the barbie experience

[saturnalias]

(source)
 

barbie thoughts

i don't know what i was expecting this movie to be about but this was not it. and i am not disappointed. the whole experience was so much fun to me, i had dinner with my friends (me made pink bread for our burgers) and we dressed in all pink, took way too many selfies and shoot a bunch of tiktoks that won't ever see the light of day.

now onto the real movie thoughts.

so i think that the movie was maybe an attempt to keep a lot of people happy and there were several things that were a bit .... like i honestly think it was way too nice to men sorry not sorry. the way barbie just forgave ken so fast in the end kinda didn't sit well with me. like they destroyed barbieland and subjugated women, turned them into objects and maids for them and that was completely overlooked and ken was forgiven because ooooh guess what? it was barbie's fault that he was feeling bad! like i get it??? because the movie is about how the oppresion of patriarchy affects everyone, men included, but still,,,,, it was a bit too easy on men for my personal taste.

and the "patriarchal brainwashing" is so well represented too. all the barbies completely forgetting who they were and why it matters that they are not those people anymore is so important. as it is extremely important to remember it. as women living in a patriarchal society we fall into misogynistic behaviour all the damn time and it's important to see that we can change that in ourselves and in others.

someone said this on twitter and i think it is arguably the most important part of the movie: in barbie's ideal world, men were not sexual objetcs, they are just there and women have no desire to control them in the way men do.

and i do want to say that ryan gosling did a great job as ken and that the character on itself is so well written it's crazy. his whole solo song during the ken-off fits sooooo well in the movie, like ken is only thinking about himself and im completely obsessed with it, the songwriting is 10/10.

AND ANOTHER THING: it's completely obvious that everything in the movie is a continouous saturation of stereotypes which i love. it really gets you thinking that these things were taken to the extreme and portrayed that way in a MOVIE and yet it totally resonates with things that happen IN REAL LIFE.

i dont care what anyone says but america ferrera's monologue (yeah you know the one) is so so good. the delivery itself is just great and her performance was superb but the speech is the best part of the whole movie for me. when we got out of the theatre i told my friend how much i liked it and how it literally made me tear up a bit and she told me that it felt forced to her or even a bit cringe in some way but i was like!!!!!!! why. maybe it's deeply personal to me bc everything that was said (literally word by words) is exactly the way i've always thought about it. women are never enough—we are either too much or we are always lacking and society (men and other women) just don't like us no matter what we do. and that's so powerful to me.

the mother-daughter relationship was so well portrayed and written, it felt really really natural and realistic. AND ALSO the memories of barbie actually being gloria's is so <333 literal hug to the sould. bc like a grown woman can still have dreams and imagination and childlike wonder and still enjoy the same thing she did as a child, playing with barbie being a literal comfort place in her life!!!!!! showing us that playing the same way we did when we were young is okay!!!

there's just so much to say about margot robbie. yeah, she totally is the perfect barbie i do not care what anyone else says. the scene where barbie is sitting on the bench, feeling every human emotion for the first time and just crying!!!!! it was so good. ALSO turning to the side and seeing the old woman, and immediately calling her beautiful <3333 like barbie has been concerned about so called "imperfections" and aging and dying and suddenly she's in the real world, in front of a real person who is no longer considered beautiful by society BECAUSE of those "imperfections" and she still thinks beautiful. my heart is so full.

the whole sequence of barbie walking (rolling???) into the real world and automatically being stared down by everyone is a crazy scene. the way the contrast between men/women is immediately portrayed is crazy. like she is feeling uncomfortable, she gets cat called, laughed at and literally assaulted (the guy slapping her ass) and it really represents the transition into girlhood. one day you are just a kid, everything is about friendship and dreams, pink and sparkles, and the next one you are being perceived in this completely violent, predatory and sexual way by society. the worst thing is that, as women, we experience this at a very young age. the first time someone made a comment about my body i was eleven years old. i was still palying with barbies.

and yet, she experiences this and so much more, like the fear of death and she still chooses to become human. the ending didn't mean much to me at first (i didn't quite like it to be honest) but like it makes so much sense. the "perfect" world in barbieland doesn't resonate with her anymore. she has seen and experienced too many human emotions to become the barbie she was before. there are many horrible things in the world and yet she chooses to live because there are so many good things too—celebrating with others, loving, laughing, crying, the sun in your face, the wind in your hair. the good outweights the bad. barbie wants to be one of the people who can change the world, do you know how meaningful and powerful that is?

people complaining about how the ending was unfair to kens and how they wanted the ending to be a representaiton of equality for both kens and barbies but the line "hope that some day they (kens) will have the same representation as women have in the real world" is literally IN THE MOVIE. how can you miss the point? it's the year 2023 and we as women are still NOT even close to equals to men. that's what the movie is trying to show. you can think that is is unfair that kens are not given the same treatment as barbies in the end because it fucking is. and it is also the reality for women in the real world. it's meant to be upsetting.

WHEN BARBIE IS IN THE MATTEL CORP and calls for the woman in charge <333333 incredibly ironic in the best way that the board is all just white men.

there's something that was a bit ... ? for me personally: talking about how barbies was for the empowerment of women when i did not experience it like that. obviously it is not like this for everyone. i realise now that i am older that when i used to play with these dolls (which i did for over 10 years) nothing about it was "inclusive". perhaps it's bc of the country i live in but we did not have black barbies or fat barbies, and even the dolls that had brown hair were not "barbie". the barbie was the tall, blonde and skinny doll. if the doll was different than that, then it simply wasn't barbie. and considering i never fit into the barbie stereotype, it was never for or about me. barbie could be anything she wanted. i could not. also i will not get into the whole "promoting captitalim and the culture of fast consumery" because we all know that barbie promoted that.

!!!! some things are truly not that serious though !!!! people being like "iS bArBiE oVeRhYpEd?!?!?!!" pissed me the fuck off, like shut up!!!!! let other people have fun!!!! why does it matter if i want to dress all in pink with my friends to go watch a silly movie!!!!!! literally leave me the fuck alone.

and thinking about that let me realise that i did not have a single pink thing in my closet and i love pink. i borrowed a sweater from my mum and i loved how the colour looked on me. but it always feels as if im not allowed to like pink. because pink makes me feel feminine. society tells us that pink is for girls, and considering i don't feel like one 50% of the time it's a colour i've rejected since i was a kid, when i first started sturggling with the aching realisation that my gender identity was different from my friends' and that liking both boys AND girls was not in fact a universal experience. also pink seen as feminine and femininity being considered as fragile, leading us to believe that being women and wearing pink makes us weak.

OK SO overall. it's a crazy movie. i liked it so much. it was funny and it got the whole theatre literally laughing all the time but it's also a serious movie that gives you a lot to think about and discuss.