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Please link me any good analyses of the Barbie movie you've read, be it on Twitter, Substack, or wherever. CW stuff is especially desired.
Just my two cents, because the movie is weird in a way that I'm not quite sure the directors intended. Disclaimer: I enjoyed the film but I think everyone is misreading it, mostly because of the charisma of the two lead actors and their performances.
The Space Odyssey cold open of the children smashing their baby dolls in response to the appearance of Barbie should have clued people off, really. Barbie and Ken are not characters, despite the movie trying to make a gimmick of her ending up in the real world and fish-out-of-water comedy sequences. They don't make sense as characters, and the fact that they have any internal coherence at all is a necessary function for the main narrative thrust of the movie.
The tension in the movie is caused by the fact that Barbie and Ken are amalgams of ideas. Ken is the idea of men as accessories to women. The dramatic tension comes from how that idea is trying to reconcile itself with the idea that men could be fine on their own. This is why people reacted to his arc: they read it as a metaphor for women's liberation, because it's clearly meant to be played this way (even if the bro-patriarchy is an idea that was given to him from outside sources).
The cold open is Mattel saying to the little girls, "you didn't know what you wanted until we told it to you. Before us, toys told you that you could be mothers. After Barbie, toys told you that you could be anything." There's an arrogance to it, in claiming that Barbie is defining an aspirational idea of women. The fact that the movie seems incredibly defensive about this is not an accident - the feminists waged war against the pink toy aisle for years, with Barbie being the main culprit, and a quick Google will dredge up articles from as late as 2013 with mothers asking if it was actively harmful to be buying their girls Barbie dolls.
And then comes The Monologue - an impassioned delivery by America Ferrera playing the mom, who shows the movie's hand. It's a tour de force of bitching, a finely aged whine that complains about the incredibly contradictory and difficult values of what it means to be a woman today. It doesn't make any sense unless you understand that Barbie is supposed to be representative of women. This is why Barbie's neurosis comes from anyway; as an plastic avatar of female identity sold by Mattel(tm), she doesn't know who or what she is anymore because the contradictory demands of modern women and what they're supposed to be are messed up. This breaks the Barbies out of their brainwashing, something I didn't get until I realized it's because they've accepted the contradiction: it's okay if women don't know what they're supposed to be.
(Of course, the monologue truly shoots itself in the foot with the line "I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us." The possibility of, just, well, learning to deal with not being liked doesn't seem to occur. Except for a toy, being liked is everything. A little known fact: Barbie started as 'Lillie', a doll of a sex symbol/gold digger from a German comic.)
One other interesting anecdote: the musical theme of Kendom is "Push" by Matchbox Twenty, a song accused by feminists of popularizing misogynist lyrics. To the point where the songwriter had to explain that it had actually been written about an emotionally abusive girlfriend.
Another: the movie's veneration of Ruth Handler, an opportunist, perennial grifter, liar who avoided personal responsibility at every turn and was indicted on conspiracy charges.
Those articles were from a time when feminists thought women cared about being pretty because they were brainwashed into it. The new Barbie movie comes from a new strain of feminism where caring about fashion and makeup are okay. I don't understand when, how, or why the change happened, but yay?
Your post makes me think the movie could've been truly amazing if the script was revised to say that women are essentially equal in status to men now, but that both men and women feel listless. The movie as it exists implies that women are second class citizens, and the plight of the Kens (so far as I can tell) is meant to be read as "what if men experienced the same existential crisis women so? Wouldn't that be crazy?" But despite the film's bias, there is still a plausible centrist egalitarian reading there. I wonder if there was internal conflict behind the scenes over whether it's okay to portray the complicated nature of modern manhood and womanhood without explicitly saying that women have it worse.
I saw a copypasta on /tv/ that edited America Ferrera's monologue to be about men, and I think if it was toned down to be less incendiary, it would've been great if Ken delivered it.
"You have to be masculine, but not overly masculine that it's toxic. And you can never say you want to be manly. You have to say that you embrace your feminine side which is just as powerful... but you still have to be manly. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's pitiful. You have to be a boss, but you must never tell a woman what to do. You have to make the decisions but you also have to listen to what women want, which they don't know, before you make a decision that will always be wrong. You're supposed to make time for your wife and kids or you're a cold and distant father, but not so much time that it hurts your career, or you're a failure of a provider. You have to be unselfish and think of others, but you can't be too selfless or people will see you as weak. You have to tolerate women's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of being whiny and told to man up. You have to be chivalrous but not so much that it's chauvinistic. You have to be kind to women but not so kind that you're creepy or boring. You're supposed to be strong and confident for women, but not so strong and confident that they feel oppressed or that you make other men angry at you. You have to be romantic and spontaneous but not naive and cringeworthy. You have to take the initiative and make a move without being told to, unless of course your attention is unwanted. Always be grateful for your privilege and feel passively aware that being a man is easier than being a woman. Remember that this is the 21st century and it is time to think of women as equals but also remember that women are oppressed and dis-empowered, so do not think of them as equals. You have to never be too weak or too strong, never be too kind or too cruel, never be afraid or cocky, never be too quiet or too loud. And you must never, ever complain. Because you are a man, everything is easy for you and everything that goes wrong is your fault."
A movie like this couldn't exist today. It'd be pilloried for being stuck 20 years in the past. But it'd be great.
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