A New Year’s Christmas Present

By Brian McLoughlin

Jack and Jill are having cappuccino in the Annebrook House Hotel.

‘What Christmas-after-Christmas present would you like, Jill?’ asked Jack. They had mutually agreed to put off buying their respective presents before Christmas when prices were high and wait for the January sales.

‘A Barbie doll,’ Jill smiled.

‘You’re joking?’

‘You recall the film Barbie, you wore blue, everyone else was pinkish; you were feeling the blues.’

‘And then we went to Oppenheimer and all were gawking at you fully ornate in preposterous pink.’

‘They were admiring me. I was this morning ontemplating Barbie, the film, and wondering what is its essence.’

‘The essence of doll.’

‘Yes, Jack, or perhaps the denial of mother.’

‘Who’d want to be a mother?’

‘The very first scene in Barbie has a very tall Margot Robbie dressed in the original Mattel black and white stripes smiling at the little girls with little dolls in little prams as they smashed their little dolls to smithereens and the female voiceover saying that no girl should ever suffer the ignominy of being mother – something like that. The last scene has Margot, as Stereotypical Barbie leaving Barbieland, leaving the doll’s house, to go to the real world, to a gynaecologist.’

‘To get mother parts?’

‘To become a real woman, because a real woman, unlike a doll, can be anything – including a mother. So the Barbie journey is from doll to real.’

‘Margot Robbie sure is a doll, the pinkest Barbie in Barbieland – and the blondest of course.’

Jill smiled indulgently. ‘There’s a famous 19th century play called A Doll’s House. It was initially banned in many countries because it upset the patriarchy. It’s about a married woman with children who leaves her husband because he treats her as a doll, but that’s no longer authentic to what she is. Mattel, the maker of dolls, want to put Barbie back in the box for reasons of profit but Stereotypical Barbie has to go out of the box to experience the real world where women are not on top to gain a new perspective on Barbieland; that an imbalanced world, whether male dominant or female dominant, serves neither man nor woman. What happens to a world without balance? It bombs.’

‘Oppenheimer?’

‘Yes, that film is the story of JR Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, his early fascination with exploding stars and later, leading the project in a desert construct in Los Alamos, to build the atomic bomb before Hitler does; a project that took so long that when finished, Hitter had been defeated – ‘

‘I know, Jill; I saw the film.’

‘Yes, but did you see its essence?’

‘About man gaining the power to destroy worlds.’

‘I couldn’t help thinking if the women painted Los Alamos pink, would those bombs be dropped? Or better, did the women there even for one moment consider the women and children in those Japanese cities who’d be burnt and smashed to smithereens?’ Jill gazed into her chocolate-grained-heart-shaped-topped cappuccino.

‘I suppose it’s about distance.’

‘It’s about disconnection, Jack. If we don’t connect, we self-destruct. If we connect, we thrive. Let our New Year’s resolution be to connect more… to oneself, to each other, to all others.’

‘Yes, Jill. It’s time to truly connect, you and I. It’s time to tie the knot. So not a Barbie, instead a ring – to make you a real woman.’

Brian McLoughlin is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meet on Tuesdays at 10.50am in the Annebrook House Hotel, starting from January 9.