Live Watch: Barbie
It's good, but not sure it knows what it wants to say
Barbie movie is, thus far, so well executed. My personal enjoyment of it is like a 7/10. But objectively it's walking such a tightrope. Once wrong step and the whole thing comes crashing down. And it hasn't made a misstep once. Also, Will Ferrel is perfect as Mattel Willy Wonka
As far as the conservative backlash the sense I'm getting is "How mad are you at feminism?" If the answer is "Unreasonably" then ofc you're gonna have a bad time. And I don't blame them. In a sense. I don't blame them in the scorpion and the frog way. Like it's to be expected.
To put it another way, it's kabuki. Like the role the Barbie movie will play is to do Teen Vogue feminism. The role for reactionary anti-feminist conservatives is to get mad at that. Everyone is just playing their roles and reading the rote scripts they can't not say.
For my own butt hurt reactionary take for as anti-corporate this movie is I do enjoy thinking about how hypocritically Greta Gerwig is loving the (deserved) financial success of the movie.
Actually wasn’t going to do one of these since I don’t really have that much to say about the movie. But I paused to cook a little. And am just jotting down what’s going through my head until my chicken is done.
As far as the “deserved” from before I do feel like pre-2005(?) this movie would merely be a quite good movie. On the level of MEAN GIRLS. But in the movie desert that is the new snoring ‘20s (see what I did there?) it’s elevated to great by way of terrible comparison.
Oh, I read once that despite the animosity to spoilers people typically enjoy fiction more when it’s been spoiled. And there are movies I stopped watching but enjoyed on the 2nd viewing when I knew what to expect. And actually a lot of the Barbie movie was in fact spoiled for me. And I think the Ken stuff might have been helped by that.
OK, Ken’s 2nd act turn reminds me very much of the end of Kevin Smith’s mediocre DOGMA when Ben Affleck is dropping the bodies and says something along the lines of “[G-d] should have just let us fuck”. There’s a dorm room level analysis of patriarchy/ men that both movies share. The difference though is that BARBIE is a movie for kids. And DOGMA was Smith’s opus on religion.
But there is a galaxy brain interpretation about how Ken, even without genitals, is still a sexual animal. While Barbie is frigid. Which makes sense cause you can’t make a horny Barbie movie. But, and I can’t quite put my finger on this (and the movie isn’t over), but it does feel like the movie is expressing feminism doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Like it recognizes and represents a kind of stereotypical trad instinct. Ken, a loser, comes back with a book on the patriarchy and the Barbies `happily` are bringing them beers. But it doesn’t like that either. Until one by one a woman convinces them they’re actually unhappy.
FTR my position is that the Barbies being scientists while liking the alpha Kens are not actually in conflict. There’s only tension if you insist upon a maximalist position on gender roles. It’s a kids’ movie so it’s ok. But it’s childish to not get that power dynamics in relationships have nuance.
“You have to…” Or else what? Like why do you “have to?” There’s something super trad about Barbie feminism. Like by focusing on stereotypes there’s kinda a thing where these contradictions exist in the minds of the Barbies and only there. Like all the contradictions go away if you just accept that people have preferences and you can’t please everyone. So make a choice who you want to be and be ok with the idea that that means some people will like you less.
I’m pretty sure given Gerwig’s encyclopedic knowledge of movies she thinks THE GODFATHER is in fact a masterpiece. But somehow it’s also sexist to extoll its virtues. Also there’s a pretense here that women are pretending not to know stuff. But implicit in that is that if they didn’t know these things it would in fact be shameful to require help with. Which kinda suggests all the subjects (like basic finance) the Barbies are pretending not to know are just things the movie is saying real women stereotypically don’t actually know. But it reimagines the real life ignorance as a feint.
I feel like it says something that the show stopping number at the end is done by the dudes and is about the Barbies in a background guiding role. Reminds me of this Armenian expression this girl once told me “In a marriage the man is the head. But the wife is the neck.” The whole movie is the kind of Teen Vogue feminism that pays lip service to the girl boss. But kinda pays homage to being very trad.
I mean the end of the Barbie movie is that she finally gets a vagina so, presumably, is no long frigid? Man, Ken really could have avoided a whole character arc if Barbie did that at the beginning of the movie.1 Like the plot of the movie is Ken is frustrated because he’s in a lifelong relationship (essentially a marriage before no-fault divorce) with a frigid woman. And the end of the movie is Barbie is told, Dorothy-like, she always had the power to become human. But goes through the process to find fulfillment by putting in the final piece of the puzzle and growing a vagina. Thus becoming a sexual being. Freud would love this. Lip service feminism while being trad as fuck. Like in the scene with the construction workers where she states that neither she nor Ken have genitals I thought it would be funny if the end of the movie was Barbie getting a twat. But didn’t think it was worth mentioning. But that is the end of the movie.
I mean the movie is superficially life affirming. But the plot is that Barbie is completely satisfied. She rejects and hates that suddenly she’s ripped from the Matrix. Goes on a hero’s journey to restore her reality. Learns that her bad thoughts happened because her brain has been scrambled by a girl so famously cruel and domineering that _when an adult approaches her_ another girl steps in the way to tell her how abusive this child is. Only to find out that in fact it was the mother who has been so beaten down by this hell spawn that she’s been thinking about death through the avatar of a children’s toy. And for some reason Barbie chooses this hell rather than returning to a life she loved for almost a century. And Ken does FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON. Except when he returns to his 2nd class citizenship he still remembers the brief time where both Kens and Barbies were happy together under the patriarchy. Until feminism reinstated their matriarchal prison.2
POSTSCRIPT: The Barbie victory is secured by each Barbie intentionally making her Ken jealous so he fights over her. That’s not me twisting anything. That’s the tentpole of their plan. A more trad plot point could not have been written.
POST POSTSCRIPT: It’s crazy that the BARBIE movie has the most sympathetic and hot incel in cinematic history. In internet terms they made the Chads incel Kens. And they made Michel Cera’s natural incel, Allan, a content Last Man. It’s actually pretty wild.
POST POST POSTSCRIPT: The Barbies are deprogrammed by a women so unhappy in her own life that she psychically broke Stereotypical Barbie from a different dimension.
POST POST POST POST POSTSCRIPT: When looking at the equality of Barbieland it’s notable that there is no money. Their jobs are entirely about differentiating status, as kids role playing games are. But the movie’s perspective is that the patriarchy created role playing games that were fun for all.
Either accepted or rejected rather than trapped in the role of sexless boyfriend purgatory with a woman who has no libido. It would be more obviously sexist if the idea of frigid women wasn’t so antiquated (although weirdly reclaimed as asexual) that it has been forgotten about. Like it’s so out of the discourse it’s mostly only talked about academically
To be clear I’m not mad at this. It’s absolutely a more sympathetic treatment of Ken than I was ever expecting. But that is the plot of the movie. I’m just saying it’s weird is all.