About That Barbie Movie . . .

If you haven’t seen the Barbie movie, intend to, and don’t want spoilers, you should stop reading and come back to this later.

On the other hand, if you’ve already seen it or don’t intend to see it at all, please read on. (Especially if you’re avoiding the movie because you think it’s offensive.)

I had no interest in seeing this flick. None. When I heard about it, my first thought was “Oh, thank God my girls are grown and gone so I don’t have to watch another Barbie movie.” But I had friends who heard it was good and wanted to make a girls’ night of it . . . and you know how I’ve been harping here about doing the community thing. So, I went with them.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I read reviews and saw people slamming the film as “woke” and misandrist (there’s a new word I learned: “man-hating”).

Wow. I’m wondering if they saw the same movie I did. 

In the movie I saw, when Barbie returns to Barbieland and sees that Ken has transformed it into Kenworld, a patriarchal paradise, she realizes that this is his reaction to having been belittled and devalued all the time in her world. And she is suddenly aware of her privilege and sorry he has been relegated to such a meaningless existence. “There is no Ken without Barbie”, he points out, and the realization of this truth saddens her.

AND in the resolution of the Ken story, when the Barbies are given the option of returning Barbieland to its original state where women ran things and men were incidental, all the Barbies agree that this is not okay. They realize that both Barbies and Kens should be valued as individuals.

I mean, that’s the movie I saw. Was it just me?

Piers Morgan apparently saw something else. In his review, he said, "The movie's clear message is that the only solution to this dreadful partriarchal state of affairs is for women to rule the world, and preferably to do so on their own without horrible men to ruin both the planet and them."

With all due respect, Mr. Morgan, did we watch the same movie? Did you perhaps leave before it was over? The story ends with the Barbies realizing that their "matriarchy" was toxic and unjust. So, they end it. Remember that part?

I also read that director Greta Gerwig "acknowledged that she was making an explicit connection to the Genesis narrative." And I picked up on that right away. In Genesis, Adam was made first -- and some Bible readers have interpreted that to mean that he was then superior and Eve was nothing more than his helper or an ornamental appendage. Similarly, in Barbieland, Barbie came first; Ken is simply her accessory. Neither situation acknowledges the value God gives to every human of every gender. Neither situation is acceptable. Not in reality nor in Barbieland.

That was the message, Mr. Morgan -- one of the primary messages, in fact. At least it was in the movie I saw. Again, perhaps we saw different movies? Mine was filled with forty-some different shades of pink . . . how about yours?

I have somewhat recently been a victim of readers reading a controversial statement in one of my blog posts and then completely misinterpreting (or even flat-out ignoring) the rest of what I said. So, maybe I'm a bit sensitive to this issue. Read the whole thing, people. Watch the whole movie. Engage your brain and not just your Heresy Alert System. If you're only looking for what's wrong, you're gonna miss what's right.

There are a couple good lessons here for all of us -- on either side of our sundry "aisles". First, if your pundits of choice spend a lot of their public time dramatically up in arms (and particularly if they tend to benefit personally from others joining their outrage), maybe you shouldn't take everything they say for granted. And second, if you want to have influence with those on the other side, it behooves you to listen and actually understand what it is they're saying before you denounce it. Do unto others, y'all . . .