The story behind the success of a stuffed-toy phenomenon, The Beanie Bubble is in many ways a template World 2.0 tale of one man, a vision, plus a lot of help from other people, most of whom get left in the dust when it is time to bask in the glory.
It could be Jobs, or Musk, or Thiel, or Bezos, but here it’s Ty Warner – in many ways he got there first, building up a company selling understuffed, very soft toys to children. The toys became a thing, a can’t-lose investment. Starting in the 1980s but accelerating to warp speed in the 1990s, Ty Inc. rose and rose on the back of the rise and rise of the internet in its early days, until, suddenly… pfft! Beanie Babies had gone the way of the South Sea Bubble, Tulipmania and the rest.
Zipping forwards and backwards in time to suggest timing is everything, the action revolves around the three women who helped Warner achieve his aim – Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), the neighbour who was there at the beginning and went from helping him stuff toys on the kitchen table to running the entire business. Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), the young would-be med student who instead became employee number 12, introduced Warner and co to the world of the nascent world wide web, and in particular to the newly launched enterprise called eBay, and took the company from “millions to billions” by coming up with the notion of restricting supply, thereby increasing demand. And Sheila (Sarah Snook), the lighting designer with two children who got folded into Warner’s world after becoming romantically attached.
All three are bright, opinionated and assertive women who know how to stand up for themselves. All three find that beneath Ty’s charm – the generous employer, the sensitive lover, the brilliant surrogate father – lurks a wounded child whose imperfect relations with his father, a stuffed-toy salesman who died young, have left a mark. The man is a maniac, but a cloaked one.
The character of charismatic man-boy Ty Warner is slightly underwritten (legal reasons?) but engagingly played by Zach Galifianakis, who’s been less high profile of late than he was in the post-Hangover years but has been working steadily all the time since. He even appeared in 2017’s Tulip Fever, the story of another craze pointing up the “wisdom of crowds” (joke) in the 17th century.
But then the whole thing is nicely played, and in a certain register. It could have been done as a hand-wringing melodrama, a kind of updated Mildred Pierce, but co-directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash sell it like a new toy – it’s clean, bright and grubby fingers have not yet done their work. Banks and Snook are well versed in playing women with stiletto (both types) instincts, the slight surprise being Viswanathan, who is in many ways the emotional centre of this almost-comedy.
It’s a very easy watch, slips right down, and there’s more in play than the subject matter and slick presentation suggest, like a critique of the stories American corporate culture comforts itself with – like Ty’s line that his toys are all about America, all about Mom and Pop toy stores, that the little guy is his chief concern. Ty Inc. is not a Mom and Pop store. The Beanie Babies are made in Asia.
The film is made by Apple, and if there’s a read-across to Steve Jobs it’s all plausibly deniable. But this is in many ways the story of the maverick who starts to believe his own publicity and ends up so cocooned that no new information can get through. Though he’s become the new establishment, on he goes with the “disruptor” discourse, no one believing it quite as much as the boss. And so misses the only real cast-iron inevitability in all this, that all crazes come to an end and that for every Beanie Baby today there’s a waiting Pokémon or Tamagotchi tomorrow.
Here endeth the lesson.
The Beanie Bubble – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
