The millionth take on the Barbie movie (this philosopher is negative)

 As the last person in the world, I've seen the Barbie movie. If you love Barbie, this post is not for you.

Now, there's no denying that the movie has awesome aesthetics. It starts out in a kind of pink plastic hell, reminisent of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "we" - the houses have no walls, everyone sees each other all the time, everyone has the same opinions, everyone smiles all the time. In Zamyatin's dystopia everyone ate some strange artificial food made of oil (sic), whereas in Barbieland, people don't eat at all - perfectly thin women, still hysterically smiling, go through the motions of eating, but it's just a pantomime. Everything is slightly skewed and off scale - mimicing the scale issues with the toys, cars are too small and hairbrushes are too big, but everyone keeps smiling, keeps moving these hopeless objects around as if they were actually useful. 
Of course I get that it's supposed to be fun and cute - I don't think it is, but whether cute or hellish it does look hella cool, there's no denying that. The 2001 parody is fun, the journey to the real world is delightfully whacky - there's a lot to like here if you watch the movie with your brain turned off.

However, I watched it with my brain turned on, and after having been subjected to tons of hype of this supposedly smart and feminist movie. It did not hold up.

1. The fake criticism of the Mattel Company

Obviously Mattel won't fund a full-length movie commercial for their products only to criticize themselves. This is nothing to be surprised about - but it still annoys the hell out of me that they inserted this fake "criticism" and that so many otherwise smart people swallowed it hook line and sinker; went "oh, Mattel are brave enough to criticize themselves!"

They make fun of "weird" Barbies and Kens that got discontinued, without ever mentioning the elephant in the room: All their dolls have been extremely thin. At one point, they launched a "curvy" Barbie who was a little less slim than the others (still slim, mind you), but it got discontinued when they discovered that little Barbie-loving girls thought this one was a disgustingly fat loser. In the movie, they pretend that down-right fat Barbies are a thing. (Edit: Turns out the somewhat-less-slim Barbies are still sold as "Fashionista Barbies". Anyway, the movie never touches the Barbie weight issue.)

Mattel has received heavy criticism for the horrible conditions their factory workers endure, but there's no slave labour in the movie since toys magically appear in warehouses in response to what happens in Barbieland.

They present the made-up problem of Mattel's all-male board (you can Google what it looks like in real life - six men and five women), and for about five hot minutes they use it to make fun of sexist men. Then we learn that Will Ferrell's CEO character, as clueless as he might be, cares about one thing only; making the world a better place for girls. He's not even greedy! Doesn't care about how much money he makes!
I've seen people claim that this movie is both feminist and "as anti-capitalist as a big blockbuster is allowed to be". This is completely baffling! I get where the feminist claim comes from - the movie has lots of women, and human character Gloria gives a Feminism 101 speech at one point. But anti-capitalist?
I recently saw The Meg 2: The Trench. This is a very silly monster movie. At one point, Jason Statham's action hero uses a torn-off helicopter blade as an enormous sword to impale an even more enormous monster shark. If someone asked me if I had any good anti-capitalist movies to recommend, I would not recommend The Meg 2: The Trench. But it still manages to be more anti-capitalist than the Barbie movie, featuring villains who do environmentally destructive drilling on the ocean floor so they can make more money. Whereas in the Barbie movie, we see that capitalists only want to improve the world. At worst, they may be a little clueless!

The closest they get to some real self-criticism is when angry teenager Sasha rants about how Barbie presents an impossible ideal and brings down people's self-esteem. But that rant brings us to the second big issue I had with the movie ...

2. The extreme gender essentialism

When Sasha rants about how Barbie is bad, the movie makes sure to tell us that she's wrong and we shouldn't listen to her. Before the rant, a teenage boy tells Barbie that Sasha is a horrible bully. During the rant, Sasha's croonies gleefully urges her on while she tears down what they think is a mentally unstable woman with Barbie delusions and reduces her to tears. Of course we shouldn't listen to anyone as mean and nasty as Sasha! In addition, she wears - gasp! - loose-fitting unisex clothes at this point. It's not like she looks all butch or anything, she's got long flowing hair for starters, but she doesn't look very feminine either. And this is bad. 

There's a ridiculous trend in shallow internet feminism that equates feminism with femininity and a lack of femininity with internalized misogyny. I think it started when people put a name to the trope "not like other girls". Sometimes, in works of fiction, people talk of how girls generally speaking are terrible, because they're cowardly and shallow and vain. The heroine of the story, however, does not share these traits - she's not like other girls, she's great. This trope is legitimately criticized for being misogynistic. Real-world girls may also pat themselves on the back for not getting along very well with shallow and vain girls, and getting along much better with the supposedly superior male gender. And there's a very narrow conception of "the tomboy" which often gets valorized in fiction for children.
The problem is when shallow internet feminists talk as if there's no pressure at all on girls to be feminine in any way whatsoever. Yes, being cowardly and shallow and vain are often stereotyped as feminine traits and also lambasted, but it's not like we live in a world in which butches like Lea DeLaria are held up as an ideal for all women to emulate. Girls may fail to conform to standards of traditional femininity simply because those standards don't suit them - it doesn't have to be internalized misogyny all the time! Feminism should be about letting go of gender roles, not enforcing them! (It's absurd that this even needs to be said.)
But back to the Barbie movie, Sasha starts out kinda non-feminine, horribly nasty, and yells at one point that "everyone hates women, both men and women hate women" clearly including herself in "everyone". Her arch in the movie is about simultaneously becoming sweet and nice and learning to love Barbie and embracing a feminine style with pink little dresses. 

