aster on cohost

@RightRevJake

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@RightRevJake7/26/2023, 4:50 AM

aster @pieartsy

aster @pieartsy7/26/2023, 3:37 AM

The Barbie movie was fun.

It has the CEO of Mattel wave at you affectionately and tell you he doesn't truly do it for the money but for the sake of little girls everywhere. It takes leftist critique of consumerism and materialism and portrays it as something ridiculous and harmful that a child believes. It uses a deceased woman's ghost as a mouthpiece to extoll how perfect Barbie is. It tells you that your existence as an ordinary person with thoughts of death can also become part of the Barbie brand and that it is "already making money". These are all things that literally happen in the movie. I am not exaggerating any of it.

Everything is lampshaded and nothing is truly critiqued, only dressed up and posed before being put back on the shelf. It is quite clearly a lovingly-crafted, beautifully-acted commercial for the generation which insists that commercials don't work on them. I think that the Barbie movie is the most glitteringly pink, fantastically obvious, unashamedly EVIL, panem-et-circenses propaganda I've set eyes on as an adult. I am sitting here on my couch with a headache, nausea, and a heartrate of 100bpm because I am blisteringly, blindingly angry about how I knew all of this before going in and I was still excited and bought a ticket.

Not because I ever thought I was immune to propaganda, but because I am sitting here with the painful, useless knowledge that I am utterly helpless to it, and I will always be, and so is my husband, and you, and everyone else because we live in a society and the society knows it. Mattel™ is actively selling us the rope that we are hanging OURSELVES with, and it's fine because it's like, glittery, y'know!

But I mean, let people enjoy things yeah? I enjoyed the movie. Sincerely, what a dazzling little spectacle. Are you going to go see it? Have you seen it already?

Are you going to critique it too?

#The Cohost Global Feed #leftism #anarchism #Barbie #the Barbie movie #feminism #You Are Not Immune To Propaganda

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in reply to @pieartsy's post:

Geo @georgio7/26/2023, 3:53 AM

It was definitely much more thought provoking than I expected it to be! But the more I sit with it, the more those thoughts are not in favor of the movie lol

@otismonkey7/26/2023, 4:21 AM

The ultimate message of the movie seems to be that Barbie isn’t the problem here. Barbie is great. Barbie is nice. All Barbie really wants is to empower girls. (And that’s really what Mattel wants too.) It’s us here in the real world who added all this terrible weight to Barbie’s legacy. Any damage done by the idea of Barbie is totally divorced from the doll itself, so don’t feel guilty about going down the Barbie aisle next time you’re at Target or whatever.

aster @pieartsy7/26/2023, 4:51 AM

god you're right, this is the the actual thesis of the movie isn't it? it's so fucking blatant too

aster @pieartsy7/26/2023, 4:58 AM

I'm just gonna be upfront that I see [one of cohost's staff] liking this post and I am desperately sitting here hoping they rechost it so all of ~~china~~ cohost knows I'm pissed

aster @pieartsy7/26/2023, 3:08 PM

i predicted this but one of my friends got really upset at me and said "please let me enjoy things for once". girl, no one is stopping you.

aster @pieartsy7/26/2023, 3:09 PM

this is why everyone hates leftists. no i will not stop being a leftist

Tim Chevalier @tjc7/27/2023, 9:54 PM

Seriously! If they can't enjoy something without being sure that no one, anywhere is critiquing it, then that's their problem.

eevee @lexyeevee7/26/2023, 7:59 PM

honestly i'm surprised people are actively excited to go see the movie in the first place because like

barbie is a doll. she doesn't do anything except have different outfits. there's no... lore. if i try to imagine a barbie movie i can only picture the world's most generic woman spending five minutes at each of twenty different careers, then staring directly into the camera to say "and you can buy all of those!"

i fairly effectively strip advertising from my perception so maybe there's something more compelling there? i don't know

toad @toad7/26/2023, 9:06 PM

i haven’t really seen any ads for the movie but i did see an interview with greta gerwig where she says,

Barbie was invented first. Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie's position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.

