Barbie Geopolitics

[Phoebe]

Filed under: controversies I would not have predicted.
The Barbie movie, which I don't think has been officially released here yet, has been banned in Vietnam. Why?
If I am to trust the stories given to me by my phone, it's because Vietnamese officials felt that a map of the world, crudely drawn and including dotted lines, adopted the "9-dash-line" used by the Chinese to map their assertion of rights over the South China Sea.
This assertion is hotly disputed by the Vietnamese, and they accuse the makers of the Barbie movie of including this feature in their Barbie world map in order to appease Chinese censors.

The mind puzzles over this and it's too early in the morning.

[Kyle]

They're probably right. I don't know that's a reason to ban the movie, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. Hollywood has been doing shit to appease the Chinese censors for the last decade.

[poorpete]

Heavy eye roll. Have to believe eight dashes mean nine. That Asia means China. That other lines also mean ownership (USA gets Cuba?). More likely an overreaction, but maybe an honest overreaction, it's a justifiably sensitive topic! Digital artists at WB can easily change it, why not.

[Phoebe]

I'm going to go see this movie, because I have to. I am the adult chaperone. I will watch with a keen eye for any geopolitical significance.

[Kyle]

I'm going to watch it this weekend because my youngest son and I have sworn to watch every Goose movie. I'm looking forward to it. Should be a gritty political thriller.

[Phoebe]

Posting the movie review here:
It was epic and hilarious for quite a while, and then at some point they didn't quite know what to do with the great setup they had put in motion and it ran away from them. The last part imo became labored and confused. I wanted to write a whole different ending. However, it was interesting and had many lol moments. The map messaging controversy - people had to be high to think it had anything to do with China imo. The deeper question would be where are all these dolls made and why?!

[Kyle]

I’m doing Barbenheimer tomorrow. I’ll report back.

[Phoebe]

Here is a factoid related to the Barbie movie that I'm not sure my kids understood or that others would understand if they were not from the old school group of multi-decade Barbie owners. There's a thing about cellulite which might play as straight up concern about becoming unattractive or fat. It's especially hilarious because women worry so much about cellulite, but a wrinkly flesh upon the thigh is one of the weird things that can happen to old Barbies based on the substance they were made of.

I don't know what kind of plastic produces that effect, but Barbies of a certain composition are subject to their plastic changing in that weird way that looks like cellulite or lumpy fat on their legs. It generally doesn't happen to the other parts of their body, which are made of a different plastic? I had another non-Barbie made of cheaper plastic who was not subject to this concern at all because she didn't have legs good enough to be molded and bendable in this way. The old Barbie legs bent in a specific way and have wires in them, coated with this smooth yet potentially tacky plastic that is almost as if a big pink school eraser were turned into a plasticy substance.

The point is that the plastic cellulite concern is multi-layer hilarity because girls may have had the experience of looking on in dismay as this happened to their dolls, even as they learn in the culture they're supposed to be worried about cellulite happening to them as women. In addition, as soon as you hear this you start having a little question in your mind about how old this Barbie is - for example, Is she the doll of a fairly recently grown child, or from what era did she actually spring? So you feel like you're on a bit of an inside joke with Greta Gerwig because y'all had some old Barbies back in the day. But there was some opportunity lost here because Barbies do not only become weird when they are played with too hard - when they age the hair becomes thin and their plastic changes, so the older Barbie does not look as good even if she's been treated carefully over the years. I had two Barbies and one non Barbie imitation, and the imitation doll was more attractive and played with by my own kids because with her cheap hard plastic she survived aging better than the Barbies did.

Another interesting little fact is that stereotypical Barbie is a construct in the narrative, yet there's also a cheap standard Barbie you could get without special accoutrements. There were non-white and non blonde versions of this Barbie sold as well, but the blonde version always had a certain type and length of hair exactly like the hair they gave Margot Robbie in the movie. My Barbies had totally different hair than hers even though they all had long blonde hair, so we learned to differentiate them.

[Phoebe]

My complaint about Barbie is now crystallized via my own kids explaining it to their dad, as well as the takes of various reviewers, all of whom say one point of the movie is that we would like gender equity, neither patriarchy nor matriarchy is The Way, and everyone should be free to be themselves. But I, old fashioned feminist, am super bored of Ken and pretty certain we never gave matriarchy the old college try, so how do we know it wouldn't work better? I guess if you see the world as relentlessly sexist, you can settle comfortably on a demand to prioritize the concerns of women. Nobody else is going to prioritize them - even women making a movie about Barbie end up spending soooooo much time on Ken and Ken issues, and breaking Barbie out of existential despair by giving her a real vagina. This has not been my liberation experience, comrades, but I guess people have to start somewhere.

[Kyle]

I thought it was funny as hell and really enjoyed it.

[Phoebe]

My woman friends, such as they are - women I lunch with? I do have one bestie at the moment and she is wonderful. Anyway, the other women friends, they are mad because they feel like the Barbie movie totally skirted the elephant in the room, which is the mass of body image issues related to Barbies. They tried to erase all of that somehow by having a couple plus size Barbies, but since there aren't any plus size Barbies it just raises more questions and the people wanted answers and they were mad that no answers were forthcoming. Like the issue was never Ken, it was the fact that a Barbie inhabits some kind of alien body. So making it about patriarchy seemed like a way of cheating about the important issues. I guess this didn't really bother me because it seems so obvious and so impossible for any Barbie movie to deal with that I bracketed the whole issue automatically.

I was very amused by all the jokes and in jokes, and the only point at which I was crabby about it was, I never had a Ken doll and I don't care about Ken in any way, so I felt like way too much real estate of my Barbie movie was being occupied by nonsense of no interest. I also felt like they should have done a lot more with Kate McKinnon instead but you know... It's Kate McKinnon so we all want her on screen.

[Kyle]

See, I don't think you understand the real star of the movie is Ken. Let me mansplain it to you... oh wait... I think I get it now.

One of the things that I really appreciated about the movie was that it was legitimately laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end. People can argue about all the issues it raises and was about, but at the end of the day, this was an extremely well-made and solid comedy- which is extremely rare these days.

[Mike]

Good movie. We went with our youngest son and all three of us had a blast. Genuinely funny with so much of the humor aimed at adults. The end was 15 minutes too long... the drawn out heartfelt wrap-up being incongruous with the tone of the rest of the movie. But it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for the rest of it.

[Phoebe]

They did a nice job of balancing "fun for kids" with "hilarious for adults" and "thought provoking".
A lot of good discussions about it happening.