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Fangz posted:Well, in the end the protagonist chooses to leave Barbie land and live in the "real" world, doesn't she? Real world patriarchy (as opposed to the cartoonish version) can't be *that* bad if she chooses that. The movie doesn't provide a solution to sexism and gender roles. I don't honestly see how it could. It says "This sucks", demonstrates how it sucks for everybody, and leaves that there to simmer. Fashion point: Did anybody else note that Weird Barbie's hair got less chopped off and her marker face got less extreme? In the very last scene she's got a great undercut and in-scale color lines on her face.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:09
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Baronash posted:The Kens haven’t been kept stupid by the Barbies. Everything in Barbieland exists in a stasis created by Mattel. In the same way that Doctor Barbie has always been a doctor, and Supreme Court Justice Barbie has always been a Supreme Court Justice, the Kens just exist as they have been designed. The Barbies aren’t the ruling class, the Mattel board of directors is. Exactly. The Barbies were programmed to be independent girl-power dolls who value female friendships more than guys. They and the Kens are all just working with how they were designed. I guess it's a tribute to Ryan Gosling's performance that so much of the discussion around an explicitly feminist blockbuster keeps circling back to "But What About the Kens?"
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Jul 24, 2023 18:14
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deety posted:Exactly. The Barbies were programmed to be independent girl-power dolls who value female friendships more than guys. They and the Kens are all just working with how they were designed. I mean every time women do anything it circles back to "but what about the men?"
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Jul 24, 2023 18:16
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Rarity posted:I mean every time women do anything it circles back to "but what about the men?"
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Jul 24, 2023 18:23
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weekly font posted:I wish they weren’t cowards and made Ken the gay friend we all know he always was. Honestly the movie would even work better if a new corporate mandated poochie-rear end boyfriend doll to reinforce cis hetnorms was the villain ncuti gatwa ken is definitely just emma mackey barbie's gay friend also I did like this movie but I feel after sleeping on it it is dangerously close to being Ken the Movie instead of Barbie the Movie
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Jul 24, 2023 18:57
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Badger of Basra posted:ncuti gatwa ken is definitely just emma mackey barbie's gay friend
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Jul 24, 2023 19:01
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yes so much of the good Ken stuff is in the second half which is what made me feel that way, which I guess you could say is actually on purpose in a meta way because that's also when he's taken over Barbieland I just wanted a (second) dance number with all the Barbies
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Jul 24, 2023 19:05
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Badger of Basra posted:yes so much of the good Ken stuff is in the second half which is what made me feel that way, which I guess you could say is actually on purpose in a meta way because that's also when he's taken over Barbieland  I saw that  edit.
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Jul 24, 2023 20:01
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A quirk of the movie’s logic is that it says there’s actually nothing wrong with Kendom and Ken’s behaviour, because it’s just another silly power fantasy that we enjoy with irony. All that’s ultimately at stake is that the fantasies are, inexplicably, mutually exclusive: Mattel will stop making Barbie toys because Kendom is popular, saddening adult fans of Barbie. Of course, in actual reality, Mattel would simply release Kendom as a parallel joke product line for the exact same target market as this feature film.
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Jul 24, 2023 20:21
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is that not a literal joke in the movie whose punchline is the mattel ceo providing the intentionally absurd line that, "i didn't get in this business for the money [that would come from a kendom product line], but to inspire little girls."
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Jul 24, 2023 20:31
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Baronash posted:The Kens haven’t been kept stupid by the Barbies. Everything in Barbieland exists in a stasis created by Mattel. In the same way that Doctor Barbie has always been a doctor, and Supreme Court Justice Barbie has always been a Supreme Court Justice, the Kens just exist as they have been designed. The Barbies aren’t the ruling class, the Mattel board of directors is. No, it's a little more complicated than that. Barbies and Kens are simultaneously reflections of how they are played with (this is the inciting incident remember!), cultural zeitgeist (why else would stereotypical Barbie exist), and Mattel's product decisions. But also what happens in Barbieland alters what toys get made (the Ken dojo starts being mass produced and sold without any active effort by Mattel, they're surprised it's happening!).
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Jul 24, 2023 23:47
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Also something that I noticed was that Gay Ken sided with the Barbies. He's there in the meeting with them wearing a Barbie necklace.
