Guest “Reviews of Films I Haven’t Seen” – Barbie:  A Movie We Didn’t See!

By Nunka Weimberger

Reviewing a movie has never been easier! Since the advent of social media, with its posting, reposting, tweeting, retweeting, X-ing, trolling, fake newsing, Meta-ing, Musking, Zucking, podcasting, and opinion-influence on a complex and totalizing level never before seen in human history, actually “seeing” a movie is no longer relevant. What a timesaver! Those postmodernists and critical theorists were right all along: a creator’s original “text” is neither original nor creative. It is neither facetious nor dismissive to say that critiquing a movie, particularly a well-known pic that has everyone talking, in no way necessitates viewing it. Rather, since an artistic work like a movie is really but a sum of interconnected, sometimes contrasting, ideas articulated through whatever means the filmmakers, the audience, the critics (both one and the same, respectively), the culture warriors, and the injured cultural civilian bystanders have at their respective disposals, from Substack to talking just loud enough to trigger the people at the next table in the airport cafeteria, we are as engaged as any authority could hope to be with virtually new movie. In fact, arguably, by not having seen a movie, we become experts. And if we haven’t heard of a particular movie? No matter. Our not-having-heard-of-it is our point of departure. Plus, since nothing is original, what does it matter whether we have “heard” of it? Hearing of things is so 2004.

Barbie is a movie based on a doll invented by a Jewish woman in 1959 and meant generally to dissuade North Americans from wanting to look like and/or date Jewish women—and also, nonwhite women.

In today’s review, though, we have very much heard of the movie we’ve not seen: Barbie! Barbie is a movie based on a doll invented by a Jewish woman in 1959 and meant generally to dissuade North Americans from wanting to look like and/or date Jewish women—and also, nonwhite women. At the time when the Barbie doll was born, in all her plastics-era glory, there were no official “people of color.” Nineteen Fifty-Nine was a different time. Presidents were bald, white men who still wore hats. If you were red you were not in fact a “real” American. Sorta the opposite, in fact. If you wanted to build roads, highways, and railroad bridges you were a radical Bolshevik named… Dwight D. Eisenhower. Barbie had a mane of blonde hair and a figure the result of what most experts agree was mishandled orthopedic traction in childhood. To their cred, though, the people who made and marketed Barbie kept her up-to-date and later invented versions of her for kids who didn’t look like the blonde, atomically Caucasian original. Barbie even got a bestie named Ken, whom she swore never to marry. So take that, patriarchy.

The 114 minutes we spent not watching Barbie were passed napping, reading, and concluding at long-last which is better, Waterloo or La Croix.

We must say, we enjoyed not-seeing this movie. The 114 minutes we spent not watching Barbie were passed napping, reading, and concluding at long-last which is better, Waterloo or La Croix. (Spoiler: Waterloo. We’re not sure why that’s a “spoiler” exactly but, like “gaslighting,” we are intent on reusing it.). This is in no way meant to critique the film’s director, Greta Gerwig, its cowriter Noah Baumbach, or its stars, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. All told, seems like they have done a competent job of updating a doll many first wave feminists find toxic. But the truth is that the only thing toxic about Barbie are the fumes issuing from her as Ben Shapiro burns her. Just how many Barbies does that guy own, he can go and burn ‘em all up?! Also, the movie has so far made over a billion dollars which means it must be good, it can’t be bad, there is no other way to look at it, because that’s the only way.

Barbie seems to confirm that being pink on the outside is okay, as well as being pink on the inside, unless you’re aiming for medium-well. But since no one is at all well these days, why not be pink all over? The Z-Gen kids seem cool with it, even if their feminist foremothers are uneasy with Barbie. The latter may feel that their hard-won victories over the decades have somehow been undone by the current Barbification of culture, but we don’t concur. We just think the Z kids have the luxury of a more nuanced take on pop culture—a luxury first wave-femmers helped create for them. So let ‘em have it. If they live through the mass shootings and democracy-assaultings of our time, they are probably going to be engulfed in wildfire flames or drowned in a tsunami before they hit forty. Let ‘em enjoy a movie about a toy they loved.