Feeling Cynical About Barbie

I don't know dog I know I'm supposed to be excited about Barbie but I'm just not I used to love playing with Barbies I wouldn't even let my parents give away my Swan Lake doll when they moved last year and talk you know as well as anyone that I'm the biggest fan of the BCU I've watched Barbie in A Christmas Carol every year I know all the lyrics to I am a girl like you I just don't know what's wrong with me I thought wearing pink and going to the Cineplex with my friends and screaming along with my fellow Millennials would cure me but I can't shake this feeling you caught a help me talk I think I might be cynical about Barbie [Music] people love Barbie like really love Barbie and I get it the movie is fun it's hot pink it's called Innovative sets fun costumes pretty hilarious jokes a stacked and diverse cast who delivered some amazing performances a really great score in highly choreographed musical numbers a self-reflexive message about Barbie's complicated role in pop culture a beloved woman director and best of all it's for girls it's for girls well actually it's for women it's for fully grown women but still it's for girls and we love that especially since every movie that comes out these days is some gunpilled action film with ripped guys and spandex whereas the Barbie movie it's pink of course people love Barbie but people love Barbie so much that it's become a bit immune to criticism like when I posted an update on my Community page vaguely insinuating that I was Barbie critical saying uh we're talking about this next the response was largely if you have a negative opinion about this movie I'm unsubscribing it's a little hyperbolic but someone did actually say that the other responses were more like people panicking good uh why the uh you did not like it people getting annoyed your take already sounds contrarian cool but I am in no mood for Pick Me girl contrarian realness so I may or may not finish watching your video depending on the take people worrying I'd make a video about feminism I swear to God it's about The Superficial feminism every single female piece of media has to be torn to shreds and the rest is fine because it's what's expected people worrying I'd make a video about capitalism don't think I want another I don't care if you make a great movie have passion towards making it put in a meticulous amount of attention to detail in every aspect and treat that film with the respect and care it deserves it's still a toy commercial because that is the most banal and useless criticism of all time in all seriousness I hope this video isn't just film bad because capitalism and people for the most part being like just chill just a fun great movie people are real defensive about the Barbie movie which today seems like it should be shocking but it really isn't for one the movie in all its she's everything and he's just Ken Glory became the inevitable punching bag of right-wing grifters like Piers Morgan Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz whose media literacy extends no further than their own straw man politics they said the movie which portrays a Barbie Universe where men are relegated to second-class status was an assault on men obviously failing to see The Wider message in the film which we have to spoon feed the boys every once in a while the patriarchy hurts everyone not just women so it's natural and fair that people will be quick to defend it from bad faith actors someone actually sarcastically said that I should collab with Ben Shapiro under the post which just chill the other reason people are so defensive about it is because when the movie was first announced last year there were some on the internet who accused as director Greta Gerwig of selling out Gerwig had previously been understood as a darling of the mumblecore movement and director of the two character forward dramas ladybird and Little Women so people were confused that she would ever sign on to such a big budget corporate project like this except her Asian quickly Stamped Out this criticism when they told a New Yorker that gerwig's ambition is not to be the biggest woman director but a big Studio director since other Indie darling directors like taika ytt for example have worked with corporate franchises before the disproportionate vitriol against Gerwig seemed misogynistic and it's true she definitely receives more criticism as a whole from the public than any male director and much fewer people raised this critique against ytt or her partner Noah bombach who co-wrote Barbie you didn't see anyone haranguing Christopher Nolan when he made Batman Begins but because gurwig is a woman we're all sharpening her pitchforks man directors do not get forked but in a similar fashion to ytt gerwig's Artistic stroke on the Barbie movie was widely anticipated and eventually lauded by critics and audiences alike gerwick has already proven that she can write nuanced Artful films about women they say so she's actually the perfect person to be signing on to this since the 50s Barbie's been placed on the feminist chopping block at least once a decade for her hypersexual blonde wayfish girl boss brand of Womanhood some may say that she has no place in our current cultural landscape but Gerwig made