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Jul 25, 2023 00:37
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Thats not gay ken. Its Allen. He's just Allen.
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Jul 25, 2023 01:41
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Nah, Gay Ken (Earring Magic) was def there with the other defects and recalls. So was Sugar Daddy Ken. Who is Sugar's daddy.
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Jul 25, 2023 01:49
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I can't remember my Barbie life but was Earring Magic Ken actually marketed as gay?
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Jul 25, 2023 01:52
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Android Apocalypse posted:I can't remember my Barbie life but was Earring Magic Ken actually marketed as gay? It was an accident. They did Earring Magic Barbie and that was successful and Ken was failing, so they decided to try Earring Magic Ken. When they went out to research fashion trends at that time, they accidentally went to gay clubs and researched gay fashions.
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Jul 25, 2023 01:53
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Cojawfee posted:It was an accident. They did Earring Magic Barbie and that was successful and Ken was failing, so they decided to try Earring Magic Ken. When they went out to research fashion trends at that time, they accidentally went to gay clubs and researched gay fashions. lmao
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Jul 25, 2023 01:54
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Allen seemed to be the "Omega Wolf" of Barbieland's hierarchy system. Barbies run that world, Ken's are an extension of that, and Allen is an extension of Ken. So it makes absolute sense for him to participate in the counter insurgency operation. Where did all the Kens actually live? They never mention it. Do they just go into some catatonic fugue on the beach when all the other barbies go to sleep? Do they just lurk in the sewers or something? I feel like there was also some commentary about men with Ken Prime. Unlike Stereotypical Barbie he's "Beach" Ken, an utterly useless specialization rendering him unable to either lifeguard or surf. In the real world he discovers the hard way that for all the male privilege he's got it's simply not enough. I feel like his whole revolt was this Andrew Tate style empty posturing that had very little substance behind it. It was neat to see all the niche dolls. I honestly found puberty skipper to be the most off putting. The Camera Barbie looked like a neat toy honestly but I guess it's a sisyphean hell to have a video screen on your back that you can never actually see. Who was the Asian Ken supposed to be and why was Beach Ken so insecure around him?
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Jul 25, 2023 02:14
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Panfilo posted:
he was ken
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Jul 25, 2023 02:18
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Ken doesn't bring patriarchy to Barbieland. Barbieland is a fantasy realm that was already entirely controlled and sustained by Mattel and Warner Bros Discovery (whose HQ is conspicuously visible from the Mattel boardroom's window). This means that it was always an outgrowth of the patriarchy in "the real world". Hm. Sounds like they played it safe and it has less of a message than Battleship (2012) did.
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Jul 25, 2023 02:26
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The funny thing about Video Barbie is that the FBI was concerned about people spying on children, which is why the product was withdrawn.
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Jul 25, 2023 03:00
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A mostly very fun film but kind of incoherent to me as a women's studies lady. I don't usually engage with the whole "is this thing feminist enough" dialogue because it's not like that stuff exists on a gauge from red to green, but the Barbie movie explicitly invites it so I guess we can engage with it on its terms. The last third is basically nonsense beginning from America Ferrera's complete non sequitur of a lecture and then it just collapses from there. Sure, the Ken-led patriarchy is all style and no substance - just like the patriarchy of Will Ferrell's boardroom - but the thing about patriarchy is that it's never needed substance to be successful. The reinstatement of the Barbies shows that the power of the Barbies and Kens are equally empty - if I'm being generous this just says culture is not what liberates - which is why it presents Barbie picking "being human" as the real choice that matters. But that's insipid considering, you know, humans do all the awful stuff and have in the very text of the film itself largely proven incapable of transcending, frankly, anything, never mind gender. It's so underwritten it can't even be called humanist messaging. Very weird to me. Also I think the two "film bro" jokes actually underscore this isn't just a film for millennials - it's actually a movie for terminally online people, because if you pull a rando off the street they will not really have paid a lot of attention to Zack Snyder discourse. Basically: weird bourgeois sensibilities at play, weird old prescriptive feminism rhetoric from America's character, needless ambiguity about whether the daughter's perspective early in the movie is valid. The moment when Barbie bemoans not being pretty enough isn't lampshaded sufficiently - it doesn't make any goddamn sense in the context of everything that happens prior. There's just so much gibberish. I wasn't expecting anything revolutionary from a Barbie movie but I feel like Greta Gerwig demonstrates a kind of unusual amateurism here. The movie works best when it's a series of vignettes and capers; the sight gags are great; the cutaways are fun. Margot Robbie and Gosling are really great and everyone's demonstrating good comedic chops. But when it tries to become a whole it gets real "today's theme is ... themes".
