Since this week, Greta Gerwig Barbie broke multiple records and generated a staggering $1 billion in global ticket sales. There is no doubt that people, women and girls in particular, in many parts of the world, go to the theater to see a white, blonde, telegenic Barbie muse on death and patriarchy.
And why not?
The Pink Tide and the Apocalypse
The past few years of the pandemic have been miserable for most people, and again, for women and girls in particular. In the United States, an estimated 2 million women left the workforce to provide unpaid care for children and the elderly when schools and social services abruptly closed their doors. According to the United Nations Population Fund, there were 1.4 million unintended pregnancies worldwide in just the first year of the pandemic, affecting almost 2 million women in 115 low- and middle-income countries. having lost access to contraceptive services. While we have all been “sheltering in place,” domestic violence against women and children has increased around the world. As if that wasn’t enough, Roe c.Wade was canceled in the United States amid a devastating increase in violence, both legal and physical, against trans people. In India, the openly Islamophobic government, led by Narendra Modi, oversaw a needless carnival of death when its COVID-related policies, or lack thereof, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Russia invaded Ukraine in the largest military attack since World War II. Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires have reminded us all that the planet has had enough of capitalism.
In this rolling apocalypse, if a film comes with its magic wand and grants us a respite for a few hours, how can we refuse? Barbiefor a brief moment, brought films back to their original primary function: to soothe and entertain.
There is, however, something more specific in the crowds of women and girls, mothers and daughters, friends and cousins, who flock to the theater. Barbie gave them rare permission: to be frivolous and childish. There are many films that emphasize granting men endless childhoods. From Star Wars and Marvel Comics to the entire video game universe, a dizzying array of choices are available to men to continue living in this ever-expanding fantasy land of battles, superheroes and, frankly, very loud noises. strong. For women, cinematic choices are romantic or poignant bildungsroman pieces. But don’t you sometimes tire of the poignant? Barbie takes women back to the days when they played with dolls, but without pious reminders of the passing of time, or any noble moral lessons. The furniture, the clothes all resonate, loaded with memories for many women, but you don’t get that cringe-worthy aftertaste of regret and nostalgia that you find in many coming-of-age films. Instead, you come away with froth and bubbles mixed with Oprah’s book club analysis of patriarchy. In a world where abortion care is very limited and the planet seems on fire, what is not a bad thing.
Barbie, Inc.
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know Barbie does race and gender reasonably well. Think about the moment when Ryan Gosling as Ken, fascinated by the sexist real world, exclaims, “Why didn’t Barbie tell me about the patriarchy?” Or his comment that “horses are only extenders of men.” Of course, the highlight is America Ferrera’s powerful monologue about what it means to be a woman that “wakes up” all the brainwashed Barbies. No prince’s kiss or “white savior Barbie” for Greta Gerwig.
Like many neoliberal phenomena, Barbie is strong and often hilarious about gender and race. It asks all of us, women and queer people, to aim for the sky, to break the glass ceiling. Not long ago, some of us asked this question of neoliberal feminism: When the glass ceiling is shattered, who cleans the shards from the floor? Amid the perfectly proportioned black President Barbies and the superbly manicured Surgeon Barbies, we wonder who cleans the Dream House, who wipes the counters, who struggles with minimum wage jobs. And is Black President Barbie ordering drone strikes in the Middle East? Before you roll your eyes at this humorless, socialist feminist point, let me clarify. The problem is not that class issues are not represented in the film. The problem is comment we answer them.
America Ferrera tells us:
You have to have money, but you can’t ask for it because it’s rude. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t crush other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the time. You have to be a career woman but also always listen to others.
This is a Hillary Clinton campaign speech. This is not the everyday advice that working-class mothers are forced to give to their daughters around the world to ensure that they at least complete high school or come home safe the night after their work in a call center. An ideal of bourgeois childhood where we seek success In capitalism, is described as universal, made more acceptable by the expression of a woman of color. Not surprisingly, Mattel is asking women to be bosses, not fight them. We can laugh at the patriarchy but without fearing corporations.
Such a rehabilitation story makes the joint release of Barbie et Oppenheimer particularly appropriate. Barbie, in more ways than one, is a quintessential product of World War II. Although it arrived first in 1959, the Mattel company was co-founded by Ruth Handler and her husband in 1945. Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14, 1945, with an estimated loss of 2.6 to 3. 1 million lives and 56 billion dollars. Contrary to the mythical figure of 70,000 put forward by Robert Oppenheimer for the number of deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death toll from the atomic attacks was probably close to 200,000, without taking into account the long-term effects of radiation on populations for generations to come.
It was to this country, on their knees, that the Handlers transferred the production of Barbie. The Oppenheimer Bomb, among other things, reduced Barbie’s labor costs. By the end of 1964, Barbie was “supporting” more than 5,000 workers in Japan. When Japan’s economy began to recover, it once again made its way to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and finally China, unerringly setting its arched foot toward countries with low labor costs. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal estimated an annual salary of $6,300 for the average Mattel worker. And unlike the reconciliation America Ferrera’s Mattel worker gets in the film, Mattel is no stranger to strike-breaking and layoffs.
Barbie, feminism and solutions
If the effects of capitalist patriarchy are most often felt individually, its solutions can only be collective. Liberal feminism teaches us that solutions are also individual and that they arise when a minority of women are part of the elite. In a time of global conservative backlash, it’s important to see female doctors, female astronauts, and female presidents on screen. Let us see them having a good time. That we hear words and phrases like “patriarchy” and “sexualized capitalism” from a teenage girl (Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha). But the problem lies with capitalism. If a handful of women can become CEOs, it’s only because the vast majority of women clean the windows of the broken ceiling.
Barbie because a film went as far as Mattel, its financial backer, allowed it. The same ideological restrictions may not apply to all the women, girls and men who flock to the cinema to watch Barbie.
What if Ariana Greenblatt’s words and America Ferrara’s speech “woke them up”?
2023-09-11 21:21:30
#Barbie #lets #laugh #patriarchy #expense #corporations