sure that this iteration of Barbie would this movie would feature not only the blonde wayfish woman but also every woman in a sort of Barbie Multiverse Barbie land is a place where every single Barbie put out by Mattel the archival ones and the more diverse ones they rolled out in recent years live in harmony and the stereotypical Barbie Marco Robbie's Barbie would be challenged redeemed and put to rest as a figure of the past so actually the movie does belong in our current feminist climate people are so happy with gurrig's artistic Flair that Barbie has been touted as savior of Cinema it came out the same weekend as Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated Oppenheimer biopic and the two films generated so much hype that bourbonheimer has been a trending topic on Twitter for multiple weeks now it has its own literal Wikipedia page and barberheimer doesn't even auto correct on the Google Doc I wrote the script in that is how big it is people have been shouting thank yous to the heavens the creative and thoughtful films like Barbie and Oppenheimer are dominating the box office and not superhero movies I mean they didn't even use CGI those are real bombs Barbie and Oppenheimer restored the industry to its natural function of True Blue Cinema and not the cgi-laden schlock being funneled into our veins every month the movies have been saved actually and I'm so sorry to keep using you as an example someone even wrote on my community post my hope is that the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer combined with the strikes will Foster a new era of more creative and original films and exactly that which is contributing to this cynical about Barbie's sickness that I'm Afflicted with foreign [Music] has come out at a very very tumultuous moment in movie history if you didn't know there are strikes happening in Hollywood right now basically the alliance of motion picture and television producers or amptp which represents most of the major Hollywood Studios like Paramount Sony Netflix Disney and Warner Brothers yes the studio that made Barbie have upended their traditional business models in favor of new ones new business models that save them a lot a lot of money on labor costs like streaming which is completely flips the TV networks on their heads and made it so that writers and actors no longer make residuals on reruns actually they make pennies next to what networks used to pay some of the stars of Netflix's Orange is the New Black were on food stamps while that show was running the studios and streamers have also proposed to replace a lot of writers with generative AI they're already doing it with illustrators so why not just throw the whole thing out I guess right now they're proposing to have background actors who already make no money mind you come in for a day of work and have their likeness replicated by AI which the studio can then reuse in perpetuity but the actor won't get residuals for the recycling of their face they'll get paid for the one day they came into set there's a lot more but what you need to know is that it's really really really bad so the writer's Union the wga and the actors Union sag-aftra are striking to let the studios know what the value of their labor is I'm going to disclaim here that I had to think long and hard about making this video since sag-aftra one of the Union striking cautions non-union influencers from promoting struck material meaning material made by one of the companies they're striking against but the thing is I consider myself more of a film critic than an influencer and film critics are exempt from these guidelines and since I don't get paid by these Studios and thus my striking wouldn't have any material impact on them whatsoever actually I am constantly at war with Warner Brothers who constantly try to make money off my work I've decided instead to show my support for the strike in a different way I want to use my platform to raise some awareness about the strike within the context of a film which probably made Warner Brothers a few hundred thousand dollars in the time it took me to tell you this writers and actors are out of work studios are hemorrhaging money by the day but they refuse to budge the amptp actually said verbatim that the end game is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses saying it's a cruel but necessary evil yeah evil is a good word for it so things are very very bad right now for the film industry potentially the worst they've ever been so the idea that corporate edgy Barbie which is fattening Warner Brothers Pockets right now is going to change the course of Cinema or change the realities of workers in the industry is straight up far-fetched the movie industry has always been profit driven yes but these strikes are the culmination of a decade-long tirade among the Hollywood Majors to secure the bottom line at whatever cost and the cost is a collapse not only in the material conditions for people who work in the industry but also in the types of films we're seeing on the big screen remember the whole no one haranged Christopher Nolan when he made Batman Begins argument okay here's my thing Batman Begins came out in 2005. Barbie came out now and now is the culmination of a full decade of Hollywood