Apparently, Proust Barbie went right over Barbie test audiences
What? The Barbenheimer set doesn’t like madelines?
Aux News Barbie
Screenshot: IFC FIlms
No sooner had the warm colors of Barbieland with Allan touched the audience’s eyes than a shudder ran through executives, and they stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to them: The exquisite Proust Barbie had invaded the screen, and audiences were lost. And all from a test screening of Barbie.
Yes, the rumors are true. A Barbie based on the French novelist Marcel Proust, author of the seven-volume modernist masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time, was largely cut from Mattel’s Barbie movie because test audiences didn’t get the reference. We don’t know what to make of a world more familiar with the Snyder Cut than Proust. Don’t audiences watch Frances Ha anymore?
There is mention of a failed Proust Barbie in the film, using this esoteric, literary-minded doll as an example of things the public simply did not understand. Ironically, Lucy Boynton, who played Proust Barbie but was cut from much of the film (she appears in the background in Weird Barbie’s house), is speaking out about her experience becoming an untouched madeleine on the cutting room floor. Reduced to a mere crumb that could nonetheless involuntarily conjure memories of mornings at Combray, Boynton tells EW she can be seen “softly in the background” of the film because test screenings revealed “contemporary audiences don’t know who Proust is, so the joke doesn’t quite land.”
Boynton called it “a little bit of a heartbreaker that we are kind of losing touch with that history” but hopes reading about a Proust Barbie on a site like The A.V. Club will “trigger” people to read up on Marcel Proust. If there’s one thing audiences want to do, it’s read a 4,200-page novel before seeing Barbie. (They should probably learn French first so they can read it in French). However, this is the type of joke that The Simpsons would make for 30 million viewers every week, so maybe, as a society, we are losing touch with wider cultural history. Or maybe cutting extended jokes about Proust in the biggest movie of the year is why we lost touch with it.
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You’d think a sizable amount of people would have at least seen Little Miss Sunshine.
For whatever reason, it isn’t mandatory viewing by law. And they say we live in a democracy.
Nor do we live in a friendtopia, where all citizens must watch Hocus Pocus.
Or The Sopranos.
Sure, Little Miss Sunshine was popular for what it was (i.e., quirky indie), but it didn’t have Avengers or Avatar levels of attendance.
Proust was also mentioned in several Monty Python sketches. And on an unrelated note, Deacon, the Railroad-associated companion NPC in Fallout 4 mentions that he reads Proust in one of his dialogues.
Or The Big Sleep.Or Paul Simon’s “Proof” video.
Or Gilmore Girls.
TFW a movie about a toy is too sophisticated and has to be dumbed-down.
At least the Stephen Malkmus reference made it in.
“Don’t audiences watch Frances Ha anymore?” I’ll assume that was a rhetorical question.As for the Simpsons, they’d make that joke for 30 million viewers in the hope that 2% caught it and were delighted. That was when the show respected its audience.
I guess The Simpsons made some smart jokes on account of all those geek Harvard writers, but I don’t think it had a reputation for them. Futurama does, but that’s more STEM based. I think Archer is probably the only show that would or could make a Proust joke and expect it to land.
On Archer the joke would be how stupid making a Proust joke would meOn Rick and Morty, Rick would say “Proust FARTS!!” and then puke a little and a million Incel nerds would explain why that was the smartest joke ever
Pam: This is bullshit!
Archer: I feel like I should make a joke here. Maybe Proust.
Pam: A la recherche du temps per-doodoo, amirite?Archer: No… but yes.
Aw where did Rick and Morty hurt you lmao. No one was even talking about Rick and morty. You’re intolerable
There’s an ‘Archer’ episode with a ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ joke that I just adore:“I would prefer not to. (beat) No Melville fans here?”
I remember in high school English we had to write a fictional conversation between two characters in works we had read that year. My English teacher was not amused that I picked Bartleby as one of the characters.
Well, your teacher and I are very different people, because I find that hilarious.
Come on, now. The fantasy is largely terrible, but you’re selling the show itself far too short. I’m not saying it’s brilliant, nut it certainly isn’t dumb.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 definitely would too. Their philosophy was always “It doesn’t matter if everyone gets the joke. The right people will.”
I read years ago that most Simpsons jokes (in the early goings anyway) went unnoticed by most viewers, but it wasn’t the same jokes viewers were missing. So different people took different things away from the same episode. Don’t know if that’s still the case.
I grew up with the show, so there were definitely a bunch of jokes I missed the first few times I watched them, either by unfamiliarity with the original material or the occasional Sneed’s Feed and Seed. The first ten seasons are so dense with jokes that it makes sense most people would miss a lot of them. But I think that a lot of the stuff was more current events or timeless social commentary, and a bunch of pop culture references. The most highbrow joke I can remember off hand is Lisa complaining that Gore Vidal has kissed more boys than she has. Sideshow Bob has definitely read Proust, but his interests clearly lay elsewhere.
