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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.
My girlfriend dragged me along, and I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting to. It's painfully ironic that, despite being touted as this great girlboss feminist movie, Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell stole every scene they're in, and are arguably the only reasons to see the movie. I mean seriously, Gosling was getting bigger laughs with an eyebrow wiggle than entire paragraphs of dialogue from Kate McKinnon. Even the secondary Kens like Simu Liu were getting bigger laughs than most of the female cast.
It's nowhere near as preachy as the discourse had led me to believe, but the few moments of preachiness fell flat on their faces and really jarred. There's a literal fourth-wall breaking joke which took me out of the experience far less than any of the preachy moments. It was impossible to believe that America Ferrara's monologue was being spoken by her in-universe character, this was the movie's "John Galt speech" moment.
"I'm a man who has no power, does that make me a woman?" The poison of modern identity politics is that it sees identity markers as deterministic, such that Greta Gerwig (an Oscar-nominated multimillionare Hollywood writer-director, routinely celebrated as one of the best directors of her generation, and one of the most influential people in the world) can airily assert that, as a woman, she has no power, presumably because homeless men yell obscenities at her sometimes. Definitely of the Hillary Clinton school of girlboss feminism, and it was the single most obnoxious part of the movie for me.
There are two or three moments in the film that tried to tug at the heartstrings. One of these I found surprisingly effective (the flashback with America Ferrara's character and her daughter), the other two not so much.
The narrative structure of the movie is all over the place. The Mattel characters, led by Will Ferrell, are introduced in a lengthy sequence, have one silly chase scene, and then have no further impact on the plot whatsoever (granted, having a group of comic relief characters in a comedy film is no vice, but I got the distinct impression they'd have more of an active role in the story). Barbie is the protagonist of the film, but she's what TV Tropes calls a pinball protagonist: it's Ken, America Ferrara's character and maybe Weird Barbie driving the plot forward, and Barbie is just along for the ride. Even in her own movie, the female protagonist has hardly any agency and just does what everyone else tells her to. Numerous ideas (the impact of Barbie's entering the real world on the real world, the clash between America Ferrara's character and her bratty teenage daughter) are introduced and then dropped just as quickly, or resolved in seconds.
For all that, I laughed a lot and didn't regret going, although I have no intention of seeing it again.
I wonder if her parents realized they were giving their daughter a pornstar name.
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