which to me is compelling enough transtextual lore — that the filmmaker is telling a story with these sorts of questions and ideas in mind — to make the movie intriguing, even though i didnt grow up as a barbie kid. granted, i haven’t seen it yet so i can’t say if it lives up to this promise, but it’s at least enough to make me interested in seeing it.

eevee @lexyeevee7/26/2023, 9:14 PM

i guess i just can't imagine more than the faintest whiff of an idea like that making it through the boardroom gauntlet at a pink toy company

i want to say i've even seen this happen several times before, where a Brand movie sounds interesting but gets watered down to homeopathic levels, but i can't think of what specifically

toad @toad7/26/2023, 11:27 PM

i respect gerwig as an artist at least as much as i respect — to compare to another toy company’s text, likely more favored by the average denizen of cohost than Barbie — the creators of Mobile Suit Gundam as artists, so i’m willing to give it a generous read from the standpoint of film qua text rather than film qua product. this is the first i’m hearing that the boardroom at Mattel had a heavy hand in the movie’s production, though; i think i recall reading that gerwig et al were afforded substantial artistic latitude, but if that’s not the case i would reconsider my approach.

eevee @lexyeevee7/26/2023, 11:41 PM

oh, that's not actually a thing i know for sure; i'm taking for granted that any boardroom would take great interest in a feature-length film that will, on some level, function as a giant advertisement

toad @toad7/27/2023, 1:23 AM

i see. those are interpretations i generally try to avoid assuming beforehand instead of applying afterward because i find it makes it difficult to analyze a text beginning in good faith

eevee @lexyeevee7/27/2023, 1:31 AM

entirely reasonable, though hard to avoid if it factors into whether you want to financially support the work in the first place

toad @toad7/27/2023, 1:49 AM

eh, movie's gonna make boatloads of money with or without my $10. i also can't influence large numbers of people to watch or abstain. i don't think there's any moral component to whether i buy a ticket or not, so for me it's a matter of comfort, and i've generally gotten over my discomfort with purchasing things i might later find i disagree with.

aster @pieartsy7/27/2023, 4:10 AM

i can’t say if it lives up to this promise

imo it doesn't, tho it likes to pretend to

aster @pieartsy7/27/2023, 4:12 AM

on my end, I was susceptible to the pink (fav color), himbo ken, and the "if your friends all jumped off a bridge..." phenomenon.

I also seriously disagree that barbie doesn't have lore haha (grew up on barbie direct to video movies)

eevee @lexyeevee7/27/2023, 4:21 AM

strong agree that they should make more pink movies and himbos

is there lore?? is it like, ongoing lore? barbie feels like the same sort of character as like hello kitty, and if i saw two hello kitty movies i would not at all be surprised if they had nothing at all to do with each other

aster @pieartsy7/27/2023, 8:29 AM

not really ongoing lore (also I think we might have diff definitions of 'lore'), but I don't see movies for the pre-existing lore in their ip, I go to movies if I think they'll be entertaining. on that front it was obviously a success :')

eevee @lexyeevee7/27/2023, 8:33 AM

i guess i mean more in the sense of "is there enough of a hint of substance in previous media that you expect a movie will contain more substance", vs, this could be any movie but we put barbie in it

aster @pieartsy7/27/2023, 8:42 AM

oh gotcha. I think this is definitely a Barbie™ movie only. the hint people were picking up on was not in prev media (which most people who weren't raised as little girls in the 90s-00s haven't seen) but the cultural weight of the brand that the movie looked like it would (and did) cheekily comment on and maybe, among the more naïve of us like my sorry ass, even deconstruct & reconstruct (it made passes, but didn't). no one expected it'd do anything more subversive, and it didn't. but what shocked me was less "this is nothing more than a commercial" but "this is nothing more than a commercial which tells you it's a commercial and explicitly laughs and explains about how you and your self-proposed anticonsumerist 'ideals' are still susceptible to mattel's brand and will make them money in words, in the most literal reading, repeatedly."

eevee @lexyeevee7/27/2023, 8:45 AM

hmm. fwiw, i've technically won by not seeing their movie, but it doesn't feel like it in the slightest since they are still going to make one jillion dollars