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Jul 25, 2023 03:01
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Doc Fission posted:A mostly very fun film but kind of incoherent to me as a women's studies lady. I don't usually engage with the whole "is this thing feminist enough" dialogue because it's not like that stuff exists on a gauge from red to green, but the Barbie movie explicitly invites it so I guess we can engage with it on its terms. A good post. I found myself in the same predicament RE: what is this movie about? until I stopped thinking "Greta Gerwig has something to say about X" and started thinking "Greta Gerwig made a fun 90s comedy and got to paint an entire town pink to do it"
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Jul 25, 2023 03:17
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For sure, but in that case I think she could've stuck with keeping it a comedy instead of trying to do Big Themes and come off looking like a more deft filmmaker. Like again, the comedy is a knockout, which just makes the parts that aren't comedic and desire to be taken seriously a frustrating experience
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Jul 25, 2023 03:35
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You make a valid point. Barbie is glittery chiffon sewed together with lead weights. I am just so grateful to see the lead weights brought up AT ALL, and of course for the glittery chiffon, that I'm not paying enough attention to the Frankensteining.
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Jul 25, 2023 03:51
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Doc Fission posted:For sure, but in that case I think she could've stuck with keeping it a comedy instead of trying to do Big Themes and come off looking like a more deft filmmaker. Like again, the comedy is a knockout, which just makes the parts that aren't comedic and desire to be taken seriously a frustrating experience I see where you're coming from, but I appreciated that the film didn't shy away from those things, because the subject matter practically demands it. quote:Basically: weird bourgeois sensibilities at play, weird old prescriptive feminism rhetoric from America's character, needless ambiguity about whether the daughter's perspective early in the movie is valid. The moment when Barbie bemoans not being pretty enough isn't lampshaded sufficiently - it doesn't make any goddamn sense in the context of everything that happens prior. There's just so much gibberish. I wasn't expecting anything revolutionary from a Barbie movie but I feel like Greta Gerwig demonstrates a kind of unusual amateurism here. The movie works best when it's a series of vignettes and capers; the sight gags are great; the cutaways are fun. Margot Robbie and Gosling are really great and everyone's demonstrating good comedic chops. But when it tries to become a whole it gets real "today's theme is ... themes". Like, not wrong. But I don't think the amount of perspectives shown was to it's detriment. To me, the daughters perspective early on didn't need to be validated, per se, and presenting it was a nice nod that, yeah, that opinion also exists. I can't fault the movie for not trying to definitively answer the great moral question of "is Barbie good". Also helps that the core themes do hit pretty well - i.e. the main characters arcs being self denial and self acceptance in the literal sense. Some of the more preachy speeches aren't amazing, but everything else is so it's easy to overlook.
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Jul 25, 2023 04:16
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I thought the movie was hilarious but I also thought that someone read the wikipedia articles for feminism and patriarchy then went with that.
