#also this is not to mention the cissexism and heteronormativity and reproduction of gender roles

[one-hell-of-a-sheep]

(I don’t know how to put things under a readmore so spoiler alert for the Barbie movie)

I think my biggest issue with the this movie was just its general political incoherence, of course the Barbie movie produced by Mattel isn’t going to be a groundbreaking work of feminist theory but I wish they had thought harder about what points they wanted to make and what the movie actually said about the issues.

One specific thing that really got to me was the sheer amount of dialogue where characters just stated the political perspectives we’re supposed to take away, which firstly, what happened to show not tell? And secondly, the rest of the movie often undermined those statements pretty egregiously. Case in point, 10 minutes after the “women shouldn’t have to constantly mother and apologize for men” monologue, Barbie is kindly and patiently consoling Ken as he cries about how being in charge is so difficult and he really only reinvented patriarchy because he felt friendzoned and emasculated. Also case in point, after opening with a whole spiel about how Barbie saved girls from the omnipresent pressure to be mothers, a big chunk of the story revolves around a mother-daughter story which imo could have been totally omitted without significantly affecting the film.

My problem really isn’t that it’s not a great feminist movie! I didn’t expect it to be! It is the Mattel Barbie movie! It’s a marketing vehicle dressed up as a feature film dressed up as political commentary! But it’s still deeply frustrating to me that the filmmakers did a bad job of making the point they were trying to make. There’s a lot of potential that this movie just would not have been able to live up to by virtue of its corporate identity, but even within those limitations, it could have been so much more. And yes, there were lots of really good and interesting story elements, it was visually excellent, it was entertaining, all of that, but I feel like the ways in which it was a good movie just made me more disappointed that it wasn’t better.