(long post w/ spoilers ahead)
I gotta share my piece here bc wtf are these guys even serious???
I think barbie is literally the most balanced and spot-on way i've seen any filmmaker approach the gender issue because:
flipping the roles around (having the barbies initially be clannish towards the kens and treating them as second-class citizens of barbieland) was the best way to teach empathy to the men who still don't get feminism.
i literally have friends who are more right-leaning than me politically, who i almost feared to have some misogynistic tendencies here n there, who got dragged by their friends or gfs to watch the movie and came back saying they learned a lot and absolutely loved the film
i think it's balanced af bc neither the barbies nor the kens were 100% good or bad—but both were valid for acting the way they did. both got hurt trying to exclude the other only to realize at the end that they both are of equal value to each other
the kens don't fully get as equal as the barbies in barbieland...yet (i.e. the kens asking for a spot in the congress but the barbies bein like hMMM nah), just like with women irl, but there's no denying that feminism has brought so much progress already esp over the past decades. just like how the kens revolting made barbies actually consider valuing kens more
if these men disliked the film bc of its "wokeness" (ahem ben/sha/pi/ro), the film literally calls out not just far-right politics, but also the far-left. greta is calling out BOTH extremes. remember when barbie just met sasha and was so ready to make things right with her but then sasha was just outright judging barbie for ideals that she didnt want to portray but the patriarchy just made her a symbol of?? remember when sasha barely gave barbie a chance to explain herself and was so mean that barbie just ended up storming off in tears?
they literally just met and she labeled her as a fascist
the things sasha said may have been valid, but really, cutting barbie off that harshly with no chance for discourse didnt contribute to achieving closure in barbieland or the real world
and speaking of closure, there was barely any of that for weird barbie and allan. made me think: what if they were symbolizing how despite the progress for women in the gender discourse, we still got a long way to go for the lgbt+ community?
(ik anybody in the film couldve been lgbt but weird barbie and allan didnt exactly conform to the molds of what barbies and kens were like, which made me think they were symbols for the community)
i might come up with more points to make here, or not, but
TLDR: barbie's audience grew up, but somehow greta made the film so insightful such that it teaches all of us how to be good people, just like the older barbie movies did when we were little <3
