How To Skip Barbie Without Being A Sexist Concern Troll About The State Of Cinema

It’s extremely unlikely that I will see Barbie in theaters. I loved Lady Bird. I loved Little Women. I admire the audacity of Greta Gerwig, despite her mumblecore roots, unapologetically playing with feminine signifiers in major movies as if male auteurists have any respect or interest in Louisa May Alcott novels, fashionable millennial girls whose knowledge of the band Love doesn’t go past the High Fidelity soundtrack, or dolls. I think Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie are often at their best in hyper-stylized scenarios, and the supporting cast looks terrific as well (Kate McKinnon! Michael Cera! Issa Rae!). There’s a big problem, though. My inner child is a boy. A boy who thought Barbies were weird and yucky. And while that boy quickly grew into a sensitive, R.E.M.-loving nerd striving to live up to feminist, progressive ideals, he never found anything attractive about the iconography of Barbie. This dude wanted to wish that Aqua video off the face of the Earth. Throw in my current disinterest in the theatrical experience all together, and I’m 99% certain I won’t see this thing until streaming, probably with the curtains drawn so no one walks by and gasps. Even if COVID was as gone as the government likes to pretend, I’d probably still avoid seeing something that unapologetically g-g-g-girly on the big screen.

While I know I can't be the only person with this perspective, I sure feel like it online. Most people I know either can’t wait to see it, or have professed a virulent disdain based not on a fear of sexy girl germs, but a principled antipathy for Hollywood commercialism. A sad contempt for the excited audience buying in and pretending the fate of cinematic art is not an issue (I know there’s also an explicitly right-wing argument against the film, but I blessedly don’t know those radio hosts and blue-checks). Rather than say that these people are completely full of shit, I’ll just explain why I’d be completely full of shit to make a similar argument.

Oh, the headline? That’s just to grab eyes. I don’t actually think any of you are sexist concern trolls about the state of cinema, knowingly or unknowingly. Not even the guy who wrote Has Barbie Killed The Indie Director? for the Guardian, an article that also bemoans Sarah Polley, Questlove and Barry Jenkins working with Disney, acknowledges only white male directors that he feels kept it real (not, say, that erstwhile indie director Martin Scorsese once made a sequel to The Hustler starring Tom Cruise for Disney), and - in a surprise tangent - bemoans our cynicism about “hypersexuality.” Yeah, I’m not accusing him of anything.

After all, maybe he also didn’t like The LEGO Movie. I was impressed that the film managed to convey how what made LEGOs so thrilling to me as a kid wasn’t really the models, but the opportunity to build your own creations and stories with the pieces. Reveling in and promoting Intellectual Property was just a starting point. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller celebrated “master builders” who irreverently engineer extensions to those concepts, if not abandon them entirely. I’d be a real jackass to say that was pretty dope for an ad and assume Barbie couldn’t be, especially when the director already showed they could do something both fresh and loving with Little Women.

I also remember when a movie like Kill Bill would be declared a “feminist victory” for Hollywood. Kill Bill, a tribute to exploitation films and Uma Thurman’s feet, made with the financial and creative protection Quentin Tarantino received from someone we now know was a serial rapist. A rapist who got his money from…Disney. Oh wait, that was actually a pair of movies. Tarantino got to prepare two original movies with Disney money because Harvey Weinstein liked the cut of his feminist jib so much.

Word is that Gerwig has reached the place where Hollywood will pre-produce multiple movies for her as well, though they’re adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. I learned about this achievement from a tweet saying we’d lost another good underground director to Hollywood. Which is really fucking funny. Did anyone say we’d lost Spike Jonze - a guy who was already making Levi’s ads - to Hollywood when he adapted Maurice Sendak? I remember people responding to that news, basically, with “hey, that might be dope.” Or when Tarantino pitched making a Star Trek movie? I remember people basically suggesting, “hey, that might be dope.” What is it about when Martin Scorsese makes a twisted reboot of a Robert Mitchum thriller with extra tattoos that makes people say “hmmm, I’ll withhold judgment/buy tickets,” while people shriek “what price Hollywood?” when a former indie darling wants to adapt a legendary fantasy series from the 1950s? Well, not every indie darling gets that shriek. I don’t recall Peter Jackson, director of Heavenly Creatures and Meet The Feebles, getting much push-back when he signed up to do Tolkien…for Harvey Weinstein. (Yes, yes, Weinstein passed over the rights, but that’s who the then-pride of New Zealand indie cinema, not yet finished with The Frighteners, pitched it to).

But Anthony, you might say - I hate that stuff too! And you might, to some degree, be an equal-opportunity crank about all things Hollywood. But it’s 2023, and we need to leave the fantasy of “equal opportunity” hatorade back with the Denis Leary MTV ad we got it from. You might be willing to decry sell-outs of all creeds and colors, but it’s pretty blatantly clear who we forgive and who we pile on in the aggregate. There’s a certain fire to the expression of outrage when Hollywood asks us to respect something feminine. We might roll our eyes when attractive woman wants to fuck Seth Rogen in a movie, but it gets none of the loud, furious dismissal men give Sarah Jessica Parker or Barbra Streisand when they claim to be Helens Of Troy. It’s easy for men (and women! A sexist culture is internalized by everybody, after all) to find female vanity and audacity a little more egregious or offensive than men’s. A little less common, a little more worth complaining about. Stanley Kowalski might be shitty to his poker buddies, but it’s Blanche DuBois that really got on his bad side. And I think it’s worth second guessing how that bile plays out in your own behavior.

Again, you don’t have to be excited for Barbie. You can totally hate Hollywood’s commercialism, and balk at the relative comfort your friends have with it. I’m just saying I’m too cognizant of how being raised in a sexist culture might play into my personal disinterest in this movie, and I don’t want to rationalize that away. That’s not the kind of asshole I want to be, even if I accept I’m the kind of asshole that writes a thinkpiece about Barbie discourse without having seen it. If you want, you can do even better, and just say “not my thing.”