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Hold on: I thought it was the wimpish new left that loses its rag over “offensive” culture. Aren’t snowflakes usually self-styled radicals, with multicolored hair and pronouns in their bios, who rage like overgrown children against movies or books or jokes that rattle their fragile sensibilities? Yet now it’s men on the right, blokes who no doubt consider themselves resilient, who are bawling like babies over a film they don’t like.
The film is the Barbie movie. The men are Ben Shapiro, Piers Morgan and an army of unwoke bros on the internet. They’re all flapping with fury over Barbie’s “man-hating agenda.” The speed with which these blokish critics of snowflakery have themselves turned into snowflakes — getting swept up in a blizzard of faint-hearted horror over a film they don’t like — has been extraordinary. Perhaps the poor dears need a safe space?
First out of the gate was Shapiro. He made a YouTube video titled “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes.” That’s a hard pass from me. Shapiro felt so wounded by Barbie, especially by the pot-shots it takes at the patriarchy, that he filmed himself burning Barbie and Ken dolls. It brings to mind those watery-eyed trans allies who burn Harry Potter books as a form of medieval protest against the speech-crimes of the witch J.K. Rowling.
Shapiro, of course, has criticized Potter burnings. “Leftists are now burning Harry Potter books because they are triggered by J.K. Rowling’s alleged ‘transphobia’ and ‘fatphobia,’” he huffed on Facebook in 2020. And yet now you, my friend, are burning dolls because you’re triggered by a movie. In both cases a pre-modern purging is being carried out, with snowflakes sacrificing to Vulcan’s flames the source of their emotional pain in the hope that it might help alleviate their suffering.
What the right-wing snowflakes hate about Barbie, directed by indie-film queen Greta Gerwig, is its swipes at the patriarchy. In a nutshell, Barbie, played by the dazzling Margot Robbie, lives in Barbieland, where women rule. She then goes to the real world — well, California — where she discovers that, actually, men mostly rule. Ken (a superb Ryan Gosling) quite likes the real-world patriarchy, so he brings it back to Barbieland and all kinds of camp chaos ensues as a result.
“It’s brain cancer in movie form… it’s just a man-hating propaganda film,” wail bros on the internet about Gerwig’s storyline. Piers Morgan’s critique is a little more sophisticated, but only just. The moral of this horrible “woke” movie is that “men are evil oppressors [and] women are unimpeachably perfect victims,” he laments. He reckons that if he made a film in which the men were brilliant and the women idiots, “I wouldn’t just be canceled, I’d be executed.” Really? Surely you can maintain some perspective even during a fit of the vapors.
Are the Barbie-bashers right? Is the film “woke?” Well, yes and no. Of course it has a pop-feminist storyline. If you’re surprised that an official Barbie movie made in the year 2023 has a girl-power message, you can’t be very culturally clued-up. But it’s a nuanced film. It takes digs at “wokeness” too. When one of the girls in the real world yells at Barbie, calling her a fascist and an avatar of the excesses of modern capitalism, it’s clearly a parody of the hyperbole and pomposity of the TikTok generation.
What’s more, that things are perfect in Barbieland but less so in the real world feels like a calling into question of one of the key shibboleths of the twenty-first century left: namely, that “representation” can help bring about equality. In Gerwig’s story, women are represented perfectly in Barbieland — as presidents, judges, astronauts and whatnot — while in reality things are not so clear-cut. Perhaps the politics of representation is not enough, this clever film ponders.
More important than all of that, though, is that Barbie is fun. You remember fun, Ben, Piers, everyone? Gerwig has given us a ridiculous riot of pink and campiness and caricature and song. The molten fury some right-wing men feel towards this film brings to mind the protests against Life of Brian in 1979 or The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. Indeed, some Christians are also boycotting Barbie on the basis that it is “demonic”. Everyone needs to calm down, and fast.
The mad overreaction to a movie about a life-sized doll speaks to today’s culture of fragility and intolerance. The great irony of Shapiro and Morgan damning Barbie as “woke” is that their sad, frail response to the film is what’s really “woke.” If “wokeness” means anything, surely it means a censorious sensitivity to culture and ideas that do not accord with your own values? I see that far more in the self-pitying backlash against Gerwig’s fun film than I do in the film itself.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website. Subscribe to the World edition here.
