It really is as if Hollywood executives woke up one morning and said, “How can we ruin another American icon? Quick, get Kate McKinnon on the line!”
I saw “Barbie” on Sunday, and it was everything I knew it would be. Incidentally, it wasn’t because McKinnon is an unfunny butch who I otherwise avoid, like gas station restrooms. But because there is nothing the entertainment industry enjoys more than defiling beauty, femininity, and innocence.
The doll, beloved by generations of women, is all of those things, so the film was destined to be a charmless, disenchanted offense to the senses. God forbid Hollywood produce anything that might celebrate the whimsical, fabulous, and pink life of the Barbie everyone knows. Instead, the movie is two hours of obvious references intended as jokes crammed into a lecture on how miserable and impossible it is to be a happy woman in America.
The climax is literally a lecture on how miserable and impossible it is to be a happy woman, delivered by America Ferrera’s character, a mother in despair who works at Mattel and who channels Barbie from her fun fantasy world into real life via her own depressed and defeated mood.
Don’t have too much fun, kids!
“I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so people will like us,” she says. “If all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don’t even know.”
Other angry women looking for an excuse for their shortcomings or bad luck loved it. But, ironically, it takes some balls to project that kind of misery onto “every single other woman.”
Every single other woman isn’t mentally and emotionally paralyzed the way Barbie, written and directed by celebrated feminist Greta Gerwig, insists. Not everyone hates themselves and their lot in life the way Gerwig must. That includes women.
Many of them are happy, content, even. Barbie is and always has been. She’s rich, beautiful, smart, talented, winsome, popular, and physically active. Or, she was, right up until a bitter Hollywood feminist got her sticky hands on her and decided it was time to corrupt yet another American legend.
Barbie should have been about the things the doll has forever been: excitement, femininity, beauty, and ambition. What the audience got was a self-conscious lead role and an inexplicable transgender person who looked like Jack Nicholson’s “Joker.”
What a shame. But everyone should have seen that coming.
