My mother laid the trap.
“So what are you doing today?” she asked.
I fell in, telling her, in my naive, Lucy-and-the-football fashion.
“We’re going to see the ‘Barbie’ movie,” I said.
“Not ‘Oppenheimer?’” my mother replied.
“No,” I said. “We’ll see that later.”
“Oh,” my mother said. My blood ran cold.
That afternoon, my brother told me that, in their conversation, our mother was perplexed as to why I, the son of a nuclear physicist, presented with the choice between a movie about the father of the atomic bomb and a movie about a plastic doll for girls, would choose the latter.
I was not surprised. All that meaning had been compressed within her single syllable: “Oh.”
In my defense, I’ve already lived “Oppenheimer.” Among my earliest memories is being held over a bubble chamber in my father’s lab to see the subatomic particles flitting around. I’ve watched people use real manipulators — those robots arms at Homer’s nuclear plant in “The Simpsons” — to handle radioactive material at NASA. The linear particle accelerator at Fermilab? I’ve been inside it.
“Barbie” was my call because ... the movie sounded fun. I wanted to do something fun. To celebrate finally giving COVID the boot.
And “Barbie” is fun. It reminded me why people go to the movies in the first place. For two hours, I really was somewhere else, Barbie Land (though not so fully as to fail to notice the movie also spells it “Barbieland.”)
Margot Robbie should win the Academy Award. And Ryan Gosling is Ken. Barbie’s neglected boyfriend, exiled to the periphery of the endless girl’s night dance party. This buff, superfluous figure sadly flexing on the beach for his fellow Kens. I felt for him. As someone who, in my day, has looked into the eyes of my share of Barbie types and realized they were just not into me, I could relate to Ken.
The movie is about the yawning chasm between dreams and the real world. It’s a hero’s journey. “Siddhartha” in high-heeled shoes. Barbie arrives in our chaotic reality and immediately heads to a construction site, expecting to find all women, like on the Supreme Court. Wrong.
Ken, tagging along, is quicker on the uptake, for once. He discovers the world is a patriarchy. Dimwits like himself, whose primary qualification is a Y chromosome, run the place. Cool!
Though Ken thinks the world is run by men and horses, in one of those charmingly daft touches that make the movie. Horses are traditionally a girl thing, and the Kens play the cliched female role: lounge around, look attractive and complain about being ignored. While Barbie grapples with the white men running Mattel, Ken flees back to Barbie Land to remake it in his image.
Of course Fox News whiners are upset. The Barbie movie made me faintly embarrassed to be a guy, one of those pedantic dopes gravely explaining how to swing a tennis racket and talking over “The Godfather.” Spot on.
Here’s where having a sense of humor is crucial. I can’t imagine taking myself so seriously as to get upset by the “Barbie” movie. Conservative blabber Ben Shapiro went on a 43-minute anti-Barbie tirade — 43 minutes! — that begins with him setting Barbies on fire in a trash can. “One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen,” he spits.
Really? There are 10 “Fast & Furious” movies; can’t women have even one movie for themselves? That’s the right-wing fascist mindset in a nutshell. Let Bud Light send one six-pack to one trans influencer and the world comes to an end. Purge the impure!
I’d never watched Shapiro before. He speaks in this twitchy chipmunk voice, making choppy gestures, as if he were a plastic doll himself. No wonder he felt gored by Ken. Nothing in “Barbie” presents a more gelded vision of manhood than the two minutes of Ben Shapiro I could stomach before shrugging and moving on.
I laughed a lot in “Barbie,” but later worried that my wife had been tipped off to what smug prats men are. Had Barbie spilled the beans?
“You don’t think less of me because, you know, the ‘Barbie’ movie?” I asked her, later.
“No,” my wife said. “It wasn’t really about men. It’s about excluding people. Ken was so damaged. When you exclude people, it damages them.”
Yes, exactly. Damages the excluded and, even more so, the excluders.