reboots remake sequels prequels and spin-offs like these were the trailers that played before Barbie the Marvels trolls 2 Hunger Games the prequel Blue Beetle a DC movie if anyone cares and Wonka every single movie was a big budget movie made from existing IP so yeah now is a time where this is all the theaters will play now it's when almost every High grossing movie is capitalizing on our arrested adolescence dragging out 90s and 2000's children's IP and repackaging it for fully grown adults now is when the studios are trying their absolute best to erase the humanity of their workforces to protect that precious bottom line I am a broken record at this point but I think nothing will ever change if we ignore that now is absolutely unfathomably depressing I don't think it's necessarily Greta Gerwig it's the moment it's now I think I would have loved Barbie if it was 2005 but it just isn't and to be honest as one of her loudest Defenders I think it's okay to criticize Gerwig for so passionately aligning herself with the majors at this point in time sure directors need to make money and the industry has become completely hostile towards anyone wanting to make original mid-budget character forward content directors need to survive to and sure if you're going to have to work with one of these franchises at least you can make a more artfully driven and subversive film from within which is what she seems to be attempting to do here but gerwick didn't say that she needed to work with the majors she said that she wants to and to me that's worthy of criticism and if we're going along the lines of Barbie being artfully driven and subversive I really don't think the movie proved that the odd tour model of filmmaking was enough to subvert the corporate franchise film I don't think it saved Cinema I think it's part of the problem [Music] people keep going well at least Barbie was in good hands at least it was made by someone who's creative and passionate about their craft at least it was a subversive big budget movie and you may as well make that because it's not like they're gonna stop making them but was it subversive a little bit like the script is influenced by works of literature Like Paradise Lost and Reviving Ophelia and clearly borrows a lot of visual references from older Hollywood like 50s musicals and Planet of the Apes like yeah it's an inspired film and it's very creative in the way it's situated Barbie within this current cultural climate like the whole Barbie land Multiverse is really well executed and I think it's one of the strongest parts of the film but honestly I felt like the story was kind of underdeveloped Gerwig has said that Barbie is meant to be a mother-daughter movie but the real world plotline with America Ferreira and her daughter felt super rushed the daughter who's Barbie critical comes around on Barbie near the end of the film but I guess this just happens off screen maybe somewhere in the travel Montage between the real world and Barbie land where it feels like a lot of the storylines seem to just disappear many plot points like this are tied up by like single quippy sentences and don't exactly feel earned by the time the film is done it just felt very rushed and maybe it's rushed because so so much of the run time is taken up by the characters telling us out loud what the themes of the movie are almost nothing is shown through the storytelling at one point America Ferreira launches into this monologue about how difficult it is to be a woman and it just fell flat for me because it seemed like it was designed to generate snaps from the audience I think Gerwig tried to dance around the landmine that was making a movie about a controversial doll with a fraud history by doing this abstract tongue-in-cheek meta commentary thing and sometimes it worked but after a while it just kind of got tedious and people say of course it's on the nose the movie's for kids but for one there are so many kids movies that don't spoon feed us their messages like we don't need to treat child audiences like they're stupid and two I don't think it's for kids which I'll get into but that's how I felt about it you are entitled to like the Barbie movie the film was fine it's structural and thematic shortcomings are not what sent me into a depressive spiral when I left the theater it was something else altogether going back to that hole and sorry it's actually nothing against you guys you just gave me so much to work with that whole it's still a toy commercial is the most banal and useless criticism of all time comment if we are past being critical of Corporations trying to sell us stuff through ART then we may as well give up to be able to identify when you're being manipulated as a viewer is a tenet of media literacy and I don't think we should ever throw that away just because someone you like made the propaganda propaganda can be well made but we should still point out that it's propaganda Richard Brody the renowned New Yorker critic wrote in his gushing review of Barbie Barbie is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making pre-existing subjects one's own and to advocates for imaginative infidelity the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property but Barbie isn't off label this isn't