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Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is surfing into cinematic history on a wave of right-wing tears — and a boatload of cash. The blockbuster film, which grossed a record-breaking $155 million domestically (and $377 million internationally) in its first weekend has also shattered the psyches of conservative commentators who have reflexively branded the colorful, witty, bubbly-yet-deeply-introspective film a magnum opus of man-hating, communist-adjacent, woke feminism.
In a video titled “Audiences Tricked Into Watching The Adventures Of Man-Hating Feminist Barbie,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called the film “the most aggressively anti-man, feminist propaganda fest ever put to film.” He also added in a Sunday tweet that he would rather be “thrown into a volcano” than actually watch the movie. Take that as you will.
Over the weekend, Walsh tweeted (X-ed? Xeeted?) that he had already been “looking forward to watching Oppenheimer,” a Christopher Nolan’s biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” which premiered the same day as Barbie. “Then I saw a bunch of people on Twitter complaining that it mostly features white men and it isn’t inclusive enough and now I’m even more looking forward to watching it,” he added.
“This is a good time to remember that feminism has killed far more people than the atomic bomb. It is perhaps the most destructive force in human history,” Walsh tweeted on Monday, accusing feminist ideology of being “aggressively anti-family,” and there being “60 million dead babies thanks to feminism.”
“Trans ideology, its off shoot, is competing for the title,” he added.
Feminism is not, in fact, a deadlier ideology than that which motivated the creation of a weapon of mass destruction, the use of which has reshaped the course of human history and resulted in an endless campaign of proxy wars and mutually assured destruction between military superpowers. Neither is being transgender, but we digress.
Elsewhere on The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro claimed he had been “dragged” to the theater (dressed suspiciously like emo Ken) by his producers. Shapiro opened his 43-minute review of the movie with a clip of him setting a pink convertible full of Barbie dolls on fire, superimposing recorded screams for a more dramatic effect. But melted Barbies cannot hold a candle to the nuclear-level meltdown Shapiro and his ilk are having over a film that celebrates the complexities of girlhood, and the womanhood that follows.
In his review, Shapiro called Barbie “one of the most woke movies” he’d ever seen, and complained that it was “explicitly designed to divide men from women.” Maybe if Shapiro had spent his time in the theater actually watching the film instead of, as he put it, taking “pages and pages” of notes, his comprehension would have improved.
“Women used to build society. Now they dress in pink and bring a bottle of wine to an air conditioned theater to cry in solidarity with an actress lecturing America about how hard it is to be a woman, then ragetweet at people who don’t like ‘Barbie,’” Shapiro tweeted on Monday. The thing is, Shapiro and others who consider a movie that critiques the toxicity assigned to gender roles — even from the age when we’re playing with dolls — as a personal attack couldn’t be more out of step with mainstream audiences. People don’t just like Barbie, they’re loving it.
Not since 2018’s summer of Movie Pass has there been such enthusiasm for the dying ritual of spending a day at the movie theater. A double feature of Barbie and Oppenheimer has been dubbed “Barbenheimer” by fans boasting costume changes between showings and debating which film should be watched first.
Gerwig’s film has broken the record for the highest-grossing opening of a film directed by a woman. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is tied at 90 percent freshness between both professional reviewers and audiences. The resounding acclaim from both industry professionals and moviegoers makes some of the responses from conservatives accusing the film of being political propaganda in a pink disguise all that more bizarre.
The middling backlash to the film has even made it all the way to the halls of Congress. Before the premiere of the movie, Texas Senator Ted Cruz — who had also said he has not seen the film — accused Barbie of being secret pro-Chinese communist propaganda.
Ginger Gaetz, the wife of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) criticized Barbie for neglecting “to address any notion of faith or family,” and “disappointingly low T” (testosterone) and “beta energy” from Ryan Gosling’s Ken. Her husband made several needlessly transphobic remarks to justify his creepy fixation on Margot Robbie, the film’s star.
They may as well be shouting into the void. Audiences around the globe have reached a consensus: life in plastic, it’s fantastic.
