One of life’s tasty little ironies: the stereotype of the loudly and proudly ignorant man, mouthing off about a subject without bothering to understand it first, is protested against most furiously by those who best embody it.
Having seen Barbie at last (I prioritised the other one), and belatedly absorbed some of the discussion around it, I’m bewildered. Not by the film, but by the agitation it has caused for these particular men, beyond even their normal limits.
The creation of a world-destroying weapon, its use on civilians, political paranoia and persecution, humanity’s eventual self-extinction – none of these plot points in Oppenheimer, all based on real events, have ignited the outrage of men quite like an imaginary doll using the word “patriarchy” too many times on screen.
“The most aggressively anti-man, feminist proganda-fest ever put to film,” fumed podcaster Matt Walsh, for example.
Political activist Jack Posobiec called it “man-hating woke propaganda” and “a horror show”, with Ryan Gosling’s Ken apparently portrayed as “beta”.
Commentator Ben Shapiro published a modestly titled YouTube review (“Ben Shapiro DESTROYS the Barbie movie for 43 minutes”) in which he confessed to being “viscerally angry”, and proved it by ranting: “This movie is not just a piece of s***. This movie is a flaming piece of dog s*** piled atop an entire dumpster on fire piled atop a landfill filled with dog s***.”
Sophisticated analysis there. He claims to have hated it, yet I count nine stars.
In one of the film’s early scenes, Gosling’s Ken describes his job as “beach”. Not surfing, not lifesaving. Just beach. A similar phenomenon has infected the media and internet: folks whose profession isn’t really persuasion or argument. Just anger. Perpetual, irrational anger.
Gents, we are not the target market of Barbie, but the utterly unhinged reaction to this movie from some of our brothers is all the proof you need that we should see it anyway. And here’s the crucial part: engage with it, in good faith. Actually pay attention to what it’s saying, as opposed to what you thought it would say before your bum ever hit the seat.
The chief charge against Barbie is that it’s “man-hating”; that is the phrase that slithers its way into most of the incendiary reviews.
This is a self-centred critique. It comes from the mind of someone who has, somehow, managed to watch a film about the experience of being a woman without making any serious effort to empathise with the female characters.
(Full spoilers from this point forward.)
Yes, the Kens and the Mattel executives are mostly portrayed as dumb, bumbling bro types, who aren’t representative of men more broadly (#NotAllMen?). I’ll grant you that. This is the film’s main source of comic relief.
Ask yourself why all the women sitting around you in the theatre laughed at those moments. Could it be because they’ve endured a guy or two mansplaining tech stuff to them, or droning on about the history of cars, or commentating The Godfather, while they feigned interest?
These are real stereotypes! I’m guilty of two myself, and only because I’ve never seen The Godfather (yes, I know, shoot me). They’re the small, irritating, mainly quite harmless things women silently roll their eyes at day-to-day, blown up and overemphasised for comic effect.
So yeah, the joke is on us for once. Are we capable of taking a joke, lads? We have no qualms ribbing each other all the time, but now that the women are poking fun, suddenly we come over all humourless. It doesn’t speak well of the male ego.
This is one film, by the way. One. How many more throughout Hollywood’s history have portrayed female characters as hapless damsels in distress, or scantily clad sex objects, or love interests with no apparent interests of their own outside finding love?
If you didn’t enjoy watching the men in Barbie being airheads, then congratulations, you finally understand how your female peers felt watching a great deal of cinema growing up. You have walked a grand total of one hour and 54 minutes in their stilettos.
Director and co-writer Greta Gerwig is not taking a malicious dump on men here; it’s more complex than that.
Consider the main Ken’s character arc. He begins the movie deriving all his self-worth from whether or not Barbie pays attention to him. He wants the story’s protagonist to love him, and that is his entire identity. The lesson he learns by the end is that he’s enough without her, and can forge his own self-worth absent the attention of a woman.
Now flip the gender roles. See the point Gerwig is making? It’s applicable to both men and women in real life. Your sense of self shouldn’t hinge on that guy or girl liking you back.
British broadcaster Piers Morgan wrote one of the more withering critiques of Barbie in The Sun, and I want to quote from it a bit, because my god, it misinterprets the message.
“At the end, Barbie makes it crystal clear to Ken that she doesn’t fancy him and certainly doesn’t need him to conquer the world,” Morgan said.
“In fact, she has a much better chance of doing so by channelling her inner feminist power free from his stupid, controlling clutches.
“Ken is thus reduced to a weak emasculated goon, an objectified and excluded member of the wrong sex who sings a lament to his own ‘blond fragility’.”
No, no, no. Piers, honey, no. Ken is not emasculated at the end, he is liberated. How is that not clear? Was the “I am Kenough” hoodie he wears too subtle? Gentlemen, being rejected by a woman does not make you emasculated. Believing it does only fosters the sort of resentment that underpins so much of the world’s misogyny.
Here’s some more from Morgan. This time he comes ever, ever so close to grasping the point.
“It is true he and the other Kens are promised a more equal world going forward, but we see no actual evidence this happens,” he wrote.
“It all smacks of George Orwell, ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ The audience is left in little doubt that all that matters is the women are in charge.
“Of course, by reaching this dismally sexist denouement, the movie achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve, and that’s establish the matriarchy as the perfect antidote to the patriarchy when in fact it’s just the same concept that they asked us all to detect in the first place.”
There’s a moment towards the end when the Kens ask whether they can have a seat on the Barbie-dominated Supreme Court, and are told to make do with a lower court seat instead.
This sort of progress has to be gradual, the Barbies say. You can’t expect to earn full equality overnight. Maybe in time.
Does the joke really need to be explained?
Gerwig is not saying a matriarchy is “the perfect antidote to the patriarchy”. She’s drawing a sly parallel between them. It’s an allusion to the glacial progress of feminism in reality, where positions of power are still largely dominated by men and yes, some patriarchal structures do remain in place. Where women have been “promised a more equal world going forward”, but in some areas, see little evidence that it’s happened.
Again, the usual gender dynamic is being flipped. Male viewers are being asked to consider how it feels on the other side of the divide, with less pay and less power, with male-leaning institutions stymieing further progress, and male blowhards like many of those mentioned above insisting the problem doesn’t even exist anymore.
The preachiest moment of Barbie, and I suppose the one that must rankle the Matt Walshes of the world the most, is the monologue from America Ferrera’s character, Gloria, in which she vents about all the (often contradictory) pressures the world places on women.
A sample: “You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be ‘healthy’. But also, you have to be thin.”
Another: “You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people.”
You can read the whole thing here, and I challenge even the borderline chauvinists among you to find more than a sentence or two that is even debatable.
A determined man could construct a similar list of the societal pressures on us – perhaps that would be a better use of Shapiro’s time than his 43-minute DESTRUCTION of the film. And I can understand why Gloria’s monologue might make a man uncomfortable.
But angry? If you leave this movie feeling angry, and attacked, and unfairly treated, then you haven’t been listening properly. And that rather proves her point, doesn’t it?
Twitter: @SamClench
Email: samuel.clench@news.com.au