Get stuffed! Why The Beanie Bubble is ‘a joyful funeral for the American dream’
When Damian Kulash and Kristin Gore were growing up – back when they were friends in high school, two decades before they reunited, got married and had twins – there was, he says, “this basic feeling that the world was really screwed up in the past but would get much better in the future, and we were somewhere on that curve: lots of things weren’t yet fixed, but we were inexorably going towards somewhere fairer.”
Next to him, Gore nods. Sunny optimism was, she says, “a very 90s thing”.
“People who are 19 now don’t feel that,” continues Kulash. “I wouldn’t if I were 19. I don’t myself. Because it’s just as bad or worse!”
“It’s total bullshit that there’s a level playing field,” agrees Gore. “It’s all completely skewed.” What today’s teenagers needed, she felt, was a roadmap to show them that you can still succeed in a cracked system if you have a strong moral compass – and a nose to sniff out the myths.
So the couple made a movie. All part of the day job for Gore, 46, who has been a writer and producer on the likes of Futurama, Saturday Night Live, Her and Nailed, as well as an editor on An Inconvenient Truth – made by her father, Al Gore. More of a jump for Kulash, 47, the frontman of OK Go, the rock band best known for their inventive one-take videos.
They envisioned the film as a cuddlier version of Foxcatcher, the chilly 2014 drama that Gore worked on. Both are about a real-life creepy billionaire – in Foxcatcher’s case; a wrestling coach, taxidermy fan and murderer John du Pont; in theirs, Beanie Babies creator Ty Warner, who dissected scores of soft toys to figure out how best to stuff his own (“I’m not a psycho,” he says early on. “But it is fun”).
And both films, says Gore, are “funerals for the American dream. But this one is a bit more joyful. A second line parade through the French Quarter kind of funeral.”
The Beanie Bubble is certainly colourful – as well as being, as Kulash admits, a bit of a bait-and-switch. Its red herrings are the slightly hideous plush cats that abruptly became hot property around the advent of eBay, leading to “one of the biggest and most absurd speculative crazes in history”.
The scale – and democracy – were unprecedented. “It used to take a big reserve of capital for you to buy into some market where you could make this type of error,” says Kulash. “Even with the tulip craze, you had to be a member of the landed gentry to be able to afford that stuff. Same with real estate or gold. But as soon as you have a market at the $5 level, everyone can get sucked into the mania.”
Those who profited the most, he says, were “mostly stay-at-home mums in suburban Chicago” – a sector of society not usually invited into the back room. “That’s incredible! But now we see the same craziness over and over; this arbitrary value system. NFTs are no different from Beanie Babies or crypto or anything with false scarcity.”
So why do we keep repeating the same mistake? Kulash rubs his forehead, an enthusiastic cultural student. “The whole American ethos – maybe western or capitalist ethos in general – is that there’s a loophole in ‘it’s too good to be true’, and you’re gonna be the one who finds it.”
Gore nods next to him, all serene good humour. “Bubbles of hope are sort of irresistible,” she says. “This feeling that maybe I have finally discovered the thing that will solve all of my problems. Human nature is always hoping and there’s something beautiful about that. Naive and terrible, but also beautiful. I’d rather have hope as a guiding light than cynicism. Even when it comes with some pain.”
Most of the pain meted out in the movie is to the women who enter – and then try to extricate themselves from – partnerships with Warner, played by Zach Galifianakis. All three are lightly fictionalised versions of real Warner victims: company co-founder Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), a tech whiz who joins as a student, and Sheila (Sarah Snook), a single mother who falls for him.
It’s really all about their stories, Gore and Kulash are eager to stress. Yet Warner does remain The Beanie Bubble’s ghastly heart: an ebullient manchild who turns a marriage proposal into a spotlit ego trip and suggests his fiancee have her nose fixed before the honeymoon. For Warner, explains Kulash, there is no arc: he is the American dream, in all its hideous, irresistible vainglory. “In the same scene, one woman sees him as this Willy
Wonka ball of charm and another goes: he’s terrible. He’s not acting differently, and they’re seeing the exact same thing, they’re just at different places on the cycle.”
