Barbie Is Woke and Feminist and a Withering Critique of Bro Culture. That's Why It's Great!

I loved, loved, loved this movie.

If the Ben Shapiros of the world are positively apoplectic over the Barbie in theaters I can only imagine how enraged they would be over an earlier incarnation that would have been written by Diablo Cody and starred Amy  Schumer. 

I suspect incels and other misogynists would have been so enraged that their heads would have exploded, Scanners-style. Honestly, it wouldn’t be that much of a loss. 

Schumer, incidentally, makes half of the woman-haters of the world angry because she’s extremely successful even though they personally do not find her sexually desirable. She pisses off the rest by being sexually desirable in a manner they find confusing and upsetting. 

I read an article about this previous version and how Diablo Cody was flummoxed as to how they could make a Barbie movie without shamelessly ripping off The Lego Movie, the previous gold standard for filmic adaptations of popular children’s toys. 

By her own admission, Cody could never quite crack the code on how to bring Barbie to the big screen without being overly derivative of the hottest meta comedy of 2014. 

Cody noted with amusement, and perhaps at least a little anger, that the Barbie movie that got made apparently gave up on not ripping off The Lego Movie, to the extent that it cast Will Ferrell in a very similar role to the one he played in the influential earlier hit. 

Barbie does not deviate from the sturdy template established by The Lego Movie. It also reminded me of the Day-Glo musical weirdness of Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar but that does not make Barbie any less of an achievement. 

Just about everything is built upon the bones of something else. That is particularly true of entertainment made from what is depressingly but accurately known as intellectual property. 

Instead of Amy Schumer, Barbie became a vehicle for Margot Robbie, who is, if anything, possibly too blonde and beautiful to play a pop icon who is herself too blonde and beautiful. 

Robbie looks the part. She is breathtakingly gorgeous, a truly striking individual. More importantly she’s also a great actress and a natural comedienne. She’s so perfect that I could easily see her getting nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. 

The Academy Awards generally does not honor movies like Barbie when timeless, not at all terrible masterpieces like as The Green Book, Crash and The Artist exist unless they make a shit ton of money and become bona fide pop culture phenomena. That explains why My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Crocodile Dundee both received Oscar nominations for their screenplays while Groundhog Day did not. 

Thankfully Barbie has made a shit-ton of money and is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. Last night I attended a sold out show with my eight year old son Declan full of people in pink. You could feel just how much this silly yet important movie meant to the girls in the audience, how they had seemingly been waiting for something like this their whole life. 

All I can say is that that’s super gross. All movies should appeal exclusively, or primarily, to men. It is consequently extremely sexist for Barbie to appeal overwhelmingly to women with its pink color scheme and evil, possibly society-destroying message of female empowerment. 

Barbie begins in Barbie Land, a magical pink wonderland where every day is the best day of your life until the next one and all of the positions of power are held by women. 

In keeping with the film’s man-hating “woke” agenda in this so-called paradise conventionally gorgeous women like Robbie are joined by women of color, overweight women and a woman in a wheelchair. 

Look, I’m not an unreasonable man. All that I want is for every character in entertainment to either look and act like me or be a woman that I want to fuck, although I am open to the occasional person of color appearing in a movie or television show as long as they act as comic relief and don’t have lead roles or roles of importance. 

Why on earth would a movie like Barbie feature a woman in a wheelchair unless it was trying to promote the shamelessly “woke” idea that disabled people are somehow human and deserve to be represented in pop culture? 

Are they trying to shove down our throat the idea that we should all be in wheelchairs? Are they trying to shame us for being able-bodied? Do they want my children, my innocent, pure children, to apologize to anyone in a wheelchair for not being disabled? 

Do they even realize how fucking insane that is?

Barbie begins as a sugar rush explosion of sight and sound and glorious spectacle. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a hit of good Molly but it’s also madly meta. 

Mumblecore superstar Greta Gerwig’s insanely popular blockbuster based on the Mattel toy line (that’s a strange, unexpected but glorious sequence of words) is narrated by Helen Mirren of the Fast and the Furious franchise. 

She explains that in the film’s trippy post-modern universe Barbie and, to an extremely lesser extent Ken, are products of the Mattel corporation and live in a matriarchal wonderland where men are seen only as eye candy, partners or brain dead hunks to be looked at and vaguely pitied. 

It’s like a gender-based version of White Man’s Burden that actually works and isn’t a confusing mess. Ken is just the boyfriend in the same way that the female leads in movies throughout the decades have just been someone’s girlfriend except that Ken isn’t even someone’s boyfriend; he desperately wants to be Barbie’s boyfriend but being a confused ignoramus, he’s just not worthy of a queen like Barbie. 

Words cannot express how angry seeing preppie fashion doll sidekick Ken being treated in a less than reverent fashion made me. It’s obviously because he’s a straight, white heterosexual male who is also made of plastic, fictional, a doll and devoid of genitalia. The filmmakers wouldn’t even think of portraying Malcolm X, Martin Luther King or Gandhi that way but I guess since Ken is white and a dude and doesn’t have a penis they’re fair game. 

Men are brilliant, brave warrior-philosopher-gods. We created the world and make it run. Every good thing in the world was invented and perfected by a man, even the stuff created by women. There’s consequently no way that men as a gender will survive being mocked in a feature film adaptation of a popular line of fashion dolls. 

