nine Circles Issue Six
Barbenheimer Special Edition
Walking through Richmond today, I saw several small flocks of women dressed head to toe in hot pink. You almost certainly know why.
I’ve been un-ironically excited about the Barbie movie since the day it was announced that Greta Gerwig would be directing. I loved Lady Bird, and thought Little Women was as close as we’ve got perfect adaptation of a classic novel in years. I can remember sending the Hollywood Reporter article breaking the news to a friend, excitably predicting ‘this is going to be a cult classic.’
What I didn’t expect was total saturation: The Barbenheimer memes everywhere, the hoards of fancy-dress wearers heading into cinemas (disappointingly few Oppenheimer fits though…), the breathless, obsessive coverage across the internet. Let’s wait for the opening week numbers, but it’s pretty clear that Barbie is brilliant for cinemas, and for… Barbie? Mattel? Greta Gerwig? Culture?
For Mattel, Barbie is the vanguard of a play to launch a new cinematic universe (sigh). I imagine this means we’ll be getting He-Man and Hot Wheels films, but after that… Thomas the Tank Engine? Uno? Literally anything where there is consumer pre-awareness. Read this New Yorker piece for more.
Mattel Cinematic Universe (we need a different acronym) non-withstanding, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a week with two big film releases, neither of which are tied to a long-running series, is the first time in years that film is totally dominating the conversation in mainstream culture. It’s been a very, very long time since I heard someone speak with any enthusiasm about a Marvel film, or really anything Disneyish at all. Might we have reached the tipping point where mega-series start to decline again in favour of one-off stories? It's been fifteen years since Iron Man came out in 2008. I don’t think I believe in twenty year trend cycles, but sometimes I want to.
For more on the story behind the film, read this profile of Gerwig in The New York Times Magazine by Willa Paskin, and this piece on Gerwig’s co-writing of the script with her filmmaker husband Noah Baumbach by Maureen Dowd.
Welcome to issue six of Nine Circles. Thanks as ever for being here, I hope this slightly brightens your Sunday night or Monday morning. Read on for links on the conversation in Russian academic on nuclear escalation, the history of the TLS, U.K. election polling and the 1922 committee, along with more evidence for my perennial take that the NYT is highly underrated as a trolling institution.
I remember feeling a genuine chill when, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, commentators started to talk about the possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons (the smaller kind - the bigger, end of the world ones are called ‘strategic’). Thank god the nuclear escalation ladder has been managed very responsibly so far by the Americans and others, but this piece by Hanna Notte for War on the Rocks is a fascinating and sobering look into the debate in Russia’s foreign policy expert community on the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Ukraine or another Eastern European country.
I promise I did not consciously follow my thoughts on Barbie with something Oppenheimer themed.
This essay by James Campbell in The Hudson Review on his time as the pseudonymous ‘J.C.’ of the NB column at the back of the Times Literary Supplement is a fun story of British literary culture in its own right, but also serves as a nice run-through of the last century of The Times, and of newspapers and book reviewing in general. For about twenty five years, Campbell wrote a catty, funny, interesting column on literary culture - a sort of reward for making it through all the reviews. The vibe he’s going for is something like a gossipy glass of wine with your cleverest, funniest, most well-read friend.
I can’t wait to read the book it is extracted from, but the piece also made me reflect on what I want to do with this newsletter: NB was always a miscellany of a few unrelated items each week, like 9C. One of NB’s funniest recurring features is the prizes: The Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal, the Unoriginal Title Prize, the All Must Have Prizes Prize.
I’ve been sat around when I should have been writing this newsletter, thinking of stupid ideas for fake prizes. The Janet Malcolm Prize for Character Assassination? The Eliezer Yudkowsky Prize for Predicting Human Extinction? The Peter Florence Award for Giving Another Prize to an Already Rich and Famous Author? Other stupid ideas for the future of this newsletter include a regular feature reviewing tube stations, notes from non-fiction books I’ve read, and reviews of gallery and museum visits. I did consider doing short reviews of fast food around London, but after some googling remembered I was just stealing the idea of Will Self’s Real Meals, a column that ran in the New Statesman a few years ago.
Polling legend Peter Kellner thinks that MRP polls are significantly overestimating the probability of a total wipeout for the tories at the next election. He explains why at some length here. This doesn’t mean that Labour won’t win convincingly, but that we should all calm down a bit about the possibility of the tories ending up with less than a hundred seats, as was predicted by some blockbuster polls earlier this year.
After a probable Conservative defeat, we’ll all spend days on end again watching for what the 1922 Committee will do. In a piece titled ‘The Assassination Bureau’, Tanya Gold profiles the rule-making and election-running body of the parliamentary Conservative Party for the New Statesman. The piece includes interesting details on how the committee works, and on Sir Graham Brady’s conversations with multiple tory Prime Ministers, telling them that it was time to go.
The New York Times is highly underrated as a trolling institution. Rarely have I read a piece played entirely straight, in which the disdain for the interviewees is more obvious than in ‘Gilgo Beach Suspect’s House Becomes a Macabre Tourist Attraction’ by Corey Kilgannon and Nate Schweber. True Crime fandom has always been deeply gross, but driving for hours to gawk at the house of a newly-caught serial killer? And even if you did that… what on earth would possess you to talk to the national press about it?
Thanks as ever for reading. See you next Monday!
I loved the variety! Barbie pink makes me feel so uncomfortable and not sure why?
I’m up for that!!