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Barbie - Queer enough to enrage right-wing culture warriors, Cishet enough to disappoint trans community
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Aug 13, 2023 02:15
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Breetai posted:Not getting that Starship Troopers is satirical is the product of either being young enough that you haven't developed the capacity to examine the media you consume at all, or of being very stupid. I personally like how almost everyone in mobile infantry are people with aspirations of a better life: the woman who wants to be a politician (leavesafter the farm kid gets his head blown off in training), the man who got into Harvard but was too poor to pay for it (first Klendathu drop victim), the woman who wants to be a mother (panics when Harvard dies, runs, falls in a hole and gets dragged off by bugs), and the man who wants to be a journalist (eaten after the reporter is eaten by a bug---whose death is filmed by the camera man). They're all braving the meat grinder, and they end up worse off (dejected or dead).
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Aug 13, 2023 02:27
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Bogus Adventure posted:I personally like how almost everyone in mobile infantry are people with aspirations of a better life: the woman who wants to be a politician (leavesafter the farm kid gets his head blown off in training), the man who got into Harvard but was too poor to pay for it (first Klendathu drop victim), the woman who wants to be a mother (panics when Harvard dies, runs, falls in a hole and gets dragged off by bugs), and the man who wants to be a journalist (eaten after the reporter is eaten by a bug---whose death is filmed by the camera man). They're all braving the meat grinder, and they end up worse off (dejected or dead). That's exactly the point, I'm pretty sure.
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Aug 13, 2023 02:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:That's exactly the point, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it's why I posted it as a follow-up. Anyone who looks at that film and concludes it's a full-throated endorsement of military worship and fascism is dumb as hell.
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Aug 13, 2023 02:31
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Vegetable posted:I do feel the gynecologist joke at the end misses the mark. It’s a joke about how Barbie dolls don’t have genitals, yes. But in what’s already a pretty cis movie the throwaway line reeks of gender essentialism. Absurd take imo. Like, it's just a funny joke about Barbies not having genitals and making you think it's gonna be a job interview. I'm generally against the "it's just a doll movie" defense, the movie is pretty straightforward about its themes and deserves to be analyzed and criticized for what it is. But that line is, as a matter of fact, just a doll joke. Change the kind of doctor it is and the joke falls flat. Are we really going to argue that Stereotypical Barbie isn't definitionally a cis woman? It's a movie with a trans Barbie who's given plenty of screentime and several good jokes, should the movie about the universal Girl Toy have been trans-er?
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Aug 13, 2023 06:09
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Breetai posted:Not getting that Starship Troopers is satirical is the product of either being young enough that you haven't developed the capacity to examine the media you consume at all, or of being very stupid. Not getting that Troopers is satirical is moronic, but not getting that it’s satirical of liberalism is extremely common. The target of the film is not the blithering idiocy of the jingoists, but those with moral concerns who nonetheless go along with it because they can’t conceive of anything better. Less an Act Of Valor and more a Zero Dark Thirty. AvesPKS posted:Aren't these readings all too textual anyway? Isn't this movie actually an allegory for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968? This is CD, right? Subtext isn’t an actual thing; it is always relative. It is both to Barbie’s credit and its eternal demerit that it tells you exactly what everything represents at all times, and there is nothing else going on.
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Aug 13, 2023 06:59
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I think where Starship Troopers either struggles or shines the most (take your pick) is how it presents its society as more democratic and equal than society in the 90s, let alone now. The biggest example is when the white general in charge of Klendarhu acknowledges his failures and is replaced by a black woman, then he stands in support of her. Imagine politicians/generals in America actually taking responsibility, it's unheard of. Then you have the gender roles being pretty much equal at the lower ranks too - women in the infantry, in the showers, captaining the ships. The press is free and open enough to do a live broadcast of a disaster, rather than censoring and hiding what happened. And of course, guaranteed citizenship, full stop, instead of the American method where various military veterans are deported. Not to mention no hint of voter suppression, poll taxes, etc - from the very beginning the line is crystal clear on the fairness of the system, despite it requiring an awful tradeoff to acquire the voting rights. I don't think the movie is supporting fascism, but I think it tears down 90s liberalism so much that it's easy to misinterpret it. Especially because of our obsession with team politics and viewing any attack on one side as support of the other. trevorreznik fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 13:48
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Breetai posted:Not getting that Starship Troopers is satirical is the product of either being young enough that you haven't developed the capacity to examine the media you consume at all, or of being very stupid. Look at the contemporary reviews. Rotten Tomatoes now saturates things with current stuff, but when you look at dates, it had a very middling reception from reviewers that just thought it was dumb. Even some of the positives didn't get that it was satire. These were Boomer reviewers in the 90s, so, yeah, but the *majority* didn't recognize its satire at the time.
