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.
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:
spoiler
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.