If it had any damn sense at all, Barbie would simultaneously cash in on Barbenheimer mania and flatter the fragile egos of men who hate and fear women by making Ken an Oppenheimer-like scientist working with other Kens to create the most dangerous and deadly weapon known to man.

Can you even imagine what a crowd-pleasing moment it would be if, once he realizes what he’s unleashed, this new, intimidatingly brilliant Ken were to observe of his deadly creation, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds?”  

Wouldn’t that be a better, truer representation of preppie fashion dolls than a handsome, fuzzy-headed bro? 

But no, Barbie has to inexplicably treat Ken like he’s some sort of dizzy sidekick and not an exceedingly capable man of action. This stands in stark contrast to such dignified portrayals of Ken as the bald guy in Aqua and Michael Keaton’s Ken in the Toy Story movies. 

Ken is incapable of reflection or self-awareness. The same is not true of Barbie, whose perfect pink existence changes forever when she starts thinking about death. 

The tricky thing about death is that when you start thinking about it it’s hard to stop. Death is one of the many awful, awful, nearly unbearable things that make us human.

On a very real level this movie centered around an excessively sexy doll is about what it means to be human, and what it means to suffer, and what it means to struggle and doubt yourself. Last but not least Barbie is about what it means to be a woman in a culture that, despite the existence of feminist manifestos like Barbie is still pretty damn sexist. 

Barbie learns this firsthand when she visits an enigmatic, powerful figure known as “Weird Barbie” played by Kate McKinnon. Weird Barbie was once a non-weird Barbie but her owner played with her too hard, too roughly and too carelessly so she acts as a guru who hips other Barbies to the complicated realities of life. 

She tells Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie that the person who is playing with her has filled her head and her world with worrisome thoughts about death and life’s meaning and other profound existential questions sculpted chunks of plastic generally do not need to deal with. 

So Barbie travels from her perfect fake world to a real world that is anything but perfect and also much too real. Ken comes along from the ride despite Barbie doing everything short of getting a neck tattoo that says, “Ken, I don’t like you that way” to express her complete disinterest in him as a romantic partner. 

In the real world Ken is shocked and overjoyed to discover that the United States is fueled by testosterone rather than estrogen. It’s a world where, even at this late date, men still hold the vast majority of the power and they’re not about to give it up without a fight. 

Gosling is a brilliant dramatic actor who commits to playing a total idiot with a level of conviction that’s both surprising and impressive. He has found his inner Ken and given him voice. A stupid, stupid, stupid voice. 

Ken uses this knowledge to transform Barbie Land in his own bro-y image. Having noshed hungrily for the Fruit of Knowledge he decides to transform a paradise for women into a giant Man Cave with men at the center and women serving them in various capacities. 

Ultimately, however, Barbie is not the unforgivable insult to masculinity that its frothing-at-the-mouth critics accuse it of being because there are no real men in it. 

The film’s Kens are not men. They’re bros. They’re guys. They’re dudes. 

Bros, guys and dudes are lesser life forms than men. 

Barbie is, among other things, a devastating satire of the bro mindset with a fearlessly funny performance from Gosling. 

It’s less about the patriarchy than the broiarchy. A world ruled by bros would be an absolute nightmare. Barbie not so subtly suggests that we already do inhabit a world constructed by, for and about bros. 

That’s why we’re all fucked! That’s why Joe Rogan and Matchbox 20 and Andrew Tate and Kid Rock and Barstool Sports are all extremely popular and sadly influential.

Barbie depicts a world ruled by Kens as a utopia for dudes and a dystopia for everyone else. 

There is a glorious specificity to the film’s comedy. After he becomes mad with power, for example, Ken’s clothes, style and attitude all seem very overtly based on Sylvester Stallone’s aesthetic during the 1980s. 

The Barbies have been brainwashed by a patriarchy dumber than any that came before into playing subservient roles until Barbie comes back to Barbie Land with Gloria (America Ferrara) the Mattel employee who has been playing with her and filling her plastic head with dark thoughts of death and inadequacy and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) intent on using what she’s learned in the real world to make Barbie Land a utopia once again.

Barbie expected to be greeted as a hero and a liberator by the girls and women of the real world. Instead she’s confronted with her very complicated, contradictory status as both an icon of old-school sexism who promotes impossible beauty standards and the notion that nothing is more attractive than being a thin blonde with disproportionately large breasts but also an aspirational figure who shows women that they can be astronauts and doctors and any damn thing they want to be. 

In the third act Gloria gives a massive monologue about the difficulty of being a woman in a society that does its best to make life for them miserable and happiness impossible that is flashy and ostentatious. 

At the end of the monologue applause broke out in the theater. That’s the magical thing about Barbie; this ragingly post-modern, smartass, satirical comedy about a line of plastic dolls is full of moments of grace and beauty and real power. 

Gerwig’s film works spectacularly as a comedy but also, surprisingly, as a drama of self-discovery. 

Barbie isn’t just a movie. It’s an experience. 

In the end Barbie is “woke” and feminist and full of cutting social commentary on the myriad failings of bros. That’s not a criticism. It’s high praise. 

Five stars out of Five 

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