the most popular girls in school or a Todd Haynes film if you want to talk subversion watch those Mattel is one of the film's co-producers and here is where the spiral Begins for me Barbie is a kid's toy right but everything in the Barbie movie felt like it was tailor-made for me a 26 year old who wants to crawl back into the womb the entire movie was crafted for Millennials and Elder gen's ears bringing back childhood icons like America Ferreira and early 2010's hunk Ryan Gosling who was amazing but way aged out of the role if we're trying to appeal to today's youngsters and as I looked around the theater at all the other adult girlies wearing their pink Barbie shirts something clicked for me the film reckons with the fact that Barbie is having trouble in our current cultural climate of course it explains this away with the idea that kids are opting out of Barbie for political reasons and not because it's hard to get kids excited about toys when not even the best parents can suction them off their iPads but either way we know inside and outside the film The Barbie is flopping right now and if you can't make kids love her you better well sell her to the adult babies who will this generation is Nostalgia pilled and Mattel knows it but it also knows that our generation are feminists and that we're critical of capitalism so maybe it's time to take a leaf out of Disney's Playbook and get a bit Postman turn with it remember how Disney's been doing this really annoying thing for the past decade where it takes well-known IP from its library and uses the brand recognition and Nostalgia associated with that IP to rehabilitate its image song episodes never happened just look over there Bell is telling us girls should be allowed to read every Disney remake that gets farted out each year is a sardonic self-aware take on Disney's less than perfect past Mattel saw this and said self-awareness got it if we criticize ourselves before the audience does then we're safe so they wrote themselves into the movie as a bunch of Suits a board composed entirely of men and helmed by a pink shirt wearing Will Ferrell doing his usual sleazy goof routine as CEO the worst Mattel does in the film is attempt to put Barbie in a literal and metaphorical box but for the most part they're played for Laughs a gaggle of silly male suits running around and knocking heads like a bunch of dodos in one scene they're rollerblading along the beach when Will Ferrell proclaims something along the lines of you think I spend my entire life in boardrooms because of a bottom line no I got into this business because of little girls and their dreams in the least creepy way possible and it's just hard to tell if this was meant to be ironic or played straight and if it was ironic I mean I don't know if irony works when it's coming straight out of the horse's mouth and then at the end of the film where the status quo Barbie land which has been taken over by the Kens is restored and present in Barbie is president again the CEO says and thanks to the Barbies I too can now relieve myself of this heavy existential burden while holding on to the very real title of CEO and we can restore everything in Barbie land back to the way it was and Issa Ray is like I don't think things should go back to the way they were for a second here I was like damn Mattel's gonna put up with the backlash if it takes down a male CEO in the movie when it's real life CEO enan cries is a man well my query was quickly assuaged when literally nothing happens after Will Ferrell says that we just blow right along to the ending oh so close so if it wasn't already obvious Barbie was made to rehabilitate Mattel's image as the hip Corporation the one who can get down with fellow kids without them ever needing to actually change the status quo in order to get down with us and wow did that work out for them [Music] in 2018 when craze stepped in as the fourth CEO in four years Mattel had recently lost 300 million dollars Toys R Us had just gone bankrupt and things were looking a bit shaky for the toy industry he felt that Mattel had a Children's Entertainment catalog second only to Disney and a breadth of Ip just as white as Marvel so why shouldn't they do what Marvel did and do the film thing he told the New Yorker my thesis was that we needed to transition from being a toy Manufacturing Company making items to an IP company managing franchises and so if you've thought the comparison of Barbie to Batman Begins was apt it is in the sense that Barbie is the art movie that's going to kick off a multi-billion dollar film franchise Mattel has this toy Workshop in California where they offer tours to popular Hollywood directors and producers and get them to pick out the toy they want to make a movie about Vin Diesel picked rock'em's sock'em robots a24 is doing a surrealist take on Bernie produced by Daniel caluya it was just announced that Lena Dunham will be coming on to direct a Polly Pocket adaptation starring Lily Collins awesome but Greta Gerwig was the first director to go the first Bastion of Mattel's brand immersion strategy and for everyone saying Gerwig is changing the system from the inside by poking funa Mattel the bar is low isn't it I think she kind of saved them in the tradition of releasing