There was a time when I went through a lot of the old SNPP episode summaries, which are great because they identify almost all of the references while also completely unironically explaining that Itchy hits the same rib twice in succession yet produces two entirely different sounds and that must have been an animation goof. C-
“Name one successful person who lived without air conditioning.”
“Balzac.”
“No need for potty mouth just because you can’t think of one.”
“But Balzac was-”
“Bup bup bup. If “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts y… How’s the rest of that go?”
***
“You liked Rashomon.”
“That’s not the way I remember it.”
***
Both the A and B plots of “A Streetcar Named Marge” are just smart jokes. The whole idea of adapting a bleak play like A Streetcar Named Desire into a a peppy musical and Maggie attending the daycare Ayn Rand’s School for Tots where the walls are plastered with posters like “Helping is futile”. The “New Orleans” song in the episode was such a smart joke that it went over the state of Louisiana’s head and several Fox affiliates threatened to pull the show. The writers didn’t set out to disparage the city of New Orleans, they just wanted to parody a song from Sweeney Todd.
Those are all good smart jokes. I especially like the Rashomon one (allegedly). I know there are a lot of them peppered throughout, but for whatever reason, none of them stick in my mind as well as “I’d’ve called ‘em Chazzwozzers”. Proust still feels a little too in the weeds of classic literature for the show but maybe it could have happened and I would have just missed it. My school only had old copies of Tek War to read after all.
The one that sticks in my head for some reason is “At last, a copy of Ethan Frome to call my own.”
“Arr, I’ve got some customers. Call me back, Ishmael.”
Girls, Yellowfoot! Boys kiss girls!
Simpsons fans are familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.
A Proust Barbie would have increased the film’s runtime to 14 hours.
But as long as much of that 14 hours would have involved Lucy Boynton, I’d have been happy enough with that.
Proust was a hack. Maybe audiences would have responded better to a real literary classic, like Madame Bobarie.
Madame Bovary was no Lady Chatterley.
Proust, huh?
Can someone summarize it for me?
Melfi: Marcel Proust wrote a seven volume classic, Remembrance of Things Past. He took a bite of a madeleine, it’s kind of a tea cookie he used to have when he was a child, and that one bite unleashed a tide of memories of his entire childhood and ultimately of his entire life.Tony: This sounds very gay.
…He wrote aboutHe wrote aboutProust – in his first book, his first bookwrotea-booouuutttt…
Very ambitions try there, but in fact the least successful of the evening. Didn’t even get as far as the first volume.
Most famous for the last line.
Like a lot of cultural touchstone references, you don’t have to have read Proust to know the basic fundamental reference. It’s done in Ratatouille when the food critic has one bite of his dish and is transported back to childhood and his mother’s cooking. So, Pixar respects its audience more than Warner respects theirs, which I suppose isn’t surprising. It’s poignant and powerful as it is, regardless of directly knowing the source. Release the Proust cut! Or don’t, I don’t actually care all that much.
“So, Pixar respects its audience more than Warner respects theirs”WTF is this supposed to mean? WB respected the audience enough to make the joke and let the audience decide. Then they respected the audience to cut what didn’t work.And BTW, Barbie was neither a critical nor financial failure, so it looks like maybe WB did exactly the right thing.
TIL that was even a reference to something, I thought it was just evoking how the senses are strongly tied to memory in general.
It can be two things.
Or the joke that they were telling just happened to be different? One is about sense memory (which isn’t exclusive to Proust). The other was likely about how little girls aren’t interested in a Proust Barbie, but it falls flat because the audience doesn’t get it either.
Yeah, I’ve never read Proust, but I know the basic reference of a madeleine triggering childhood memories from other literature and media. I’m curious if what was in the Barbie movie was just that (probably at least had to give the “greatest hit”) or if it went deeper.
People need to read more Proust! He’s wickedly perceptive and funny.
If it’s any consolation, there’s a popular twitter account (@bartlebytaco) who has been reading through In Search of Lost Time and occasionally posts some of the weirder moments from the books, and the posts tend to get hundreds of likes. When folk are exposed to Proust, they like him.
There’s a reasonably popular annual trend of people reading ‘Dracula’ together on the dates of the various letters, diary entries etc of the book and sharing their reactions online. Social media has its flaws, but it does have a remarkable ability to connect people across all sorts of niche shared interests.
There was an essay in Slate the other week about the annual Moby-Dick weekend in New Bedford, where hundreds of Melville enthusiasts gather aboard an old wooden ship to read Moby-Dick aloud over the course of twenty-five hours. My fiancee and I are talking about going.
