my big issue with the film is that i was fully willing to go along with a silly "he's just ken" wish fulfillment in which the man character is a passive supportive sidekick for the woman main character who drives the plot. i was ready for that! i was not expecting this movie to be super duper feminist!
but they CHOSE to make the kens explicitly oppressed, and CHOSE to make that a central factor in the plot, and then tried to make the kens an allegory for cis men under patriarchy & toxic masculinity which makes no sense in the story THEY wrote. Ken's major problem was never patriarchy! it was the barbiarchy! its fucking absurd to try to use ken as a lesson on how men are hurt by patriarchy when the movie itself set up that Ken's problems started with Barbieland's social structure. Barbie is never expected to take any responsibility for anything that happened! they wanted both to have the ken/barbie dynamic be used for an explicitly feminist allegory about patriarchy but ALSO to have their silly wish fulfillment barbiarchy that is never challenged, which makes that entire part of the plot messy as hell. we are essentially expected to forget everything about how Barbieland functions and all the differences between Barbieland and the real world, in order for the Barbies and Kens to just be exactly the same as real life cis women and men. which made me as a viewer feel annoyed because they just completely threw out the worldbuilding for this universe in order to play out a VERY basic explanation of feminism.
the thing is, the Kens are actually quite similar to the cis women the movie was marketed towards (seeking wish fulfillment and catharsis by reversing the dynamics they are oppressed under, rather than taking a stance against oppression itself). the real life patriarchy is to the Kens what Barbieland is to the cis women in the audience; both are power fantasies, heavy on the fantasy. the Kens think patriarchy is mostly about horses and Barbieland is mostly about pink and dancing and girls nights. once you start to press deeper on either fantasy, it becomes clear how unsustainable these fantasies are for actually challenging oppression; they do not encourage the people fantasizing to develop a political consciousness, to think in terms of systems, to take a stance against oppression itself. but the movie decided to try to make this fantasy deep and feminist, which made it messy because actually trying to engage with the world they've built makes it clear how little they actually thought about what they were saying.
the only real feminist value present is "women shouldn't be treated badly" but not because people shouldn't be treated badly, and not because oppressed groups need to be protected, but just because there is something innate about women that makes it bad when they are treated badly. its shallow feminism not just in the sense that its not going deep into theory, but in that the movie's feminism (at least in these parts) feels primarily about emotionally appealing to white cis women and getting them to spend money and write thinkpieces on how good the movie (and by association, Mattel) is.
i know some people were genuinely affected by the big speech given at the end about how women are expected to be so many things at once. and like. if you needed the Barbie movie to verbalize that to you, i'm glad you had that. but 1) if we are in a place in society where people are getting their baby's first feminism from a movie whose feminism is pretty shallow and messy and corporate, that shouldn't lead us to celebrate the movie, it should be a kick in the pants, and 2) this movie does very little to actually encourage the viewer to develop a deeper understanding of feminism, to see the expectations put on women in the context of patriarchy as a system of power, anything. because this part of the film's feminism is so messy and mostly about selling the movie to white cis women, it doesn't really have a coherent message about patriarchy other than that its bad and women have it rough and that's not good. okay! that's not even really a feminist point, its almost pre-feminist; that women have it rough is the very starting point of developing a feminist political consciousness, it shouldn't be the big takeaway. and this came out in 2024, not 1946, so i get kind of annoyed when people act like a film making a more coherent and slightly deeper feminist point couldn't have possibly been made.
& again its a fucking shame because there IS genuinely moving story in the Barbie movie about how being human is very much defined by suffering but also by beauty, and the choice to embrace humanity and the suffering and inevitable death, because being human and being alive is worth it, and to send that message (which is broadly applicable to all people) through the lens of choosing to be a woman under patriarchy, because there is still beauty in that life. and again. no one fucking talks about it. the part of this movie that actually has some feminist meat on its bones gets ignored, while everyone (whether pro- or anti-feminist) fixated on the very thin, shallow parts of the movie's attempts at feminism. i just feel like its an example of how cultural / pop feminism gets propped up and promoted and discussed and centered What Feminism Is, when that form of feminism doesn't actually encourage critical political thinking about patriarchy and only encourages gender essentialism female nationalism and endless discourse that allows media companies to profit.
and to go back to the beginning. i didn't even go into this movie being like "oh this big budget film about Barbie made by fucking Mattel better have a super profound feminist message about the need for an anti-patriarchal socialist uprising!" i was fully prepared to enjoy the silly pink wish fulfillment movie. they chose to have this movie try to Do A Feminism and everyone and their mother couldn't stop praising this movie for that (or hating on this movie for that!), and no one seemed HALF as interested in the actually deep, moving parts of this movie as the shallow, messy parts, and it just drove me insane.
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