Hot Take about Greta Gerwig's Barbie but for being advertised as a movie about "girlhood" and nostalgia and like, and how that informs what it means to be a woman, it really...wasn't?
My biggest petpeeve from the movie wasn't the "liberal propoganda" everyone said it was — my biggest problem was that the entire message was self-contradictory. Anytime one thing was asserted, something else would happen to undermine that claim. (See, the fact that we spend the entire movie talking about how the human world is horrible and men are scum, only to have Barbie decide she wants to be human at the end? Or the fact that the movie is about equality, only to decide that men in Barbieland can only ever have the level of rights women in the real world have, which is perpetuating the exact kind of discrimination the movie set out to decry).
There were multiple beautiful scenes of Barbie watching humans be human and those scenes almost made me cry, but they ultimately didn't actually have anything to do with the theme of the movie and could have been removed. They were just there to generate emotions that were left totally unexplored. Which leads me to what I wish the Barbie movie had been:
I wish it had followed the outline of a lot of Christmas movies, like the Santa Claus movies. I wish it followed a completely cynical grown woman who forgot what it was like to be a child, and with that, forgot virtue. I wish it showed us a woman who had bought into the lie that femininity is inherently bad, and that she should be "like a man" in order to climb in the business world. She doesn't let her kids have dolls, or tutus. And then she meets Barbie and suddenly she starts to remember. She remembers what it is like to see beauty everywhere you go. To trust that there are good people in this world. That letting yourself be sensitive is what makes you fully alive.
She sees Barbie—fashionista, astronaut, president, flight attendant, doctor — and remembers that she doesn't have to be a man. She can be a mother and a buisnesswoman. She can love her babies and climb in the buisnessworld. She can follow her dreams.
She sees the unique call of woman, the reason the world needs us — for our receptivity, our sensitivity, our interpersonal relationships, our nurturing, our creativity. Our ability to find beauty in the darkest of places and strengthen it. She realizes her business needs her, not as the brash bossbabe she has been taught to be, but as the compassionate, open-minded child she was. As the person who can build bridges, not be a cut throat buisness woman.
I wish it had been about the virtues of girlhood. And how remembering what it was like to be a child makes you a better woman today.