OK, look. I’m on maternity leave, so I get to have late takes. That’s just the way it is. Kablammo, bababooyah, QED.
Anyway. I saw Barbie, and like bajillions of other people, I gotta say: it was a blast. Seeing people of all walks of life show up to the theater in pink and rhinestones and glitter? Glorious. More, please.
But also, I want to articulate exactly what I think makes the movie so deliriously joyful for so many viewers, and it’s something I haven’t seen anyone else articulate yet:
[clears throat, straightens tie, leans into microphone]
It’s a world where women are the default.
Greta Gerwig is having so much unmitigated fun with women whose whole identity is being the center of their own universe (as well as being fabulous and, yes, thumbing their noses at men while they do it).
I posed this idea to a woman I’m close to the other day, and I could practically hear her violent nodding through the phone.
“Yes!” she said. “And Ryan Gosling is great in it, but also, for a lot of the movie, he’s just a dumb guy who’s there for us to look at his hot body, and he’s not even important to Barbie, and like…is this what it’s like to be a man looking at hot women in movies? Is this just what it’s like for them all the time?!?”
(And look. The statement is heteronormative, but you get what she’s saying.)
And really, what it means to be the default seems to be one of the main points of the movie — Ken enters the real world, sees that men are the default, and he comes unhinged, returning to Barbieland drunk on power. Stereotypical Barbie, meanwhile, is immediately smacked in the face not only by catcalls, but by a massive demotion — going from the heroine at the center of her own world to mere set-dressing in the real world.
Actually, come to think of it…ok, wait. Let me climb on up here.
[climbs atop bullshit, resumes sermon]
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