I must take my hat off to the marketing team at Warner Bros. who managed to fool us into thinking that ‘Barbie’ was going to be a family friendly, light-hearted comedy about the adventures of a pair of dolls who find themselves in the real world. Warner Bros. managed to give the impression that audiences would be treated to some sight gags and a series of amusing montages showing Barbie and Ken trying to adapt to the ways of the human being, finished off at the end with some sort of weak morality tale about ‘finding your true self.’
The reality is that the film’s trailer cleverly disguised what is essentially an ode to Karl Marx and the French post-modernists, in particular the child molester Michel Foucault. This central theme of this overtly woke, triumphantly propagandist piece of filmmaking is the postmodern political principle that society is structured into systems of power and privilege, and that women and minorities are oppressed by the patriarchy.
The script, written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach is textbook feminist theory, which appears to have been lifted straight out of the University of California’s Gender Studies 101 syllabus. It is anti-nuclear family, anti-mother, anti-men, and anti-tradition. The opening scene depicts little girls smashing the heads of their baby dolls, because who wants to be burdened with children and motherhood? It seems that Gerwig and Baumbach do. They might not be married, but they have two children. Judging from the film they have created, however, they do not want this for the rest of the population.
There is barely one scene in which the ‘patriarchy’ is not rammed down the audience’s throats, many of whom are impressionable little girls. At one point, a female protagonist says something along the lines of the patriarchy is to women like smallpox was to indigenous people, and that they had no defence against it. By the end of the film, the children will not only have learnt about the ‘patriarchy’ but they will also have been introduced to the racism of post-colonial theory (another Foucauldian special). That is, the history of Western nations is a story of unbroken violence and exploitation. Or in other words, white people are bad, and everyone else is good.
By the time the credits start rolling, the little girls will also have a completely skewed vision of men and women and the relationship between the sexes. All men, both human and doll, are depicted as either pathetic imbeciles with learning difficulties, or consumed by ‘toxic masculinity’. In some cases, they are both. Why not? Might as well kick them when they are down. In one scene, the group of Mattel executives are so stupid that when their swipe cards stop working, they haven’t even got the collective nouse to work out that they can jump over the barriers. Meanwhile, all the women, both human and doll, are depicted as perfect, intelligent, and strongly independent creatures who can only flourish without men.
The vein of bitterness and anger directed towards fifty percent of the population runs so deeply through this film that I am surprised that the (few) men sitting in the audience tolerated it. It is an offensive, nasty, and profoundly misandrist piece of filmmaking packaged as harmless entertainment. The experience of seeing ‘Barbie’ was like being given a beautifully wrapped gift, only to open it up to find the magot infested rotting corpse of Western Civilisation instead.
