Film critics are a dime a dozen. Nobody remembers their names. Nobody really gives a damn what they have to say. Yet, here they are, currently paid to lug around predictably verbose interpretations of a movie about a doll.
This op-ed isn’t really about the movie. Make up your own mind, if you’ve got the guts. It’s mainly about how Barbie became such an easy target for an ineffectual, failed society.
Let’s do a little background, something most reviewers apparently couldn’t be bothered to do with Barbie. It’s easier to bleat about something without a context than with one.
Barbie the doll was created in 1959 in a very different world. People had lives back then. She was basically created as a modern princess for a prosperous time. She was as much a collection of expectations as Dreamhouses and clothes. A tonnage of merchandise arose, and it’s all still there.
She was actually a pretty good reflection of the anticipated good life for the current middle class. Girls could really have all this stuff, and they wanted to have it. The previous generation hadn’t had any of it, what with wars and Depressions and things. So Barbie was actually intended to be a positive image.
Simple enough, you’d think. …Until somebody decided that all this prosperity and material stuff was anti-women. Barbie was reviled for “unrealistic expectations”, being a fake image of real women, and of course, being wealthy by mainstream standards.
To be fair about the backlash, the Blonde Beautiful White Messiah of Pink Things wasn’t exactly a reflection of the culture of the following decades. The entire original context of Barbie as an aspirational thing, like princesses, was now the enemy.
Something like this:
You’re not allowed to be a princess and certainly not prosperous. That might be fun.
You’re not allowed to have aspirations. You get to be a bored burnt-out drudge in a specific income bracket.
You can’t have nice things anyway. You have to live in a sleazy cliché-ridden crime scene like everyone else, remember?
Only stuck-up bitches want to have nice things. Who wants to live in a clean house, anyway?
Nobody is allowed to be beautiful, rich, happy, and have a nice life. You’re not even allowed to hope for those things. That’s why there are no such things as the fashion industry, finance, and property markets. So there!
Like most human aspirations, Barbie became the problem. Well, we’ve certainly got rid of the theory of prosperity. Nobody can afford it. People live in high-rise cramped sewers and that’s OK with the idealists. After all, if people really lived like they did in the 50s, with a single income paying for a family, that’d be communism.
You can see from this insufficiently-caffeinated stuff how easy it is to spin Barbie into an enemy of the people. A perfectly innocent idea of a happy girl doll is a mix of Darth Vader, Godzilla, and oppressive lifestyle regimes.
…And that’s exactly what the critics have done. They simply take the market image of Barbie and don’t think about it. They then apply their own logic according to whatever ideology blew in through their ears during puberty.
It reads like it, too. I don’t know if I’ve ever read such a pretentious, sententious, deliberately contentious load of utter bilge.
There’s a movie about Barbie. Start a crusade, why don’t you?
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