He also remains weirdly true to himself. “From what I know of toxic narcissists,” says Gore, “they truly believe what they’re saying in the moment. There’s something authentic about them, and that is even creepier.”
Dotted through the film are photos of political leaders at key points in their careers, partly as anchors (the structure time-shuffles a lot), partly as commentary. There are none of Joe Biden’s predecessor, yet there’s something inescapably Trumpish about Warner: his arrogance and sexism, lack of empathy or impulse control.
“Those people are capable of winning the game at the highest levels,” says Gore, “because we have somehow culturally come to celebrate and reward some of the worst traits of sociopaths.”
“And,” says Kulash, “we root for them. We don’t just say: ‘Oh gosh, here’s the capitalist, we’re gonna have to fight him.’ We all want what the women want – at first.”
Understanding such desire doesn’t make it more palatable. There are nauseating scenes showing insatiable adult appetite for children’s comfort objects. Wanting excess seems to be an innate impulse, says Kulash. He tries to explain to their five-year-olds that if he took away 10 of their toys, “you’d love the 10 you have left more. And if I give you another one, you’ll love them all less. And yet you want another one. And eventually, we will probably give in. You so want to reason with them, and it will never, ever work. It doesn’t work when I tell it to myself.”
The Beanie Bubble is a film sceptical about branded goods released into a market awash with movies that celebrate them. And its directors are understandably uncomfortable sitting on the same shelf as Barbie and Air, BlackBerry and Flamin’ Hot. “As much as I loved Air,” says Kulash, “I don’t think at the end you’re supposed to be like: ‘God, should we be wearing those shoes?’”
To make a movie like that 30 years ago, says Gore, would have meant you were a “sellout”. “To me personally, it’s sort of depressing this confusion of capitalism and democracy that seems to be taking hold. It would be nice if all that passion was directed into things that made civilisation healthier and more loving, if it wasn’t just this kind of competition over products.”
Still, Gore says that she’s been buoyed by the reaction of some of the beleaguered teens who have seen the film. They successfully spotted the flaws in the system, she reports, and reached not for the roadmap but the detonator. “They were like: ‘I don’t really want to win in a system I don’t believe in. I’d rather blow it up.’”
Plus, she grins, she’s conscious that she and her husband are, for all their hand-wringing, flogging a film they made about Beanie Babies. “But it was an accident!” protests Kulash. “We didn’t mean to,” Gore agrees. “It was so incidental to the stories we were actually trying to tell. But yeah: we’re aware of the hypocrisy.”
• The Beanie Bubble is released in cinemas and on Apple TV+ on 28 July
different artist name or something, so at least I could detach myself.” Using her real name for work has made it harder to separate herself from any negative comments. It also means she saw the recent wave of online commentary about her weight, enough of it for her to trend on Twitter for two days.
Unprompted, she starts to talk about it. “It’s funny, my friend said: ‘I thought you didn’t read comments?’ And I was like” – she puts on a fauxwhiney voice – “I don’t, but sometimes it’s like I can’t escape it.” In mid-June, a video was posted on social media of her performing the junglist Nia Archives remix of Little Things – a single that has dovetailed with these hot recent weeks and is heading towards the Top 10 – and joy emanates from it as she winds through the song’s groove. But in the comments, she says: “There’s loads of talk about my weight, which is actually crazy. Because, right, I’m 26. I’m not 18. I’ve never ever been super-skinny – I’ve been slimmer, but I’ve also been younger, and a kid.”
She had already been feeling more aware of how her body has changed. “Coming into the campaign, I felt a bit like, I’ve been busy, I haven’t done as much gym. I am eating healthier, but I was chatting to some friends from school and saying that maybe I’ve gotten to that age where I put on weight a bit more easily now. Things change, don’t they, with your body?” She says she is hard on herself anyway: “I’m like, damn, I feel a bit insecure about it, and now people are commenting on it.” She smiles cheekily. “I have to think: ‘What are they going through?’ No one’s ever said anything in person, never. It’s very interesting.”
