‘Barbie’ doesn’t care about your agenda
When you’re a Barbie, every day is perfect. You get to do whatever you want and be anything you want to be, whether it’s fashion model Barbie or President Barbie, and that’s just the way things naturally are.
When you’re not a Barbie, however, it might look more than a little bit like Barbie privilege.This is, of course, a perspective flip undertaken by filmmaker Greta Gerwig in her latest film, which brings the doll of its eponymous title into the “real world” to look for answers after she experiences an unexpected existential crisis, in an endeavor to turn it into something deeper than a flashy, over-hyped toy commercial masquerading as a big screen blockbuster.
It’s not the only one, but it’s the most obvious, and it has most of the movie’s inexplicably vehement detractors feigning outrage over what they deem as “woke” propaganda.
It’s certainly true that “Barbie” is loaded with the kind of messaging that conservatives deplore. In the screenplay co-authored by Gerwig with partner Noah Baumbach, Barbieland exists through the imagination of all the children who play with her; every Barbie (and Ken) lives there, but the plot focuses on their “stereotypical” iterations (Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling), who are forced to confront the differences between the idealized utopia in which they live and the still-far-from-perfect reality inhabited by their human counterparts.