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Aug 13, 2023 13:55
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all those things are there in the source material of the books, except the part about women in the mobile infantry. The fascism of starship troopers was remarked upon, but living at the End of History it was seen as goofy at best and grotesque at worst. It aged like a fine wine and has had a cult of epic post occupy millenials like me because it predicted what the oughts were going to be. A counterpoint is the offhanded joke in robocop about the government in Pretoria nuking it's own cities to keep the majority out of power. Apartheid South africa had nukes and if they had been used in real life, all the critiques of reaganism would have been subsumed by the prescient powers of predicting the future.
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Aug 13, 2023 13:56
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Enjoyed the film - caught some very specific homages to Playtime and Being There, I’m sure there’s plenty more to find on a rewatch.
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Aug 13, 2023 16:23
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Valentin posted:the winking "there will be just enough vaguely queer-related imagery and symbols for you to latch onto in this movie if you want to make that reading vaguely viable despite it not cohering very well with the movie and being fully deniable" approach the film takes, along with closer to fine TIL Birkenstocks are queer culture. I'm so old I think they're granola-liberal culture (which does obviously overlap for obvious reasons obviously).
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Aug 13, 2023 20:20
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I can’t remember if this thread mentioned it but Weird Barbie had a carabiner keychain, which I found out after seeing the movie was another lesbian signifier. Then Mattel comes out with a movie-tie-in Weird Barbie doll without the keychain accessory
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Aug 13, 2023 20:24
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past the signifiers I think the movie just sort of actively resists a queer reading; barbieland isn't comphet, it's explicitly and repeatedly declared as asexual (even if you want to read sexuality into it, it's girls' night every night!). america ferrara's dud of a husband basically exists so margot robbie can't be in the passenger seat in that last scene. even allan isn't gay so much as simply other. it's pretty wretchedly (miserably, pitifully) straight e: and of course, all that lays ahead in the movie's conception of heterosexuality is the stasis of motherhood (america ferrara doesn't even get like, a promotion). bleak! Valentin fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 20:39
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Asexuality is queer 
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Aug 13, 2023 22:40
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Albatrossy_Rodent posted:It's a movie with a trans Barbie No, it’s a movie with a Barbie portrayed by a trans woman. The movie does not explicitly feature a trans Barbie character.
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Aug 13, 2023 23:30
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Halisnacks posted:No, it’s a movie with a Barbie portrayed by a trans woman. The movie does not explicitly feature a trans Barbie character. Can one say Stereotypical Barbie is a trans metaphor
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Aug 14, 2023 01:53
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Steve Yun posted:Can one say Stereotypical Barbie is a trans metaphor I don't know how much i would say it's a particularly good or strong metaphor but it's there. people were making comparisons to the matrix, which is itself 100 a trans metaphor subtext text and supertext. Stereotypical Barbie has a dysphoria-like experience after questioning mortality, or the impermanent nature of her identity. It's only resolved after she has a series of conversations about womanhood and patriarchy and she ends the movie at a gynecologist office for the first time, which is 100% written, played, and received by the audience for laughs but also serves as a reflection of the predominantly genitals-centric fixation in the public policy conversations about gender and identity. Stereotypical Barbie becomes a "real woman" (what that means is left as an exercise to the viewer) and then, punchline, she has had bottom surgery. The audience is left to connect the cause and effect and chronological relationships of those things presented in that order, but the movie doesn't say anything terrible out loud on purpose, I think. and the billie eillish song was really good too, so. ram dass in hell fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 03:01
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Barbie is 100% queer coded and its evident in multiple scenes.
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Aug 14, 2023 03:28
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Valentin posted:america ferrara's dud of a husband basically exists so margot robbie can't be in the passenger seat in that last scene. I thought America Ferrera’s literal real life husband was like, the realworld basis for the masculinity-hologram that was Ken.
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Aug 14, 2023 03:53
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Roctavian posted:I thought America Ferrera’s literal real life husband was like, the realworld basis for the masculinity-hologram that was Ken. I agree, Ken and Gloria's husband's both get mocked and chastised for using Spanish wrong , they are the same characters.
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Aug 14, 2023 05:14
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There's a degree to which I find myself annoyed by the "it's all in Gloria's head" interpretations, the movie's only fun if these things are in some sense literally physically happening.
Albatrossy_Rodent fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 05:33
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Barbie 2 will open up with Gloria in an insane asylum, screaming "It's real!!!" like Sisko in DS9.