This header image is now making me wonder if a B&W rerelease of Barbie would be awesome on a big screen.
This happens all the time. The famous car-racing action franchise was originally going to be called ‘The Proust and the Furious’ before negative test audience reactions scuttled it.
I’ve always heard that title translated as “Remembrance of Things Past”.
At some point people remembranced that that was a poor translation
“Remembrance of Things Past” is a phrase that the original translators borrowed from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. “In Search of Lost Time” is the literal translation and it’s what was used for the more recent edition from the 1990s. Incidentally, A.O. Scott recently wrote a NYT piece about literary works borrowing their titles from earlier works and he used “Remembrance of Things Past” as an example:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/books/review/literary-allusions.html
Incidentally, this is also the reason why the filmmakers decided to nix the character of “Klaus Barbie”.
Being a woman is like dragging a boat through the mountains every day?
Weirdly enough, Family Guy has had several references to Proust, more then the Simpson’s for sure.
It went right over test audience’s HEADS. It didn’t go right over test audiences.I know, “It’s new”.
I don’t even know how many classical subjects I’ve first encountered in popular-entertainment form. Would the modern WB turn down “What’s Opera, Doc?” because they think kids won’t get it without watching some 20 hours of Wagner?
Definitely first heard of Proust via Monty Python. Peanuts referenced Citizen Kane several times. Classic Star Trek quoted Shakespeare frequently. And I’ve probably seen more Bergman spoofs than actual Bergman films.
You know what? I’m gonna side with the producers on this one. It’s an ok idea, but the joke with most of the Barbies was that they were based on actual dolls and products – unless we were given a reason for their off-centerness (Weird Barbie got played with too hard). Proust Barbie is what? A doll that belonged to a Proust mega-fan in that’s now in a house that is filled with other forgotten actual toys? How does she fit in?
They should had a Foucault Barbie and let the audience interpret it however they wanted to.
I’m a reasonable person but I’m generally of the opinion that test audiences should be lined up against a wall and shot. I haven’t forgiven them for I Am Legend.
Harry: Proust’s novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocability of time lost, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the reinstallment of extra-temporal values of time regained, ultimately the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience, re-stating as it does the concept of intemporality. In the first volume, Swann, the family friend visits…(Gong goes, chord of music, applause. The meter has hardly risen at all.)Mee: Well tried, Harry.Voice Over: A good attempt there but unfortunately he chose a general appraisal of the work, before getting on to the story and as you can see (close up of Proustometer) he only got as far as page one of ‘Swann’s Way’, the first of the seven volumes. A good try though and very nice posture.(Cut back to the stage.)Mee: Harry Bagot, you’re from Luton?Harry: Yes, Arthur, yeah.Mee: Now Harry what made you first want to try and start summarizing Proust?Harry: Well I first entered a seaside Summarizing Proust Competition when I was on holiday in Bournemouth, and my doctor encouraged me with it.Mee: And Harry, what are your hobbies outside summarizing?Harry: Well, strangling animals, golf and masturbating.Mee: Well, thank you Harry Bagot.(Harry walks off-stage. Music and applause.)Voice Over: Well there he goes. Harry Bagot. He must have let himself down a bit on the hobbies, golf’s not very popular around here, but never mind, a good try.Mee: Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Mr Rutherford from Leicester, are you ready Ronald? (Ronald is a very eager man in tails) Right. On the summarizing spot. You have got fifteen seconds from now.Ronald: Er, well, Swann, Swann, there’s this house, there’s this house, and er, it’s in the morning, it’s in the morning – no, it’s the evening, in the evening and er, there’s a garden and er, this bloke comes in – bloke comes in – what’s his name – what’s his name, er just said it – big bloke – Swann, Swann(The gong sounds. Mee pushes Ronald out.)Mee: And now ladies and gentlemen, I’d like you to welcome the last of our all-England finalists this evening, from Bingley, the Bolton Choral Society and their leader Superintendent McGough, (a big choir comes on, immaculately drilled, each holding a score, with Fred Tomlinson as superintendent McGough) All right Bingley, remember you’ve got fifteen seconds to summarize Proust in his entirety starting from now.First Soloist: Proust, in his first book wrote about… fa la la…Second Soloist: Proust in his first book wrote about…Tenors: He wrote about…(They continue contrapuntally, in madrigal, never getting beyond these words until they rallentando to say…)All: Proust in his first book wrote about the… (gong sounds)Voice Over: Very ambitious try there, but in fact the least successful of the evening, they didn’t even get as far as the first volume. (the singers leave the stage)Mee: Well ladies and gentlemen, I don’t think any of our contestants this evening have succeeded in encapsulating the intricacies of Proust’s masterwork, so I’m going to award the first prize this evening to the girl with the biggest tits.