Apparently, Proust Barbie went right over Barbie test audiences

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.