|
The NYT had an interesting write up of the movie/Gerwig. It mostly got me really excited, I think I'm most nervous about how they pull off Ken becoming red-pilled lmao
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2023 19:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 15:13 |
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2023 06:47
|
|
|
The bros and I enjoyed tagging ourselves as the different mansplaining Kens. I’m obviously Godfather Ken, but most of my friends are Certificate of Deposit Kens
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2023 06:34
|
|
|
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of people mistaking the movie for being “for extremely online people” when I’d say all the normal rear end people I know who watched it who just sort of work and go about their days were literally moved to tears by the monologue, and all of us who’ve been posting non stop for twenty years were like “lol mansplaining joke. yeah I remember 2012”
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2023 21:49
|
|