Barbenheimer is upon us. The pink bomb exploded in theatres, marking the best weekend for cinemas since Avengers: Endgame, as well as giving us the first time in history that two movies opened above $80 million together. The natural phenomenon of the pair propelled both to new heights, with audiences showing up in droves for something new. Both movies are very different, and that’s part of why Barbenheimer even became a thing in the first place. But they share one deep similarity: they are grossly misunderstood movies.
The misread on Oppenheimer is simple - people have assumed that the movie is about World War 2 and the bomb itself, and so are critical of the lack of other perspectives. It’s not: it’s very particularly about the life of one man, whose name appears in the title. Others have assumed the movie is supportive of the bomb, the US military, and generally glorifies Oppenheimer’s legacy. It’s not: it’s very particularly about his regret.
With Oppenheimer, the misunderstandings stem from assumptions from those who have not seen the movie. With Barbie, people are coming away with completely the wrong idea. Complaints that the movie is anti-men is a major misread of what the movie is trying to say and reveals far more about your own philosophy on life and expectations for cinema than it does about Barbie itself.
The plot of Barbie is very simple - in Barbie Land, the Barbies are in charge and the Kens are just kinda there. After Barbie and Ken go to the real world, Ken realises men are in most positions of power, and brings these ideas back to Barbie Land. Ken takes over, and it’s not until Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) teams up with the other outcasts that order is restored.
The criticism that this is ‘anti-men’ is founded on a very thin reading of the movie. Things are good when the women are in charge, bad when the men are in charge, and then good again at the happy ending when the women are in charge again. Therefore, men are bad. But that’s not at all what the movie is saying.
There are three central characters in the movie: Stereotypical Barbie, her Ken (Ryan Gosling), and her real world owner Gloria (America Ferrera). They all share the same problem - they don’t know their place in the world. Barbie seems satisfied but becomes increasingly frustrated by her life of routine and lack of consequences, Ken is overly dependent on a Barbie who doesn’t love him back, and Gloria is a frustrated artist struggling to connect with her daughter.
This has been diluted down to Ken being a figure of fun because Barbie doesn’t love him, but despite Gosling’s highly comedic performance, he’s not just there to be laughed at. The point is not that Ken is an idiot and all men are stupid and bad, it’s that you need to find who you are. Ken has no personality of his own until he moves on from Barbie in his Mojo Dojo Casa House. While he eventually goes too far and struggles to live up to the expectations placed on his own sense of masculinity (a major part of the movie, that identity crises happen to men too), Ken is more like himself when he’s just Ken, not Barbie & Ken. ‘Just’ Ken has been taken as a criticism, as if he is less than. But what it means is that he is enough (or Kenough) by himself, not needing to be attached to Barbie.
Ken has no real identity in Barbie Land, and when he brings back patriarchy, he has to force himself to be something he is not in order to fit in. The point of the movie is not that men are bad, it’s that in a male dominated society, men have to fit into a very particular and often aggressive identity in order to be accepted. Allan, who rejects this, is shunned by this society despite being a man.
The most the film gets into anti-male territory is when it depicts its visions of ideal societies, and explores the ideas around what each gender desires. In the female-dominated society, the men are just there. They don’t have any real role or purpose. In the male dominated society, the women have a very specific role as servants. The women are dressed as maids or cheerleaders, serve the men beer and give them foot rubs. Women fantasise about a world free of men and men fantasise about a world where they control women.
But this critique of societal power systems and incisive depiction of gendered fantasies, so on the money its biggest detractors don’t even recognise them, is not anti-men. People are complaining that the movie shows the female-dominated world as perfect, but a key motivator for both Barbie and Ken throughout the movie is that the world is not perfect, and that is why they do not fit in there.
To say that the roles our patriarchal society casts men and women into is a bad thing is not inherently anti-men. Ken says as much himself - he’s Ken, anywhere else he’d be a ten. He’s good looking, charming, caring, and enthusiastic. But he does not fit into a world where his self-worth comes either from the attention of a woman who doesn’t love him back or the power of ruling when to do so he must live up to an idealised version of masculinity.
The moral of Barbie, very reductively, is to be yourself. It is geared more towards women and focuses on their struggles more than Ken’s, but it’s one of the few movies to do that. You can see movies that centre on men’s struggles every weekend of the year. It’s not anti-men for one in a hundred movies to focus on women, especially when that movie still highlights the issues men face in the society they have built.
There’s one movie in theatres right now about the violence of being alive, the control we each hold over each other, the dangers of unchecked power, and the cruelty of those who sit in judgement over the rest of society. The other one is Oppenheimer.