okay i vowed not to post about the big blockbuster movies that everyone won't shut the fuck up about bc i don't want to even inadvertently give them any kind of press. at least not without proper compensation, y'know. however it is also genuinely impossible for ME to shut the fuck up, so here are a couple thoughts on barbie for the little group of people who follow me over here :)
one really weird and shitty thing i noticed that i haven't seen anyone talking about at all is the way the film treats midge(?), the discontinued pregnant barbie. she really only has two scenes where she's relevant or mentioned by name, one at the beginning, and one towards the end. the first is the opening sequence where all the dolls are greeting one another in the morning, including midge, and the protagonist barbie looks a little uncomfortable to be talking to her, while the narrator describes that midge was discontinued because making a pregnant doll is "just kind of weird." while watching, i thought that was kind of a weird joke, but i was like okay, i guess they just think it's weird to imply that a doll, which is only a hunk of plastic with no reproductive organs, can create life and give birth and all. seems kind of pointless, but sure. whatever.
but then, during her second scene of relevance, after the resolution between the barbies and kens, will ferrell and his supporting characters emerge from one of the plastic buildings and he passes midge and jumps back, startled, before saying something like "oh, hi midge. that's right, we discontinued you." now it's possible i'm off-base here, but with those two lines combined, it really does read to me like the intended message is like. "pregnant women's bodies are strange and to be feared and/or shunned." which is. shitty! the only thing i could figure is maybe it's supposed to be part of the totally #wokefeministmattel shit by harping on the stance that's expressed earlier in the film about how girls shouldn't be expected to be mothers. which is true, obviously, but to have numerous characters express outright disgust at the mere sight of an entirely clothed pregnant woman feels both extreme and, regardless of any societal pressuring one way or another when it comes to childrearing, just at its core antithetical to basically any even semi-serious feminist mode of thinking.
okay. now on a lighter note, i want to talk a little more about will ferrell's character. more specifically, the fact that honestly..... he's kind of pointless in the movie? like yeah i guess technically he's the villain bc he and the executive crew is pursuing barbie when she enters the real world, but there's two big problems with that framing:
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they're too bumbling and ridiculous to actually pose much of a threat, to the point that a lot of the "conflict" they provide is pretty much immediately resolved (i.e., towards the end when the human mom is like "hey you guys should make a realistic barbie" and will ferrell is like "that's a terrible idea" and then one of his cronies says "actually that would make a lot of money" and so it's just resolved. how convenient.
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even if they were threatening in any way, the movie somewhat abandons their relevance altogether midway through the runtime to focus on the conflict between barbie and ken. in that sense, ken effectively acts as the villain of the movie, and exhibits a whole hell of a lot more ability to actually do any kind of damage. by the time the executives resurface, it comes as kind of a surprise because i had already forgotten about them.
these flaws would be a lot easier to look past if they at least hit upon one important marker: being funny. as is natural for a will ferrell character, he's very much meant as comic relief. now i'm not much of a will ferrell enjoyer, so i doubt i would have found his stuff funny one way or another, but i also feel that even objectively he's one of the weaker comedic links in the movie. this movie isn't unfunny, at least not always! there were definitely a handful of one-liners and visual gags that got a sensible chuckle out of me; i don't think many of those came from the executive posse.
with all that in mind, i would say it would have been quite easy and even advisable to write them out of the story altogether. just focus on the barbie-ken conflict and the lame, uncomfortable, shallow "commentary" about the patriarchy and what it's like to be a woman, and use the extra runtime to develop characters like the mother (whose name i can't even remember, if she had one)
sigh. okay one last thing. y'know there's been some amount of discourse about how this movie treats men? with people who like the movie saying that it's very good to men in a feminist sort of way and dipshit conservative pundits being basically required to spew rhetoric about how it's a "man-hating" movie in their ever-extending effort to win the culture war? yeah. well let me provide a different perspective to both of those: the movie is good to men for the most part but right at the end, they step into the territory of being a little too good to men. when barbie and ken have their conversation about how ken needs to learn who he is without barbie, she apologizes for taking him for granted for so long. i expected him to follow by apologize for getting his patriarchy game on so hard. but he just. doesn't. it goes back to jokes about him being a dumb goofy manchild.
now if you wanted to get REALLY deep in the soup here, you could argue that because barbieland is supposedly like a world where men's and women's social roles are reversed from that of the real world (seriously, i did get some big vibes of that short film where straight people are oppressed or whatever), then ken apologizing would be equivalent to a woman apologizing to a man after a lifetime of oppression under the patriarchy followed by a relatively quite brief period of lashing out and reversing that order. but like. that isn't what happened. ken isn't somehow "woman-coded" or something by virtue of being a part of an arguably oppressed male social class in barbieland - he's still a man, and in the context of this being a story presented to us in the real world where the patriarchy is very much real and set in stone from countless past generations, that level of suspension of disbelief doesn't fly in a movie that is realistically intended for very young people.
so ken just accepts barbie's apology and moves on. goes back to being a silly wacky guy, and basically doesn't say anything else for the rest of the movie other than a couple other quick jokes. barbieland is implied by the president to be making a move towards a more equitable society, but in the displayed text of the movie, the levels of emotional labor demanded from the two figures representing the gendered sides of that society are imbalanced. it's such a small detail but i thought that, along with the midge thing, seemed to reveal some cracks in mattel's facade of a sleek, well-read, progressive feminist corporate agenda.
i'll finish by saying i know it's kind of ridiculous to take the stupid doll movie this seriously, as plenty of people have said, but i'm not just cinema-sins-ing this shit. if i was doing that, i would bring up the weird joke they have in the middle of the movie where barbie says "i'm not pretty anymore" and the narrator butts in to say "note: casting margot robbie is not a good plan if you want to have this be a plot point in your movie." bc like that isn't shitty or ruinous to the movie or anything but it just kind of confused me and came out of nowhere, with no other jokes of its kind appearing again. but i won't bring that up, because that's not what i'm doing here :3
no, instead it's more like. this movie took itself way more seriously than it had to, and while it seems to have paid off for them commercially (seriously, could you see this thing being halfway as successful as it is if it was just a completely apolitical story-for-story's-sake like the old school barbie movies?), it also means that mattel put themselves in a more difficult conversation than they perhaps belong in. and if they're going to make the bold move to do that, i think that makes it perfectly fair game to nitpick and point out stuff like this. bc whether we like it or not, films that reach this level of success are destined to be influential in some way or another, especially because again, this is being seen by plenty of very young people. so yeah, i'm taking that as a free pass to tear this shit to pieces. so there!!!!!!
that's all. thanks :3