2023-08-20 03:59:39
The film Barbie caused a lot of ink to flow. Is it a feminist masterpiece or a by-product of the patriarchal system? Or something else?…
I wanted to understand why so many audiences – more than a billion dollars, that’s the revenue collected in three weeks by the film, 4,400,000 admissions in France – including some among spectators with very fine opinions on the cinema, went to see it.
The film is signed Greta Gerwig, darling of American independent cinema, adored actress and director of four films including the overrated Lady Bird (2017) et The Daughters of Doctor March (2019), adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel and progressive remake of George Cukor’s excellent version (1933).
Barbie is a pop musical, soft and hysterical at the same time, served by its garish colors, the ubiquitous nauseating pink and blue and its failed musical scenes. After her mediocre dramatic comedy, Greta Gerwig slaughters the musical comedy, one of the genres of excellence of American cinema of the golden age.
Read also: Barbie and our plastic feminism
But the interest is elsewhere, because the film succeeds in being both an advertisement to sell Barbie toys and a comedy that is both feminist and counter-feminist on the great stupidity and vulgarity of our time. The film tells us how, vaccinated with the ideologies in vogue in the United States which have unfortunately won over our old declining Europe, Barbie becomes a feminist and Ken discovers patriarchy.
It’s a staggering stupidity that sometimes reaches an involuntary comic when Ken, played with talent by a Ryan Gosling, excellent in the register of the falot phallocratic imbecile, searches for books on patriarchy, a word that comes up several times in the feature film, which delights the activist Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, a phenomenological feminist. In Teleramashe states that: “Pop culture is also a soft power. Admittedly, it is a trivial and undoubtedly insufficient way of conveying feminist ideas, but it allows discussions and raises questions. […]. The main mechanisms of patriarchy are depicted in a grotesque way, as if to better denounce them”.
As for Barbie the feminist, interpreted by Margot Robbie, she is a Barbie like the others, as can be many of all the women politicians, journalists and other authors who surf on progressive ideologies. She’s pretty, sweet, insubstantial, and feminist, and dreams of becoming a classic, necessarily classic human. All this display of feminism for dummies as Sophie Bachat says is sickening and grotesque. But it is the perfect reflection of our contemporary, modern, progressive and stupid society, and it is revealing of the state of decay of the Hollywood spectacle cinema.
Read also: Degendered in the cradle
On the other hand, Victoire Tuaillon, French journalist and author (1) thinks (still in Telerama) what “To show the reality of the patriarchy, it would have taken rapist, violent Kens… But that was not possible in a film like that”.
It is not for the company Mattel to produce a subversive film, but to make amends, to get in tune with the ideas of the moment in order to continue to sell lots of Barbie dolls, feminists if necessary. Barbie is therefore a cinematographically uninteresting film and a sincere and cynical object, both from a sociological and commercial point of view. We laugh a little, we get bored a lot and above all we waste our time. But you have to believe that the public likes stupidity and boredom…
(1) She notably created and hosts the podcast, “Les couilles sur la table”, which focuses on the construction of masculinities on Binge Audio.
You have just read an open access article.
Talker lives only through its readers, it is the only guarantee of its independence.
To support us, buy Causeur on newsstands or subscribe !
1692512962
#Barbie #bad #joke #Talker