a toy to go along with each Barbie Venture they recently rolled out a 50 Barbie that looks like Margot Robbie which is sold out they also put out a 75 version of her Corvette but it's not just toys if it feels to you like Barbie is everywhere right now it's because she is okay Barbie the movie had a production budget of 145 million dollars its marketing budget was 150 million more than it took to make the movie itself and yeah you can tell major Clothing outlets like Bloomingdale's and Forever 21 have released Barbie themed clothing Pinkberry made a Barbie yogurt there was a Barbie NYX line a Barbie Kia ad they put a Barbie Dream House in Malibu on Airbnb for people to stay at they launched a Barbie themed boat cruise they did the ex machina Gorilla Marketing thing and made profiles for Barbie and Ken on Bumble there are Barbie Xbox consoles the Food Network even released a Barbie themed pasta recipe like our researcher Hannah says if you want to see the real cultural impact of Barbie don't go to the cinema go to the mall Barbie is as we know a piece of merchandise and so built into the film is the optimal marketing campaign her likeness is so familiar to us that all these brands have to do is make their products pink and will buy it because we love Barbie I don't think there could ever be a reality where people wouldn't love the Barbie movie because the marketing was so ubiquitous we bought into the movie before we even stepped into the theater Mattel shares actually went up 33 in the weeks leading up to Barbie so their bid for relevance worked and we took the bait but we're a pretty media Savvy generation we've seen the way Disney and Marvel have milked brand familiarity to push product honestly nothing I've said here is new not even to this channel so why have we so openly embraced Barbie Well craze hints at why when our toys connects to what's happening in the world you see significant growth in the company when we don't you see a blip what you start to realize is this is a pop culture company foreign [Music] I thought about naming this video how I learned to stop worrying and love Barbie because everyone knows all of this everyone knows about the feminist shortcomings and the bloated marketing campaigns and that Barbie is a big budget and that it's a toy movie and that it's not the pluggy underdog for Cinema that we're making it out to be but it doesn't matter because Barbie is fun just shut up and have fun theorist Luke boltansky and Eve chappello came out with this big old book in 1999 called the new spirit of capitalism in which they outlined the way capitalism has adapted since globalization basically it took the off button and hid it in another room they say to maintain its powers of Attraction capitalism therefore has to draw upon resources external to it beliefs which at a given moment in time possess considerable powers of persuasion striking ideologies even when they are considered hostile to it inscribed in the cultural context in which it is developing right now and this goes for Barbie those ideologies hostile to capitalism are feminism and other forms of social justice let's go back to the roots of this channel for a second and revisit Jim mcguigan and his theory on cool capitalism because I think some people are forgetting what we're all about here mcguigan essentially expands on boltansky and chappello's Theory by arguing that capitalism has embedded itself deeply into the fabric of our society by convincing us it's cool and I quote yet again neoliberal capitalism has constructed popular legitimacy of such a resilient kind that it goes beyond management ideology and propaganda into the texture and common sense of everyday life in spite of severe and recurrent economic crisis is that all what's happening with Barbie right now the material conditions of the film industry are at their absolute worst so much so that everyone is striking but don't worry about that Barbie which is raking in hundreds of millions of dollars for one of the corporations being striked against and for a toy company Mass manufacturing plastic toys which has a long history of Labor exploitation is the moment she's fine Now mcguigan talks a lot about the concept of cool the way it's spread into corporate culture so that all the management Consultants now play Blues guitar and the Silicon Valley offices have bean bags but nowhere has this change been as evident than in consumer culture he uses an example from the clothing industry where he says the clothing industry addressed to the young with companies like the Gap and Nike drawing upon counter-cultural themes and symbolization with their Rebel gear but mcguigan's most important example is with apple and their Sleek streamlined products which for him are the epitome of corporate coolness so cool that they completely obfuscate the brutal conditions of Apple's factories but Barbie isn't really like an Apple product it's kitschy and loud and almost dated in a way so it isn't necessarily cool when I spoke to my friend Ralston about this she described the Barbie movie instead as Camp capitalism here's what she said Barbie is so in your face capitalistic that it becomes camp but it's operating under the same principles of cool capitalism though instead of making Services