I begrudgingly went to see the Barbie movie the other day. Alas, as a husband-to-be, these kinda things are the sacrifices one must endure.
Perhaps due to my low expectations going in, I actually found myself pleasantly surprised. It wasn't good per se, but it was better. I hadn't been exposed to any knowledge about the movie other than how the world's cities were coated in a layer of pink as the movie sunk trillions of dollars into advertisement.
First, I am not against ideology being scripted into a show - IF you do it well (Star Trek). The problem is that nobody does it well anymore. Nobody seems capable of executing their ideologies in such refined, classy ways as shows like Star Trek did, instead opting to go with far more crass, in-your-face ways, as if the scripts were written by spoilt, fresh-outta-college teens.
So when I heard people talking about this movie, all I knew were cringey political tweets like 'I took my daughter to see Barbie and when we came out, she asked me 'Mummy, what's a patriarchy?' and I couldn't have been prouder'. My feeds were plagued with such cringe, and I had the impression the movie would just be a blatant overly-political feminist product piece, pummeling my face with anti-white man rhetoric and pro-'you go girl'-ism.
Well, it turned out the movie was a LOT more nuanced than that, and both left and right wing idealogues across the internet didn't really seem to get it. For this, I give Barbie some points; it was anti-patriarchy, but not really anti-men... but there's plenty of people out there discussing the ins and outs of the movie so I'm not going to regurgitate it.
But where the movie succeeds in ideological nuance, if fails where every other modern media product fails:
The people who complain about women in lead roles like this are for the most part not actually sexist, but they are often not very eloquent when it comes to trying to express what is actually bothering them: The fact that its just plain shit, and when you see such agendas being pushed, you know with great accuracy that it's going to be shit. Not because they are women, but because the people writing with political sledgehammers on wet parchment - typically in an attempt to empower women - are guaranteed to be shit. People with such laser-focused narcissism that they can't even shoot their message through an artistic lens don't generally make good scriptwriters.
At times, the Barbie movie gave up entirely on subtlety and just straight up had a woman set up for a drawn-out, cliché whine - preach - about how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world, like it was ripped straight off tick tock.
Let's back to Star Trek. There is barely an episode from pre-2000's that can't make you sit back and think. Each episode can be standalone and still have so much depth in 40 short minutes that you're left in tears, or uncomfortable at a new perspective in life you had never considered before. I can't think of a single message that felt like preaching.
These shows don't tell you what the correct way of thinking should be, nor who is necessarily good and evil. In fact, every character is deeply flawed and their story arcs are a discussion, addressing these flaws and their failings or successes, attempting overcoming them. Decisions evolve at depth to find what might be the 'right' choice, but more often than not, it's left open-ended. Sure, they make a choice, but was it the right one? That's left for you to decide.
I tell you, when you can successfully paint your characters - protagonist AND antagonist - with a brush of uncertainty, you have yourself a show. And I don't mean using the exasperatingly tired 'Not so Different' trope. You know the one:
'You and I are a lot alike' / 'You and I want the same thing'
'I'm NOTHING like you!'
Look at Joker for another great success at character development - A rare gem in modern filmmaking. And, sadly, in contrast look at Picard, a modern Star Trek show that utterly destroys this whole philosophy by throwing darts again and creating almost an AI-generated good vs evil story arc that does nothing whatsoever to flesh any character out or add anything to the already enriched universe. At most, Picard has a son and now he has to be a 95-year-old father, which somehow does nothing to enhance his character who has actually forgotten his confident, Shakespearean roots as a lover of history and architecture, and transformed into a shelled out husk of 'good guy' you can download from Characterdatabase.com.
Even the fucking BORG of Star Trek, the ultimate symbol of cold-blooded, uncaring evil, had nuanced stories in which a Borg drone, disconnected from the main network of hive-like species, learns what it's like to be human again, learning about friendship, struggling to thrive without the voices in his head, and ultimately trying to build a new uprising of a sort against his oppressors, teaching us that there's something deeper underneath the façade of evil.
When you start off a show with a character built of objective perfection, and continue that perfection throughout the show, you're not offering anything to us that makes it worth watching other than 'wow' factor.
With this new movement of feminist media, it's almost as if the very point of empowering women makes it an absolute taboo to portray them in anything other than a state of perfection. So how are we supposed to sympathize? Why on earth should we even care about these characters? Even when the woman starts off as a run-down loser in New York, it's never her fault, it's always some out-of-control force like the patriarchy keeping her down, and her otherwise perfect existence only needs the right circumstance to fully blossom without any need to change from within.
The writers' agendas are too overpowering at this point that they simply don't know how to write anything else other than what glorifies the character they've created. It's BORING and NARCISSISTIC.
Barbie is no different. She's perfect at the beginning, things out of her control fall apart, and then the movie ends by returning to the exact same status quo, empowering her to believe she is, and has always been, uncompromisingly perfect no matter what.
Even Horizon: Forbidden West, a so-far excellent game in every other aspect that I've been playing, has this same problem. The world setting is seemingly a giant matriarchy where women don't need no man, although a lot more tastefully implemented compared to the movie industry. But even so, the main woman is introduced as perfect, the saviour of the world, worshipped across the landscape. She can only do things alone and only eventually begrudgingly has people tag along. Meanwhile, women are doing all the hard labour throughout the world map, even mining rocks and hunting mechanical super beasts, while men are more often than not relegated to dopey religious figures and utterly useless tag-alongs.
There is nothing to criticize about her. She's super strong, super kind, modest and virtuous. I do not relate to her strife in any way whatsoever.
Now, you could say it's not all meant to be so serious, but even comedy is not immune to this necessity. Think Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Nathan For You, Peep Show, Even stand-up comedians follow this formula; every good comedian is a highly flawed, morally questionable individual whose job it is to make you laugh about their problematic ideas enough that you actually start to relate, no matter how taboo; Ricky Gervais, Bill Burr, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle.
Modern media is increasingly deciding this to be too risqué, and limits itself to giving you 'objective' good characters whose journey is simply stamping out the 'objective' bad things around them. Nowhere is this more emphasised than with the recent growth of female-lead casts. Not because they are female, but because the writers are all agenda and no talent.
Don't get me wrong, there's a place for the simple superhero bad-meets-evil format such as in the aforementioned Horizon. But it really ought to stick to just that - superhero flicks.
And that, kids, is the problem with movies these days.