All the Kens do stereotypically male things after their (ultimately failed) revolution, and we learn that those things are not for women. For instance, one Barbie realizes to her horror that she had spent time discussing Zack Snyder's the Justice League - because she had been brainwashed, you see. Well, guess who's also spent time discussing Snyder's Justice League? Yours truly! Quite recently, even, on a geeky internet forum. I didn't get much in the way of uptake, though. Everyone else kinda went "ugh, Snyder". Which is fine. It would not have been fine if they went "Jeppsson, what's happening? Are you discussing a male movie even though you're a woman? There must be something seriously wrong with you! Have you been brainwashed?" 

3. The terrible treatment of Ken

I've seen people share this meme about how Ken is written the way women are written in most movies. This is blatantly false. The problem with women in many movies is that they get too little to do in the narrative. The plot is driven by male characters, and women's role in the narrative is basically just love interest. But they're usually normal people in-universe, with houses, jobs, friends, etc. The problem with Ken is the exact opposite of this. He's got a very important role in the narrative, but in-universe, he's seen as nothing but Barbie's love interest (whom she doesn't even want).

I don't think for a moment that the terrible treatment of Ken is due to Gerwig and Bumbauch being manhating feminazis. I think it's because they had two ideas for how to make a fun feminist movie:
1. Let's make Barbieland this topsy-turvy place where women are in charge and men are oppressed!
2. Let's use the Kens to parody terrible real-world types like Nice Guys (tm) and mansplainers!
- and then failed to realize that 1 and 2 are incompatible. It's kinda essential to Nice Guys (tm) and mansplainers that they live in a patriarchy and has a patriarchal sense of entitlement. It's so essential that Gloria might have mentioned that in her Feminism 101 speech! 

So here's how Ken's story goes: 

In the beginning, the Kens are second-class citizens in a land ruled by Barbies. The Barbies hold all positions of power and get all the rewards for all the accomplishments. Mind you, all of this is fake - as far as I can tell, they never really do anything. Someone might hold a speech which contains longish words, or fly up into fake space, but whatever they say or do, the result is always the same - the others applaud them, tell them they're pretty and amazing and give them a fake reward. Also, the Kens' homelessness and lack of possessions don't have any negative health impacts like it would in the real world, because they don't need to eat and don't need actual medical care. Still, though. They're very much second-class citizens.

At first, the Kens show no resentment over this. Instead, they just hang around the Barbies, beg for little crumbs of appreciation, beg to be invited to parties in the Barbies' houses, and fight among themselves because they're so competitive about what tiny crumbs of affection and recognition they get from their oppressors. However, after main character Ken has spent a day or so in the real world, things change. He sees men hanging out with other men having a good time. He sees men getting treated with respect. Men having their own houses and possessions. Men riding horses (turns out he loves horses). He asks what all this means, and is told that it's "patriarchy". (It's important to note here that from what we can see, he learns nothing about sexual violence, domestic violence etc - only the above.) He then learns that men in the real world still have it harder than Barbies in Barbieland because they need to go to university and compete with each other and stuff. He then decides to turn Barbieland into a "patriarchal Kendom" - basically, he thinks it's the Kens turn to have what the Barbies used to have.
Who can fucking blame him? Not me. 

Ken goes back to Barbieland and starts a revolution - and somewhat ironically, he's able to do this precisely because he's so marginalized and overlooked that no one pays attention to him until the grand take-over is accomplished! The Kens then tell the Barbies that now it's a patriarchy (even though "five minutes after the second-class citizens successfully overthrew their oppressors" is nothing like "real world patriarchy"), so they're supposed to dress in skimpy outfits and give the Kens beer. The Barbies happily go along with this. Why? You might think it's because their old life was getting, well, old by now (how long can it be fun, really, to repeat to each other that they're pretty and amazing and exchange fake awards?), and this is something new. Of course, handing men beer will get stale pretty soon too, but it's understandable on the face of it that they'd do this for a while.
However, this is a movie that spells everything out in dialogue, so we know that this isn't the intended explanation for the Barbies going along with mini-skirts and beer. Instead, former President Barbie says that it's nice and relaxing not to think for a while. Really? You spent a lot of mental effort before? Then Gloria says something-something-patriarchy is a disease and remember the native American genocide and smallpox? Yeah, me neither. 

Anyway. Main character Barbie discovers that to break patriarchy's hold over someone, you only need to deliver a Feminism 101 speech to them (seriously), because oppression is all in your head or something. Then, the Barbies use their feminine wiles (obviously they use feminine wiles to strike back, gender essentialism and all that) to first flirt with the Kens and then make them jealous and turn them back to in-fighting. 

The Barbies take back power. The now defeated Kens rather sheepishly ask whether they might perhaps get some legal rights? Some, President Barbie declares. But very few. We can't just give everyone equal rights now, can we? Because that would be too radical and change things too fast. The Kens "gotta start somewhere". Yes, seriously. This is the only so-called reason given for why the Kens can't get equal legal rights - it would just be too quick, too radical, change things too fast. 

In the end, the Kens are told that their real problem isn't being second-class citizens - their real problem is how they feel about their second-class citizen status. They should stop obsessing over the Barbie ruling class and how they've got everything and the Kens have nothing - instead, they should work on some much-needed self-improvement. 

The final shot of main character Ken shows him dressed in a shirt with the text "I am Kenough". Presumably, he's also learnt to accept that society is "good kenough". 

R.I.P Revolutionary Ken. This Ken suffers from false consciousness.