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Aug 14, 2023 05:38
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I'm pretty sure the whole premise of the movie is basically at least to a degree actual magical realism; trying to make sense of things from a fully literal perspective is going about it the wrong way, metaphor and reality are blended for the story, as it literally plays with the ideas of real and fake, superficiality and the complexity of the real world vs fictional archetypes, and so on. It's actually pretty common in toy based movies, at least with Toy Story and The Lego Movie both having what I'd call magical realist elements. (Small Soldiers is not, but I'm mentioning it anyway because it's baller) Calvin and Hobbes also comes to mind. Imagination is about things that aren't physically real, but ideas, characters and archetypes very much take on a real life of their own as they are shared, they are known and living things just as important in their own way as many physical things.
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Aug 14, 2023 06:47
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Albatrossy_Rodent posted:There's a degree to which I find myself annoyed by the "it's all in Gloria's head" interpretations, the movie's only fun if these things are in some sense literally physically happening. That's not catching the multiple different things going on here. The movie's events are literally physically happening, as the whole thing's framed as a corporate meta-advertisement starring various big-name celebs as "themselves". Gloria doesn't actually exist; America Ferrera is just an actress being paid to work for WB as part of some curious licensing agreement with Mattel corp., and so-on. In the diegesis of the ad, though, Margot Robbie plays a character who is literally the physical embodiment of the idea of a plastic doll, who travels into reality via magical powers and whatnot. Barbie is some kind of angelic being, but she can obviously do things like 'talk to people' and 'steal clothes'. She can be arrested and put in jail, etc. However, that is a fantasy narrative. When you examine what the magic is and how the magical powers actually 'work' (or don't work), the most sensible conclusion that this Barbie fantasy is a shared dream/fiction. Gloria reconnects with her daughter and explores "womanhood" through their renewed interest in doll-centric roleplay. All three of these things are happening simultaneously: the film is a Mattel advertisement that presents the fictional character Gloria as the new face of the Barbie brand - the "ordinary woman" author of a "dark", "weird" imaginative scenario. That's a rather strong (and fairly straightforward) interpretation of the film. Another, albeit weaker, approach is to take the fantasy scenario and read it as science fiction. Under this approach, Barbieland is subject to physical laws and we can speculate as to how the mermaid ecosystem works when the water is a solidified mass of petrochemicals, etc. What's the mechanism that allows Barbie to hover? You can do this sort of thing, but it just isn't very interesting. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 07:21
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Ok, but where do I inject my own narrative that doesn't exist in the movie?
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Aug 14, 2023 07:55
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Hollismason posted:Barbie is 100% queer coded and its evident in multiple scenes. Barbie the film or Stereotypical Barbie the character? I agree the film is queer coded; the main character, not so much.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:14
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Another, albeit weaker, approach is to take the fantasy scenario and read it as science fiction. Under this approach, Barbieland is subject to physical laws and we can speculate as to how the mermaid ecosystem works when the water is a solidified mass of petrochemicals, etc. What's the mechanism that allows Barbie to hover? You can do this sort of thing, but it just isn't very interesting.
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Aug 14, 2023 10:29
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ram dass in hell posted:I don't know how much i would say it's a particularly good or strong metaphor but it's there. people were making comparisons to the matrix, which is itself 100 a trans metaphor subtext text and supertext. Stereotypical Barbie has a dysphoria-like experience after questioning mortality, or the impermanent nature of her identity. It's only resolved after she has a series of conversations about womanhood and patriarchy and she ends the movie at a gynecologist office for the first time, which is 100% written, played, and received by the audience for laughs but also serves as a reflection of the predominantly genitals-centric fixation in the public policy conversations about gender and identity. Stereotypical Barbie becomes a "real woman" (what that means is left as an exercise to the viewer) and then, punchline, she has had bottom surgery. The audience is left to connect the cause and effect and chronological relationships of those things presented in that order, but the movie doesn't say anything terrible out loud on purpose, I think. and the billie eillish song was really good too, so. I personally don’t see it, because there is a much broader reading available. Barbie having an existential crisis, grappling with mortality and impermanence, with symptoms including dysphoria/depression: these are human experiences, rather than trans-specific experiences. Barbie resolving some of that crisis through an understanding of patriarchy: that is a feminist experience (experienced by many women and also men who realise the patriarchy harms them), rather than a trans-specific experience. Barbie becoming human at the end, with genitals as the symbol of that transformation: this is what the film had to work with in terms of source material based on how Barbies are designed, and something that could be suitably foreshadowed earlier in the film. I don’t see it as very different from the heart or the brain as markers of humanity in the Wizard of Oz. If the story was about Ken becoming human, they could have equally ended with a joke about him now having genitals, and I don’t think we’d be tempted to consider it a trans man transitioning metaphor.
