In the early 90s, according to a story that may now have become slightly mythologised in the retelling, the actor Sarah Polley – then aged 12 – was asked by Disney executives to remove a peace sign badge she was wearing. When she refused, Disney blacklisted her. This story lost a little of its potency last month with the announcement that Polley was set to direct the new “live-action” reboot of Bambi. For admirers of Polley’s determinedly independent career, the record-scratch noise could not be louder: this is somebody who worked with Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and Hal Hartley for God’s sake, before the age of 22.
Thoughts of Polley returned this week with the now-deafening noise surrounding the release of Barbie, directed by another former queen of independent cinema, Greta Gerwig. Coming up a few years after Polley, Gerwig was so indie that her films didn’t even go to Sundance, they went to South by Southwest. She was so indie that when she moved from micro-budget mumblecore movies to a scripted film with Noah Baumbach – Greenberg, in 2010 – the Guardian called it “her first tentative steps into the mainstream”. Greenberg was made for a budget of $25m, which it didn’t make back; now Gerwig has directed Barbie, for the film arm of mega-corporation Mattel, with a budget of $145m. Gerwig’s swerve into the actual mainstream prompts the question: does the phrase “selling out” have any meaning any more?
Gerwig and Polley are far from the only directors to have moved in this direction of late: Barry Jenkins, for instance, has now finished work on The Lion King sequel for Disney. Jenkins’s first feature film, Medicine for Melancholy, premiered at South by Southwest in 2008, the same year Greta Gerwig presented her directorial debut there – Nights and Weekends, co-directed with Joe Swanberg. (Incidentally, it’s interesting that so many articles now omit to credit that tiny, little-seen film as Gerwig’s first movie, preferring instead to reset her directorial career with the Oscar-nominated Lady Bird nearly 10 years later.) When Moonlight won the Oscar for best picture in 2017, ABC News called it “the little film that could”; IndieWire asked “how a $1.5m indie landed eight Oscar nominations”. But did Moonlight triumph over the industry, or was it in fact the other way round?
Mattel and Disney are two enormous corporations that would seem to stand for everything these directors are – or should be – in opposition to. To anyone observing the state of cinema in 2023, it should be a point of utmost clarity that the might of these megabucks companies can do nothing but crush the smaller people. A recent article about Barbie in the New Yorker quoted no less a figure than Gerwig’s own agent as saying: “Is it a great thing that our great creative actors and film-makers live in a world where you can only take giant swings around consumer content and mass-produced products? I don’t know. But it is the business.” You don’t say.
Why has the concept of selling out lost so much of its cultural capital today? Online, you can hardly move for defenders of these directors, belligerently vaunting the fact that – for instance – Gerwig was influenced by directors such as Max Ophüls and Jacques Tati, as if that confers greater legitimacy on a film using IP (intellectual property) to make money for a toy company that sells vacuous, hypersexualised dolls. There’s a parallel here: the idea of Barbie dolls being in any way noxious seems, in the current climate, to be as hopelessly stick-in-the-mud a stance as the concept of selling out. The thought appears to be: look, the bad guys won, so we should all go along with it; since we’re all hypersexualised anyway, we might as well do it in a more egalitarian fashion; since the big corporations rule everything now, we might as well get people with a bit of artistic nous to be the face of their product.
But the recent writer and actor strikes in the US show that selling out is not just a question of personal ethics, but an industry-wide concern. A director’s decision to align themselves with these Goliaths of entertainment has consequences; makes money for the big guy, in opposition to fostering an industry where smaller films and creators have more opportunities. The activist and screenwriter of Don’t Look Up, David Sirota recently commented: “Quick reminder that literally not a single human being would pay any money to watch a movie/TV show written and acted by Bob Iger [the billionaire CEO of Disney] which means the resources that pay his entire zillion dollar salary are generated by writers and actors, not by him.” This is certainly true. For his part, former indie darling Mark Ruffalo, now known for being the Incredible Hulk, tweeted: “How about we all jump into indies now?”: this is in reference to the fact that certain independent films are exceptionally permitted to continue shooting by the striking union, Sag-Aftra. But the thing is, Ruffalo et al always could have made indies. That’s where he started out, after all, in films for directors such as Kenneth Lonergan – and where many of his colleagues still ply their trade; instead, his recent filmography has generated billions for Disney, via Marvel. Of course creators must seize what opportunities they can to create, within an increasingly compromised industry, but personal responsibility still exists; the actions of individuals have a knock-on effect.
The impact of the current strikes on the industry remains to be seen; perhaps they will lead to a resurgence of independent cinema, as a fightback against the harmful monopoly of Disney and the predominance of the IP model. Mattel is planning films based on Barney the Dinosaur, He-Man and Polly Pocket – words to turn a film journalist’s hopes to ash – and alongside the new Bambi and Lion King films Disney has a plethora of walking-dead reboots of its old IP lined up, including a remake of The Aristocats by Questlove, the director of the independent documentary Summer of Soul. Barbie will most likely be as good and creative a film as it can be under the circumstances; odds-on that it will have the temerity to lightly poke fun at the doll and its billionaire patrons. But in the meantime, in a changing world for cinema, the struggle for the soul of cinema goes on.
