Thoughts on Barbie, and Oppenheimer, Part 1.

I don't usually watch very many movies: perhaps just one movie in theatres a year. And cinema is a medium of art that I have very limited exposure to. I've never watched the Godfather, for example. I know, it's just like in Barbie! In any case, I was privileged then, by sheer chance, to have watched in the span just two weeks both Oppenheimer, in IMAX, and Barbie, in a regular theatre.

I loved both movies, and I'm not really the kind of person to sit around and ponder pretentiously about this or that subtext in a film. I watched Oppenheimer first, and despite the depth of the film and the intrigue of its story, I didn't walk away from the theatre with any particularly deep thoughts.

I watched Barbie second, just this evening, about half an hour ago, and walked away with so much to consider that I felt inspired to write a blog post here for all of you.

Barbie, on the very surface, is a toy commercial. It's a charming toy commercial, and a very self-aware toy commercial, but that doesn't change what it fundamentally is -- it's the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic of movies. If you scratch the paint of that surface though, immediately under it is Mattel's apparent corporate decision-making with regards to the Barbie brand: an attempt not just to sell toys, but to rehabilitate a valuable intellectual property in the eyes of a society which treats this intellectual property with increasing cynicism (as portrayed by the teenage girl). By the end of the movie, she's a Barbie believer, and Mattel hopes you will be, too.

One layer deeper still, and we see how Mattel is also seeking to spin Barbie increasingly in the direction of a media franchise. Remember the SEGA video, and how Sonic's  true value has only been realized by SEGA relatively recently due to the success of Sonic as a media franchise (movies) as opposed to strictly a series of games? Mattel has been trying to push Barbie as a brand, not just of toys, but of media for a long time: there's Barbie Fashion Designer, and the Barbie cartoons, et. al. 

Barbie the movie has struck upon something that Barbie video games and Barbie cartoons have not, and that is a genuine place in the dialogue of society as an ironic self-realization that we can observe ourselves through... or at least, that's what the movie not so subtly wants for us to take home.

The film's message on the patriarchy/toxic masculinity and feminism are also quite interesting in this way, in that there is this surface message, a bigger message under the paint, and a more difficult context in which to place it all.

The surface message I took away was (1) women, AND men, should find value in themselves, and of themselves, instead of valuing themselves relative to their perceived worth to others, (2) that this insecurity is the root of toxic masculinity, which is responsible for modern patriarchal society, (3) this patriarchal society is a reality that is responsible for hurting women AND men, and (4) awakening women, AND men, to the realities of this social dynamic helps to break the chains of insecurity that result in patriarchal society, with all of the duties that entails.

This message, if it existed absent of the context of the movie, should be agreeable to any reasonable person who has truly taken the time to read up on these subjects.

However, when you place the message of the Barbie movie into the vessel that is the Barbie movie, the result is a rather perplexing endorsement of, and please forgive me for throwing this word into the conversation like a slug of enriched uranium being fired at a larger enriched uranium mass, neoliberalism.

Now, please understand, it's not my intention to espouse my political beliefs here, and this post is not a critique of neoliberalism by any means. But, it is hard to argue that consumer neoliberalism and, here comes that larger enriched uranium mass, Marxist feminism mix together about as well as oil and water: it is a combination as unstable as U-235. And not unlike U-235, such a combination is radioactive, and the wages of neoliberal feminism is the very kind of feminism we've seen emerge at large in, say, the United Kingdom: Radical Feminism, of the trans-exclusionary variety.

Now, I'm not an expert whatsoever in feminist theory: I know of it, because I read it, and did a lot of self-reflection, to better understand my two younger sisters, who are responsible for a lot of the better parts of me, it seems. And as such, I'm not really qualified to dive deeper down this rabbit hole for you all.  

I'm noticing too that this blog-post musing is starting to look more like a full video script rather than a musing: this is the curse of stream of consciousness writing, I suppose.

There's a lot more to say about Barbie though, and we haven't even gotten really to the Oppenheimer side of the equation either. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll spend another half an hour of free time doing another writeup, perhaps! But this is all I can muster for tonight: I have to get back to my office work, at 11:37 PM, on a Saturday.

The next video, on Minecraft and EULAs, should be ready by end of August or Early September!