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Notes -
So, I went to see Barbie despite knowing that I would hate it, my mom really wanted to go see it and she feels weird going to the theatre alone, so I went with her. I did, in fact, hate it. It's a film full of politics and eyeroll moments, Ben Shapiro's review of it is essentially right. Yet, I did get something out of it, it showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect". And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think women (including my mom) seemed to enjoy it.
You can really see the mutual blindness men and women have with respect to each other in this domain. Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her, and the big emotional payoff at the end is supposed to be that Ken "finds himself", saying "I am Ken!". But this whole "finding yourself" business is a fundamentally feminine instinct, the male instinct is to decide who you want to be and then work hard towards that, building yourself up. The movie's female authors and director are completely blind to this difference, and essentially write every character with female motivations.
I don't remember whether it was on the old Motte or here, but I remember stumbling upon this idea of a "heroine's journey" as well. However, I think you're oversimplifying the male version. The archetypical version is more of a "man is flawed but is oblivious to that, man has a false goal, man chases that goal and fails because he's weak, man accepts that the goal is false and he's flawed and becomes stronger by rejecting the flaw, man reaches true goal".
For example, consider Trading Places. Aykroyd's character has a clear goal in sight: to get his old life back. He chases this goal relentlessly, tries to prove that Murphy's character is a criminal and a fraud, resorts to planting drugs in his office, but ultimately fails. When Murphy's character rescues him from a suicide attempt, he realizes his weakness: egoism. The Dukes exploited them both, but he only cared about himself. He abandons his goal and uses his new power of friendship to achieve his new goal: revenge. Together they humiliate and bankrupt the Dukes, and Aykroyd's character gets everything: he's become a better, stronger man who can rely on his friends and be relied upon, he has avenged the humiliation of himself and his new friend and he's once again a rich executive, which was his original goal. And while Jamie Lee Curtis has an uncannily simian face, she still has a huge rack.
I haven't seen Barbie yet, so I can't tell how different Ken's journey is from the archetypal one.
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