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Jul 25, 2023 04:21
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given it is a big budget blockbuster movie aimed at a general audience (and a relatively young general audience at that), i think it’s fine for the movie to be fairly simple and straight-forward in how it approaches its subject matter
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Jul 25, 2023 04:29
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CatstropheWaitress posted:I see where you're coming from, but I appreciated that the film didn't shy away from those things, because the subject matter practically demands it. It raises the question of "is Barbie good" seriously, so it doesn't feel wrong to take its explorations of the concept at face value. But to explain my thinking, I also think a movie is not really a medium where you can toy in superfluousness. A 22-episode season of a multi-season television show where you can have a bottle episode about something mundane that reveals things about characters you get to know, sure. But not a movie, which goes through many layers of human beings corporate-and-otherwise to fit a definitive runtime. Every minute counts. To that end, anything that doesn't seem extremely deliberate seems like a skill issue. To me, the preachy speeches didn't always serve a greater whole and were pretty cringe, and because I'm watching this movie in a definitive slice of time it does not feel like a good use of that time. But I'll concede I'm not very forgiving about this stuff personally. Smarter people can certainly think differently. To that end, I actually don't think the core themes hit well at all. What are the themes? "Self-acceptance" - you could say Barbie failing to accept herself is the climax of the movie. She rejects the vacuousness of Barbieland and embraces being "other" instead. Which is attractive on its face, but that "other" is actually normativity as you and I experience it every day, in all its racist and sexist and so on and so forth manifestations, so actually maybe not so great after all. Barbie normativity is a thing of no consequence: you fix the culture and everything is fine. Actual normativity is violent. Barbie is in LA, a place that sucks. There is no good choice. What does this choice demonstrate, and who is it for? As for self-denial, I can't speak to it well outside of America accepting that being a woman is complex. But America's character is really, really underwritten. What are her dreams? She draws some unusual-looking Barbies; she proposes them to the board in the end. An ordinary Barbie. But the Barbies she proposed, and the Barbie in the depressed Barbie vignette, are not that "ordinary Barbie". They're actually much darker. And these propositions don't land her a promotion; we don't see her on that board - you can feel Gerwig hesitating to suggest "leaning in" is the way. But the alternative is that she gets nothing new. One's explorations of the soul also fail to be revolutionary. Which as a message is accurate, actually, but isn't that great either. Which brings me back to: What does this movie want to do? And the thing is, the movie very much wants to do something. To that end - QuoProQuid posted:given it is a big budget blockbuster movie aimed at a general audience (and a relatively young general audience at that), i think it’s fine for the movie to be fairly simple and straight-forward in how it approaches its subject matter It isn't 
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Jul 25, 2023 05:03
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I mean I don’t think the movie wants us think Barbie chooses to be human because it’s “better” than Barbieland. It goes to very great lengths to show and tell us that being human can be terrible. She chooses it because she wants to be a real person and not an idea. I think she literally says that. Her choice is that being a human seems bad, but it is real in a way that her previous existence isn’t (and importantly, she is now aware of that) so she’s going to pick that. She feels like she doesn’t belong in Barbieland anymore because she has progressed beyond what the Barbies there are. As for who the choice is “for” I don’t know. People afraid to grow up? People who think they don’t fit in?
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Jul 25, 2023 05:20
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As an overt advertisement for a Barbie toys, the film is specifically marketing Barbie dolls to different age demographics along the narrative’s progression. Barbie is first sold as a sincere power fantasy for young children, then as an ironic power fantasy for teens (“dark and weird”). Finally, there’s the tricky part: a proposed return to sincerity with a “I Am Barbie” messaging for adults, where Barbie the character is understood as a person and has therefore, all along, been conflicted and suffering.
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Jul 25, 2023 06:19
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Doc Fission posted:To that end, I actually don't think the core themes hit well at all. What are the themes? "Self-acceptance" - you could say Barbie failing to accept herself is the climax of the movie. She rejects the vacuousness of Barbieland and embraces being "other" instead. Which is attractive on its face, but that "other" is actually normativity as you and I experience it every day, in all its racist and sexist and so on and so forth manifestations, so actually maybe not so great after all. Barbie normativity is a thing of no consequence: you fix the culture and everything is fine. Actual normativity is violent. Barbie is in LA, a place that sucks. There is no good choice. What does this choice demonstrate, and who is it for? At the risk of getting completely moronic and nerdy about the toy brand movie (I do think Greta Gerwig deserves to be taken seriously though!), Barbie's talk with her creator at the end about wanting to become an author of her identity rather than a passive slate for society's ideas, reminded me of Foucault's work on power/sexuality/the subject. I don't think this is much of a stretch considering how much Ken's arc points towards gender performativity and similar ideas. He wrote: "present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we?... the main objective of these struggles is to attack... a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word "subject": subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge." The second definition supplied is obviously most relevant here. His conclusion is that "the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is... to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us..." Sorry for passing my Grad School PTSD on to readers but the ending reminded me of that passage like a lightning bolt. Barbie, as a doll, is an object onto which ideas are projected and out of which meaning is made. The core of Barbie's adventure to the real world is essentially her developing subjectivity: she begins to have strange feelings of guilt, impending death, and most crucially of being conscious of herself and how others perceive her. Foucault, the idealist that he was, believed that one had to develop a knowledge of how their subjectivity had been externally constituted by the forces around them in society to have any hope of struggling against those power structures. Without that, they'd just be thrashing around alternating between ignorant bliss and co-opted dissonance. The end of the movie shows us Barbie refusing the [glamorous!] life that has been imposed on her in favor of the struggle of being human. She's seen the rough state of the world, and the ugly way that real world power relations get her sneered at and catcalled, and she refuses to turn away in favor of ignorant bliss, because she knows that struggling to become an author of your own identity is better than remaining as an ignorant, blissful subject/object. I do get why the mansplaining jokes and America Ferrara monologue remind people of feminism 101 from like mid 2010s social media but I also think the film works on different layers and that that was Gerwig's entire goal with the, uh, nature of the source material QUEER FRASIER fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Jul 25, 2023 |
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Jul 25, 2023 06:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:As an overt advertisement for a Barbie toys, the film is specifically marketing Barbie dolls to different age demographics along the narrative’s progression. Call Alan the n word N'Sync
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Jul 25, 2023 06:58
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i watched the film on the off chance it had ryan gosling in a ken dance number so i got what i wanted out of it, but the whole general thrust of the film feels so weird knowing that mattel signed off on it like i can generally cognitive dissonance away thoughts of "can you have meaningful critiques of capitalism and power structures through art that are very much from that system", but during every one of the more pointed bits i couldn't help but think of someone from mattel nodding along as they read it on a completely separate note, watching saving private ryan that night before made the kens beach fight hit in kind of a different way
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Jul 25, 2023 08:37
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Badger of Basra posted:I mean I don’t think the movie wants us think Barbie chooses to be human because it’s “better” than Barbieland. It goes to very great lengths to show and tell us that being human can be terrible. It's a branding exercise. In the context of Barbie's "Be Anything" branding, it's shifting that message from now gauche mid-2010s girlboss trappings to an embrace of complexity and flaws. The brand's message is still "be anything", but it has an implicit "be whatever". But I don't think the film or the brand are being particularly progressive with this - I think there's an undercurrent of nihlism to this. I agree that the humans are underwritten in this, but the mother has been bruised by the failure of the "women can have it all" messaging and the daughter has realised that it's bunk and rejected the messaging thats harmed her mother. It's "you're valid" with the implied admission that, actually, very few people will be vets or astronauts or beach.
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Jul 25, 2023 10:15
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Doc Fission posted:A mostly very fun film but kind of incoherent to me as a women's studies lady. I don't usually engage with the whole "is this thing feminist enough" dialogue because it's not like that stuff exists on a gauge from red to green, but the Barbie movie explicitly invites it so I guess we can engage with it on its terms. Great post and I agree with a lot of it. I think it feels terminally online or at least references these characters being so because 1) purposefully - that’s where that radicalization happens 2) and where the cringier moments come from - its where the majority of “political” and “feminist” discourse on the subject takes place especially for upper middle class white women who aren’t confronted with it in reality. I laughed but those moments had a real pokemon go to the polls vibe to them
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Jul 25, 2023 13:24
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I told my daughter I thought the Mojo Dojo Casa House sounded like a pretty cool playset and she rolled her eyes and said, "Yeah, if you're a BOY" (ouch!).
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Jul 25, 2023 13:25
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Had fun watching the movie but my edible kicked in just before they went to the real world and the aesthetic/tonal shift hit me like a truck. The ending granted some emotional catharsis but was unsatisfying for me. I kept feeling like Allan was supposed to have a larger part to play because he was the biggest outsider as a Not Ken that helps the Barbies. Allan was the only real one in this movie imo. Police will never help you, only trust your fists, Allan.
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Jul 25, 2023 14:30
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Allan is the only person in Barbieland that actually can and will inflict physical violence, yet he is often ignored by the rest of their society. Allan is the school shooter of Barbieland.
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Jul 25, 2023 14:50
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this is allan slander barbie threw the first punch
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Jul 25, 2023 14:55
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