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Aug 14, 2023 11:51
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Toy films (Small Soldiers, Toy Story trilogy, Lego Movie, etc) in particular always seem to borrow far more from older religious texts then sci-fi. Childhood as Eden, becoming politically aware as "The Fall", etc. Though i guess Small Soldiers is read as hard sci-fi with the toys as literal robots original designed by the American military. Barbie is kinda like Milton's "Paradise Lost" with Ken as Satan, Barbie as Adam/Jesus. More angelic beings living in a non-material world then robots. But I think material readings can still be made, Satan and his minions going homeless and God's obedient angels not going homeless isn't completely meaningless because they are all immortal and immaterial, like the leftist reading was still heaven is the monarchy and Satan is anti-monarchist. We even have the same criticism where Ken seems to be the most sympathetic/suffering character compared to the protagonists.
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Aug 14, 2023 15:41
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Simply Simon posted:Why would you not read the fantasy scenario as, you know, fantasy? I do. But, then, the immediate and obvious question is whose fantasy we're talking about.
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Aug 14, 2023 17:49
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There are number of jokes that only work when we take the world literally, such as "her ghost has an office on the seventeenth floor." If this whole thing is just a projection of Gloria's subconscious, then that's not a funny bit. The comedy relies on the absurdity of a) ghosts existing in this universe, b) Will Ferrell knowing about it and having a professional relationship with Ruth Handler's ghost. And it's obviously all fake because it's a movie, but "it was all a dream" has never once been satisfying.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:17
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crowoutofcontext posted:Toy films (Small Soldiers, Toy Story trilogy, Lego Movie, etc) in particular always seem to borrow far more from older religious texts then sci-fi. Childhood as Eden, becoming politically aware as "The Fall", etc. I’m not sure how elegantly the two stories map onto each other, but surely the satan figure would be gloria? Dissatisfied with her world and eventually banished by god/the executives, she infiltrated the walled garden/static manufactured paradise of barbieland and begins to facilitate changes. Eventually she accompanies barbie from a state of sexless innocence to the messy real world of, like, having genitals and shouldering existential angst. Except I guess his would be a revisionist his dark materials-style take in which experience is ultimately preferable to innocence.
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Aug 14, 2023 19:34
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Worth noting that the innocence of Paradise Lost is explicitly not a sexual innocence. Milton strongly opposed conflating a lack of sin with a lack of sex.
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Aug 14, 2023 19:56
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Poor Ken. He was conceived to be Barbie's accessory while she is everything, and now he's being called Satan? When will enough be Kenough?
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Aug 14, 2023 20:28
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AvesPKS posted:I just miss the Transformers thread Why it doesn't seem like you read it lol
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Aug 14, 2023 20:30
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I like Mark Kermode's Barbie review, he calls Ken "An appendage without an appendage" which is pretty funny. His opinions seem to map onto mine very frequently which is interesting because looking at him I'd have dismissed him as more of a curmudgeon but he genuinely goes into movies looking to enjoy them.
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Aug 14, 2023 20:36
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Enjoying things really is the best way to spend your time alive
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Aug 15, 2023 04:33
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I'm baffled by the reading that Gloria's husband is a loser. All we know about him is that he's trying to learn Spanish to bond with his wife and kid, but he's really bad at it (witness his being pleased to defeat Duolingo). It seemed sweet to me: do something you're bad at, but keep trying because it's important.
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Aug 15, 2023 04:42
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Ok saw this movie last night and yup this was basically the matrix lol They even had the oracle in this movie! Arsenic Lupin posted:I'm baffled by the reading that Gloria's husband is a loser. All we know about him is that he's trying to learn Spanish to bond with his wife and kid, but he's really bad at it (witness his being pleased to defeat Duolingo). It seemed sweet to me: do something you're bad at, but keep trying because it's important. She definitely married a gringo thats for sure
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Aug 15, 2023 16:28
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 23:08 |
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The only thing we see the husband do is make mistakes and look a bit awkward. His only scene with other characters features him being corrected, immediately and loudly, by his family. A badass thing Gloria does is immediately highlighted as being nothing to do with him. I don't think he's a loser, but I wouldn't judge anyone for having that reading. What a strangely paced movie. Barbie pretty much resolves her character arc 20 minutes in by sitting in a park and being nice to an old lady and just...hangs around after that. Ken resolves his with a big song and dance number - he's Ken, he's enough - and then has the exact same revelation again in the next scene. Gloria's big moments seem to be the monologue and the suggestion of a Normal Barbie, except when we first see her she's obviously in that place anyway so ultimately nobody learned anything and everything went right back to where it was, except now Barbie has a vagina and will die, hooray.
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Aug 15, 2023 19:14
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