slick it makes them Poppy and Technicolor and plastic and monogrammed with big bold logos which comforts you in an opposite way and I agree with her Barbie is so in your face so pleasurable to watch so visually stimulating so fun that you can't help but love it also corporations have begun folding the language of progress into their products Barbie did it by lathering itself in pink and promising us artsy visuals and self-aware messaging and what makes me so frustrated about it is that we as a public are so easily placated by that a corporate product to me is a wolf in sheep's clothing Barbie is wearing the clothes of Artful Cinema putting on an edgelord voice and hitting all the necessary talking points so that we have nothing left about it to criticize and everything left to buy in fact it's disguised so well that Barbie itself has become feminism become progress in the industry so that now when you critique it you're not a feminist you don't believe in the future of Cinema you're a contrarian but as a friend told me the other night at dinner I'm not interested in watching movies about products I'm feeling extremely wary about Mattel's future plans in an industry already so crowded by big budget recycled IP I'm not afraid to cast this version on the stuff Mattel is putting out regardless of who made it the way I view it there's a big Mattel monarch Dyson hovering over the industry and sucking up the talent let's absorb all the talent into our machine so that instead of having people operate outside the machine they'll operate within it personally I just don't feel like having fun with Barbie not at a time when the corporate franchise is the only choice I have when I go to the movies all I could see when I was watching Barbie was a future where every film that makes it into theaters is made on behalf of some Big Brand Mr Peanut the untold story directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Terence Malik does It Ain't Easy Being the Green Giant it's alarmist but you never know hopefully by the time Rock'em sock'em robots comes out people will have had enough but if it's Artful then maybe not I want my movies to expand my visual palette into change and challenge how I see the world or put me in touch with my emotions without some sort of ulterior motive I can want that without being a pick me or Ben Shapiro or a contrarian and while it's okay to like Barbie and to have fun watching it it's also okay to remind ourselves that yes capitalism bad and no I am not a misogynist for using my platform to criticize the girl movie and not the boy movie when Oppenheimer tries to sell me the introspect of Killian Murphy doll with hat and plastic mushroom cloud included then we will talk people can enjoy Barbie but this insistence on just letting people have fun is honestly something corporations would love for us to be telling each other because that kind of logic unfurls a thick hot pink curtain over the problems with the industry and where it's headed problems that the Barbie movie very much represents so I think it's okay to be cynical about Barbie something I'm thankfully not cynical about is Maggie mayfish's amazing series called unrated where she looks at the history of schmeck's and schmectuality in film with a frankness that YouTube Simply will not allow as someone hoping to push the boundaries myself unrated is really awesome and unrated is exclusive to nebula who I'm excited to announce I have recently joined as a Creator there are a lot of things to love about nebula but what I love most about it is that there's a lot of content on there that you could never find on YouTube which is why I'm working on something very special with them about things you are not supposed to do in cinema that you'll be hearing about very soon nebula is a streaming service that's Creator founded and creator-led which means we get a ton of creative control over the videos we make by subscribing to nebula you are directly supporting us the creators and you get access to an insanely wide catalog of videos from the best of the best like princess weeks Be Kind Rewind and Jessie gender right now you can see my past videos ad free on nebula and you can even watch nebula videos offline with their app so if you want to watch me yell about Barbie on your morning commute that can happen I'm really excited to explore the kinds of videos I'll be able to make on nebula in the future especially without that dreaded age restriction if you sign up using the link below you can support me directly and get both nebula and nebula classes for a 40 off annual plans that's as little as over two dollars and fifty cents a month go do it you won't regret it special thank you to Louis Morgan Cooper Stimson Nadia C Nick Jenny Eller J Frost mcfinnigan Gabriel M The Wiz Daniel Sharma D.H Klein Daniel sardunis Carrie Gavin siddhan Sayer RSS Niall o'heron free Geoff hallstrom Alex short Mathis Bullock Bob Saget detour 99 Robin Yamaguchi Andrew S and Kelly wolf for supporting this channel [Music] thank you

Channel: Broey Deschanel

Views: 533,686

Keywords: barbie, barbie movie, greta gerwig, margot robbie, ryan gosling, america ferrera, barbie 2023

Id: -2vE-hFCpLc

Length: 31min 40sec (1900 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023