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A Fancy Hat posted:...a lot of conservatives are unable to understand art on anything besides the most basic level because they lack any kind of empathy for the artist or for characters presented within the work. Yes, or to understand irony, subtext, or any complexity of tone or meaning that isn't made explicitly obvious within the narrative. The idea that the Barbie movie is 100% sincere about its hyperbolic and often satirical commentary on gender is an absolutely insane perspective. I saw this last night, so sorry if this conversation already happened up-thread. But I find it pretty funny that this actually does bear a more-than-passing thematic and plot resemblance to Blade Runner 2049. An artificial person (who's also explicitly a commodity and has a very rigid behavioral purpose) begins to experience unwanted emotional disturbances that seriously violate her prescribed social role, to the horror and anger of the corporation that built her, leading to a pursuit to try and retire her and a ton of hand-wringing about blurring the imaginary line between the artificial and real world. Both end with the revelation that the difference between a fake person and a "real" person is ultimately self-identity and the assertion of agency. Also, she takes along a partner - another artificial person who's supplemental and fully dependent on her - only instead of him being replaced by a menacing, black-eyed, giant, nude doppelganger, this one turns into Andrew Tate. The "Ryan Gosling is in a relationship with a doll" trilogy is actually pretty solid.
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Jul 28, 2023 00:44
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Yeah, I would’ve loved it if that scene was just idiot bros explaining NFTs. Hopefully poorly.
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Jul 28, 2023 19:29
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weekly font posted:Some intern had a great time explaining cock rings during a meeting I guarantee it wasn't necessary for a 20-something intern circa 2023 to explain to Mattel that "Earring Magic Ken" came with a cock ring. They know. There's no way that infamous 30-year-old bit of lore is a secret.
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Jul 31, 2023 19:23
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Mad Max: Fury Road is about how much it sucks to be a woman in a dystopian society. I mean, dystopian fiction is literally always about the actual society that made it. I don't see why the word "patriarchy" needs to show up in Fury Road for it to be considered a searingly and overtly feminist commentary on real-world patriarchy. This is a film where the villain is a Mega Trump warlord with a private harem of child brides, a dairy farm of human women, and an army of teenage boys brainwashed by manosphere poo poo as religion. The inciting action is the female lead liberating the child brides after they paint slogans like "We are not things" all over the walls. It's hyperbolic, but so is the Mojo Dojo Casa House. Barbie is clearly speaking to a particular version of bourgeois feminism as it pertains to modern life under capitalism. But I...seriously doubt anyone missed the relevant feminist message of Mad Max: Fury Road circa 2015. trevorreznik posted:From the last page of discussion it sounds like Mattel figured out the prototype in how to make a movie where a character turns to the camera to lament the patriarchy - simply base the movie on a famous brand marketed to girls. If the Lena Dunham Polly Pocket movie happens, that's probably where they'd try it. Seems like there's some obvious subtext to mine from the premise of an innocuous and unthreatening tableau of feminine domesticity that's easily contained within your pocket. Sure hope Lena Dunham doesn't actually end up making it, though.... Xealot fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Aug 1, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 23:06
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Arsenic Lupin posted:What? I said nothing remotely like that. I don't think that was your intent, no, but I believe they're responding to this: Arsenic Lupin posted:Hidden Figures is about how much it sucks to be Black and a woman in our society. As if, the added complexity of Hidden Figures regarding Blackness in its feminism distracts from the purity of its feminist message, a "problem" Barbie does not have. I think the general idea KVeezy (and maybe SMG) are circling around here is that feminism is necessarily intersectional, and cannot actually be extricated from race or class or orientation, etc., so the argument that these other details are some extraneous interlocution that "misses the important bit" is actually privileging wealthy white femininity and doing a disservice to the topic. That Gloria's big speech is perhaps uniquely resonant to a white woman's perspective doesn't necessarily make the movie's focus more pure or direct, it just presupposes other forms of privilege (having access to wealth, having racial privilege or cis privilege, etc.) as unnecessary to address alongside gender. We can *just* talk about femininity and its specific contradictions. I don't want to drag Greta Gerwig too hard on this, because the movie has moments of self-awareness on this point (the narrator's note about Margot Robbie, etc.), but she *is* a white middle-class cis-woman. As is stereotypical Barbie, the anchor Barbie of the film.
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Aug 2, 2023 01:45
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It comes “pre-damaged.” The character in the movie is explained as “a weird Barbie” that was altered or disfigured by a child playing too aggressively. But this is a pre-packaged Barbie that takes away the potential for creativity and instead subsumes some creative child’s imagination into yet another commodity.
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Aug 5, 2023 22:01
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I mean, yeah: Greta Gerwig is a 40-year-old white woman and her output speaks to that. It's not that surprising.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:28
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Cojawfee posted:What does that mean? What are people limboing out of? She becomes a real person and gets genitals for the first time in her life. A pretty common TERF talking point is that womanhood is inextricable from the anatomical reality of having a vagina and uterus. That menstruation and pregnancy and motherhood are defining material realities that a trans woman can’t experience, making them invalid. Greta Gerwig doesn’t have these politics and the movie mostly lands on liberal inclusivity as a social good, so it’s slightly uncomfortable to close out the film with the suggestion that Barbie’s induction into “real” femininity comes with a Pap test. I don’t think the film is transphobic, I just think it’s a film made by a white cis woman that isn’t interested in these questions beyond purely facile “representation.” There is a trans Barbie, but she was never important.
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Feb 12, 2024 20:38
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Valentin posted:also very hard to take the gynecologist thing as a light "oh she's excited to do something generally considered onerous!" gag when it comes on the heels of a movie that spends so much of its runtime on how real and important and valuable motherhood is and which in the final conversation between barbie and Ruth makes the whole thing explicitly about a Daughter who is Growing Up and Going Out Into The World and implicitly could have a daughter of her own some day and wow won't she really get how complex it all is then. Yeah, which makes sense from the writer/director of Lady Bird. This movie felt like a bunch of Greta Gerwig's thoughts on childhood and the ways young girls learn what womanhood is or should be, which for her clearly intersected her relationship with her mother, how women inherit notions of the feminine from other women, etc. It's very cis because she is cis. Which, again, I don't think is wrong or was done to be exclusionary of trans women or anyone else, it's just the story she wanted to tell. And it works, that story. But it's frustrating, because she clearly saw how particular and not-universal much of it was as she developed it but couldn't let that change anything about the structure or message. Hence all these little lampshaded moments, tons of diversity-as-set-dressing, a bunch of one-off comments or jokes that call attention to the extreme normativity without challenging it. It's a big, loud movie intended for everyone, and feels progressive by default because it has a veneer of progressivism, but has very little to say about anyone else's experience than the white cishet lead. It's a good and successful movie. But imagining the version of Barbie where Hari Nef or Issa Rae wind up in "the real world" sounds super goddamn interesting.
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Feb 13, 2024 00:52
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