The far right is constantly warning that if you go woke, you’ll go broke. But when it comes to the new Barbie movie, they couldn’t be more wrong.
Barbie, which follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbie Land to explore the real world, earned a whopping $162 million in its opening weekend, Variety reported Monday. This is the biggest opening weekend of the year, and the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever.
The film had already made $22.3 million at the domestic box office from Thursday previews, the biggest preview haul of the summer. It blew the previous record of $17.5 million (made by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in May) out of the water.
It’s lightly criticizes and gleefully satires the real world’s patriarchal structure, so some people (the vast majority being right-leaning men) are saying it’s anti men and supports misandry. It definitely isn’t and doesn’t though.
The weird thing is, if they actually WATCHED the movie, it makes a strong point for mens rights.
Ken is an accessory to Barbie, he has no real life outside her, doesn’t even have his own house. As the film states, for Barbie, every day is the best day ever. For Ken? It’s only a good day when Barbie looks at him, and she often doesn’t because “every night is girls night.”
When Ken finds out the real world is not like that, he fills the void with “Patriarchy”. It’s an absolutely toxic reaction, but it’s hard to fault Ken for trying to find meaning for his existence and instead, slipping and falling down a red pill rabbit hole.
So you can see why disaffected men might feel attacked, Ken is a mirror to their own existence. Sidelined by women, powerless, and told their reaction is, ultimately, unhealthy and self-destructive, but they can’t see how else to react.
The main problem is Ken, and the real world men like Ken, aren’t presented with a socially acceptable alternative.
The end of the film ALMOST recognizes that Barbie’s Dream World and Ken’s “Kenergy” are equally toxic, but I expected a better conclusion where they realize it’s an inversion of the “real” world where women have been seen as accessories for decades, and the only real solution is true equality on both sides.
They don’t take it that far, it’s still Barbie’s world, the Kens just live in it, with token integrated positions for equality, for example, Kens get 1 position on the Barbie Supreme Court. Even in our admittedly imperfect world, the Supreme Court has 4 women on it (Kagan, Sotomayor, Barett, Brown-Jackson). You’d think they’d boost the Barbie supremes to 4 Kens, or at a minimum, 3+Allan.
You’re wrong.
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They get denied even one position on the supreme court, they get lower court appointments, which the Kens are fine with since it means they get to wear robes
You do realize that it paints barbieland in a negative light, right?
Eh, I just watched it. From my perspective I see one major problem: it tries to criticize the same problem from two opposite angles which wind up just kinda undercutting each other, while either angle alone could have been pretty powerful, the de facto conclusion of the two together is basically misandry.
Spoilers:
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On the one hand, it presents a gender swapped matriarchy in Barbieland, where Barbies run the world and Kens are basically accessories. If the movie had stayed in Barbieland and focused on Ken’s self-actualization in a female-centric society, that could’ve been a poignant illustration of the opposite struggle in the real world, striking MRAs simultaneously with understanding and cognitive dissonance.
On the other, Ken brings patriarchy into Barbieland and the Barbies 1) are immediately brainwashed? (I don’t think the small pox analogy is sufficient to justify the fact that these doctors and supreme court justices just, decided to be brainwashed?) 2) decide these I guess inherently inferior Ken’s need to be overcome by manipulation? I’m sure this could’ve been turned into something, not as poignant or impressive as the gender-swap concept, but something for sure.
But the two taken together give a really mixed message. Gender subjugation is bad, but it’s okay to do it to men because they’re dumb and bad? Except the men here are metaphors for women in the real world, so is it right to subjugate women in the real world because they’d only just fuck everything up? Is the Kendom an allegory for patriarchy, or a gender-swapped allegory for feminism? Does that mean feminism is bad? We don’t ever get to see Ken actualize, we just see Barbie cut him off and he kinda vapidly goes away? And they conclude acknowledging that the Barbies are subjugating the Kens, so it’s not even like they’re saying women are more enlightened and egalitarian, just that men suck and should be subservient. Society doesn’t really improve, they just squashed the Keninist movement.
It seemed like they were trying to say “patriarchy bad”, but tried to do it by satiration through matriarchy, and also just playing it straight at the same time, which just came out as “men bad”. If they chose a lane, it could’ve stuck. But I just left kinda confused about what they were trying to say, other than a general vibe of “men bad”.
Well at the very end of the movie, Barbie chose to leave the system in it’s entirety. The movie has a revolutionary communist message, it’s saying true empowerment is impossible within the bounds of the system. It’s mocking the “more👏female👏executives” sentiment, just doing so in a way subtle enough the Hollywood financiers didn’t realize it.