The tagline on the poster of the live-action Barbie movie says it all: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.” “She” refers, of course, to the nominal lead character, Barbie. Yes, the doll by multinational toymaker Mattel, which started marketing it in 1958.
The movie — a slick and sly marketing tool, no doubt — none too subtly implies that Barbie started a revolution in the doll industry by shifting children away from baby dolls and coming up with an adult doll that can be anything: Fashion model, doctor, lawyer, even an astronaut. The allusion to the opening sequences of the Kubrick classic, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” makes certain of this. Of course, Mattel needed to sell more dolls, so two years after its introduction of Barbie, Ken was born, designed to tacitly become Barbie’s significant other. But then, Barbie has always outsold Ken.
Thus is the premise of the latest Barbie movie: Barbie was a resident of Barbieland, a utopia of perfect houses and perfect streets and perfect cars and perfect streets. It’s perfect because it is ruled entirely by women. The men — all called Kens but of different races and physical attributes — are effete and good only for bumming around beaches. But then, disaster strikes: Barbie becomes obsessed with death and other negative thoughts that should never occur in a citizen of a perfect society. Trying to find out why, she (with Ken stowing away) travels to the real world, where she sees first-hand how men disrespect women, unlike in her Barbie world where women rule. Ken, on the other hand, sees a patriarchal society, and when he returns to Barbieland, he imports the concept so that the men take over the government. This, of course, is unacceptable to Barbie, so she schemes with the other Barbies and they reclaim power.
If this feminist propaganda movie was targeted purely at adults, then its brazen male-bashing and misandry would not be so bad as, after all, intelligent adults should be able to discern where entertainment ends and propaganda begins. What makes the film so insidious is that it wraps its harmful male-hating inside a bubblegum of an eye-candy production design, the star power of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, engaging production numbers and a screenplay that is admittedly hilarious in many parts. Its rating of PG-13, and a massive advertising campaign that targeted tweens and teens, assures that its indoctrination will be directly streamed onto the minds of impressionable youngsters who will take its messages as gospel truth.
And the message of Barbie reeks of radical feminism: only women are good, men are useless; everything masculine — as personified by Ken — is bad. Men, the movie strongly implies, should repress all qualities that make them male, and others along that line. I am all for gender equality, but such extreme lines in a movie that is supposed to be fun and entertaining for children can potentially brainwash an entire generation of girls into thinking that way. And yes, anything that swings to the far end of any philosophical spectrum is always, in the end, destructive.
Hollywood appears to have pivoted from making great cinema to purveying polarizing and injurious ideas such as the trans agenda, mindless exclusivity and wokeness. And people are beginning to notice. Barbie is another argument as to why we should never give up developing our local movie industry that promotes our own cultural values, attuned to our own evolution as a people, rather than becoming a mental colony of the neo-imperalist Western powers intent on foisting upon us their own standards of society and normality.
In fine, Barbie The Movie is dangerous for children. It should have been given a warning label like that found on many toy boxes: “Warning: Choking Hazard. Not Suitable for Children Below 18.”