this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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I felt like the movie started in one direction and was putting down men. Not necessarily in a wrong way (a lot of it was a critique of patriarchy which is both true and necessary for a feminist movie.) But halfway through writing the movie they realized that an inevitable conclusion to the whole message of the movie was that the Kens were also victims of the system and they needed a positive plot arc. The movie tries to do it, but unlike Barbie the Kens don't really do anything to earn their progression and it feels shoehorned in because they wrote themselves into a corner.
It also really enforces the whole binary gender role thing which is not a great message. I'm a straight cis dude but I shouldn't be locked into all the straight cis dude tropes, and neither should anyone else be wholly defined by their gender identity and sexual orientation.
Yeah that's a pretty prominent criticism I've heard. The movie is stuck somewhere between 2nd and 3rd wave feminism and tries to grasp at more modern ideas but framing it through Barbie makes it very difficult.
I don't blame them though, for a full blown Hollywood movie with that size budget it's impressive they got what they had.
I didn't interpret it like that at all.
The initial Barbieland is depicted as an inverse society where Barbie's are in power and Ken's are just there as an addendum (way less toxic than reality yes, because it's toy world not real world).
Then after contact with the real world, Ken completely misrepresents reality in his toy/simplistic way, and tries to implement it in Barbieland, with the objective that if he does so he will be able to be with the sole reason for his existence. That pain is also explored.
Finally, after some talks, the conclusion that Ken can be his own person is reached, this is not that developed because the movie is about Barbie ffs.
To me personally, the Kens were initially a simplistic depiction of women in the real world, which then gets tangled up with the actual real world, and end up with some societal progress for the Kens, albeit small, and a huge emotional progress for them.
It's normal that their societal progress is small, since women in the real world didn't get the rights they have from day to night.
I definitely agree that the movie is about Barbie so it makes sense that the Kens get sidelined.
But to my point, I think you're describing what I'm talking about. The Kens rubber band around between being the oppressed group in the gender reversed Barbie society, to being the cartoonish patriarchy that stands in so that Barbie can self actualize.
Actually as I type this out I guess you could interpret it as Ken then doing a cartoonish version of self-actualization with the funny song and dance after Barbie has the real emotional arc of the movie.