She feels more at ease “singing in the studio, jamming with my friends, recording …” She reconsiders. “I don’t actually like recording! More like being in the moment.” The women of DameDame* helped her feel comfortable enough to move away from the slowjam tempo that typified her first album.
Falling or Flying is more adventurous, as you can already hear on Little Things and the earlier single, Try Me. The latter is a thundering chunk of syncopated bass drums, strings and crackly guitar, adorned with the various sounds of a cocking gun and percussion that rattles like jewellery. It is dramatic. Similarly uptempo tracks on the album pulse over bassy production, shoving you forward with more momentum than the teenage love songs Smith had put on to Lost & Found.
There are still a couple of reflective, if catchy, near-ballads that sound more like traditional R&B (plus an outing for some indie-poppy acoustic guitar). But
Smith talks about how a greater sense of freedom defined this second album. She bedded in to write it, from late 2021 to the end of 2022, she says. “I started feeling more like myself again; like myself before any of this. Maybe because DameDame* are my friends, but also because I’m working with people who aren’t big names. It’s how I used to make music. Before. You know?”
That idea of the “before famous times” comes up often. One song was originally written about an old friend and, singing it to herself in the mirror at home, she realised she could apply it to her own life. She quotes a lyric to me: “‘They think that they know me here / But I know you know I haven’t quite been myself for years.’ So it’s like people see this person that’s on stage, who maybe seems a bit extroverted, not shy, a people pleaser, happy all the time, all these things. But I know,” she says, pointing at her chest, “that deep down I’m not that happy, don’t feel the most confident, quite insecure, find it hard to deal with loads of stuff that comes with the whole ‘Jorja Smith’ thing.”
She felt the glare of the public eye, which from time to time made her doubt herself. “Until I started working on this project, I felt like: I don’t know if I’m doing good or bad, I don’t know if I’m happy or sad, I don’t know if I’m winning or losing. I don’t know. It’s all a bit blurry, but somehow not.” Again – a person of extremes, who will talk about the intensity of her feelings like this, then be smiling a few sentences later. Any time she might have spiralled, it was temporary.
She likes to spend her time in Walsall being thoroughly normal and introverted: cooking, watching films, cleaning (which she says as if she is murmuring a secret) and reading (“Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams got me back into it”). Smith, who never wanted to be signed to a major label and still releases her records independently, now sits herself halfway between megafame and underground success, between red-carpet glamour and homely insularity.
In 2020, she says, “everything was moving so quick”. She found herself in relationships almost back-to-back, clocking now how that opened her up to being swayed in this or that direction. “It’s hard being with people who maybe want to tell you about yourself. Like, hold on a minute, I don’t even know how to be me quite yet either,” she says, chuckling. “Now, I’m … I’m actually all right. I don’t need to wake up with anyone’s opinions next to me in the morning, telling me: ‘Oh, maybe you should’ve worn this.’”
She won’t confirm whether she is single now, but jokes about once trying to send saucy texts to a guy: “Like: ‘I don’t know where you are, but I don’t wanna go to sleep.’” He didn’t reciprocate – “he was just being a gentleman!” – but at least inspired her enough to write the album’s title track. She feels lucky to have spoken to Adele, Stormzy and, recently, Alicia Keys about navigating celebrity because: “No one teaches you how to do it. There’s no handbook on fame, on this life. But I’m grateful for what I’m able to do because of this life. It’s just a weird one.”
She is about to be swept into hair and makeup for the shoot, and become “Jorja Smith” again. But first, she excitedly outlines her Friday-night plans: driving up to Walsall and getting a Chinese takeaway. She beams: “So I’m happy.”
• Falling or Flying is released on 29 September
Until this project, I felt like: I don’t know if I’m happy or sad, winning or losing