Introducing Culture War Barbie?
Elon Musk has entered the Barbie chat by mocking the summer’s biggest box office hit on Twitter (or X, or whatever he’s calling it this week).
The billionaire wrote: “If you take a shot every time Barbie says the word ‘Patriarchy,’ you will pass out before the movie ends.”
Musk was responding to a Barbenheimer meme that compared Twitter to Barbie and his new X name for his social network to Oppenheimer.
He’s the latest to accuse Barbie — from filmmaker Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie — of being left-wing propaganda in the wake of the movie earning the biggest opening weekend of the year, racking up $162 million domestically. Barbie follows “Stereotypical Barbie” (Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they leave Barbieland and journey into the real world following an existential crisis.
Mattel executives have tried to keep the film from being viewed as political. Robbie Brenner, Mattel Films’ executive producer, said the film was “not a feminist movie.” In an interview with Time, Robbie seemed surprised by that claim. “Who said that?” she reportedly asked. “It’s not that it is, or it isn’t. It’s a movie. It’s a movie that’s got so much in it.”
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro went viral over the weekend after breathlessly ripping the film for 43 minutes on YouTube in a clip that’s been viewed 1.6 million times. “The basic sort of premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides and they hate each other. And literally, the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women,” he fumed. He predicted, “[Barbie is] absolutely going to fall off a cliff [at the box office] … repeat business is going to be nonexistent.” Shapiro also set fire to Barbie dolls on a BBQ in protest. His review generated plenty of online mocking of its own (“They finally make a movie for people who are 12 inches tall with no genitals and those people don’t even like it,” tweeted comedy writer Jesse McLaren).
Writing for the New York Post, Piers Morgan opined: “If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking the matriarchy, and depicting all things feminist as toxic bulls–t, I wouldn’t just be canceled, I’d be executed … the movie achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve and that is to establish the matriarchy as the perfect antidote to the patriarchy when in fact it’s just the same concept that they asked us all to detest in the first place.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz accused the movie of “kiss[ing] up to the Chinese communist party because they want to make money selling the movie in China” for its alleged inclusion of the “nine-dash line” on a map that favors China’s territorial claims to the South China Sea (yet he admits he didn’t see the film).
Podcaster Matt Walsh, who made the anti-trans documentary What Is a Woman?, dubbed Barbie “the most aggressively anti-man, feminist propaganda fest ever put to film.”
Ginger Gaetz, the wife of Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, called for a Barbie boycott criticizing Gosling’s Ken’s “disappointingly low T” and “beta energy.”
Yet the vast, vast majority of Barbie viewers don’t seem to agree.
Barbie not only has a 90 percent positive critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, but an equal 90 percent positive audience score, resulting in a rare critical and viewer blockbuster for a title that isn’t a superhero film or an extension of a preexisting cinema franchise. While Barbie towered over Oppenheimer, the three-hour Christopher Nolan historical epic also had a strong performance this weekend, delivering $82 million (and also, oddly enough, had a Rotten Tomatoes number — 94 percent — with the critic score exactly equal to its audience score).
Leading up to Barbie’s release, the creative team and cast spoke about the more than decade-long journey of getting the iconic doll on the big screen, and their vision around the Gerwig movie (which she co-wrote with partner Noah Baumbach) being both a feminist and inclusive take on the toy brand.
Issa Rae, who plays President Barbie, told Time that the point of the movie is to portray a world where there isn’t a singular ideal: “My worry was that it was going to feel too white feminist-y, but I think that it’s self-aware. Barbie Land is perfect, right? It represents perfection. So if perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anybody can get on board with that.”
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