(Some spoilers ahead)
Unlike cancel culture, cancel culture culture is an actual culture. It is a lifestyle choice. Cancel culture, to the extent that it is a real thing, is about a specific action—being outraged that, for the rare literal example of cancelation, reruns of Bill Cosby’s 1980s TV show are still airing and urging them to be canceled—and then calling off the dogs once the mission is accomplished. But cancel culture culture is about finding a new thing to be mad about. It’s about being mad that Bud Light sent a single custom order of its product to a relatively unknown social media influencer (social media influencers are not, in reality, famous), or being mad that Target sells trans-focused swimwear (online, not that such a distinction should matter, though it rebuts the critical focus of their argument), or that the new Greta Gerwig film Barbie is “too woke”. Once one goal is accomplished or fails, a new one comes up. The outrage cannot end, because doing so would force cancel culture culture warriors to acknowledge how deeply unpopular their beliefs actually are in 2023.
That Barbie is not an utterly vapid popcorn flick should not be a surprise to anybody with even a tangential knowledge of it—its writers, the aforementioned Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, have histories of typically dark senses of humor; its stars, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, are critically acclaimed actors with primarily PG-13-plus filmographies; its trailer, after all, includes Robbie as the primary of the titular Barbies asking her friends, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” It is fundamentally a comedy, but its frequent juxtaposition with Oppenheimer, framing it as the ideal antidote to the gravity of a film centering around the Manhattan Project, ignores the film’s deeper themes—indictments of consumerism, reflections on the human condition, and most controversially to some on the right, scathing critiques of the real world’s patriarchy.
The latter is what has the likes of Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan complaining that Barbie is misandric, anti-male propaganda. And to be clear, to say that the film is anti-patriarchy is completely fair, but its feminism is hardly radical. The film’s politics are so agreeable that the film borders on apolitical—that men and women should be treated equally. It is a point that, although many would privately disagree, few would argue against publicly. Which requires a misreading of Barbie which is either intentionally obtuse (I think this is more likely) or aggressively moronic.
Barbie follows a fairly conventional three-act structure; in the first act, Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken are depicted to live in Barbieland, a world in which women hold every significant position of power (Issa Rae, for instance, portrays President Barbie) and men exist essentially as eye candy for the women—Ken refers to his job simply as “beach” and is portrayed as a well-meaning dimwit, but a dimwit nonetheless. This is, I assume, the nexus of the film’s supposed anti-male propaganda, and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Ben Shapiro watched exactly enough of the movie to reach this point and then drew his own conclusions.
But the metaphor here is almost laughably simple—I would be open to criticism that this is a structural weakness of the film—and yet the cancel culture cultural machine has seemingly missed it completely—in Barbieland, men and women have essentially flipped the social dynamic from the late 1950s/early 1960s (the era in which the doll Barbie was first introduced). This was an era in which men controlled everything of substance, had right of first refusal on all shots at home, and is portrayed in an often-idyllic way in retrospect. But like many women of that era, the Kens do not complain about their second-classic citizenship because they simply cannot perceive any other way of doing things. The men are undeniably ignorant, but to proclaim them as inherently stupid would be analogous to proclaiming women of the 1950s as inherently stupid; there may be a strand of feminism initially inclined to do so, but this can be easily used as justification for maintaining the class hierarchy. Which Barbie pretty aggressively does not do.
In the film’s second act, in the real world, Barbie is rightfully sickened by the misogyny she sees, both on a basic human behavior level (reasonable indignation of her objectification) and on a structural level (that every person in the Mattelboard room is a man). Ken, however, is charmed by a world in which men have power (though he encounters the limits of the power when he asks to perform surgery). Ironically, Ken’s contentment in this moment is an indictment of the men’s rights activist types who believe that the world of 2023 is pointedly anti-male: he sees a world that is as progressive to women as the modern, western world has ever been as a male paradise because, from the perspective of a Barbieland native, it is.
In the third act, when Barbie returns to her home, the Kens have taken control of the world via propaganda and brainwashing—this is of course villainous behavior, but it does not exactly shine well upon the Barbies, either, as they easily succumbed to the pressure of their former boy toys. The men in Barbie are far from intellectuals, but it’s not as though the women prove to be particularly smart, either. At first, this felt like a plot hole, but once the central conflict is resolved, it makes far more sense.
When the women inevitably regain control of Barbieland, Ryan Gosling’s Ken believes he has found a revelation—that his ultimate purpose in life is not to be in charge (which he admits to not enjoying) but to be with Margot Robbie’s Barbie, a premise which Barbie rejects. Both characters find themselves in positions of extreme power and subservience and both are unsatisfying to them. And in this moment, it is very specifically stated, in as plain of terms as you could imagine, that the human condition applies to both men and women and that the world is better when both are able to pursue their own happiness. The Barbies specifically acknowledge the shortcomings of their previous regime and vow to create a world in which both Barbies and Kens (and Allans) can be as happy together as possible.
The feminism of Barbie should be of a particularly agreeable variety, and yet hyper-Online conservatives have found reasons to be mad at an incredibly basic premise. For their sake, they should hope their next faux-outrage has a bit more to it.
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