After watching Barbie, I have been left with a taste in my mouth that is completely sour and not at all sweet.
Although I had read that the film had a clear feminist intention, I expected a more intelligent dialogue at the time of raising it, worthy of all the commotion -and budget- that it has had.
Instead, I came face to face with a script that seems to have been taken from anonymous internet troll conversations, where terms such as patriarchy, oppression, macho culture, and any other that comes to mind are repeated over and over again. Not satisfied with this, they are placed without much context or a good job in the plot, but inserted with a shoehorn. Although to be fair, it is not difficult to do this when the starting point is a weak, confusing, and lacking quality story, from beginning to end.
It begins with a little girl breaking her baby dolls, fed up with the role of caretaker that had been imposed on her up until now by the oppressive, macho, and heteropatriarchal society in which she lived until Barbie arrived to teach her that she can "be whatever she wants to be".
But at the end of the film, of course, there are three seconds of dialogue in which one of the main characters says that it's okay to "just want to be a mother", as if taking care of the family was a secondary and minor role, which, however, it's okay to want to aspire.
On the other hand, Barbie makes a permanent caricaturisation of men, represented first by Ken, whom they show as completely useless, lacking in personality and incapable of making decisions for himself, and then by the executives of Mattel, brainless CEOs who make the decisions of a large company without caring, even for a moment, the feminine vision.
Barbie forgets what the feminist movement also forgets: that the current dynamics between men and women are the result of thousands of years of interaction between social, political, cultural, religious, and, to the regret of many, biological and physiological factors, and not of a handful of men sitting at congresses or company meeting tables.
Today, there is not a single law in the Western world that favors men over women, quite the contrary. Increasingly, feminist laws grant privileges for the mere fact of being women, as a kind of revenge for so many years of patriarchy. And Barbie seems to ignore it.
In the end, the message that Greta sends is, to say the least, dangerous:
-Men and women can NOT work together.
-Men in power are stupid and incompetent.
-Only women in power guarantee a just world for all.
In summary, I feel that a golden opportunity has been lost to put forward a sensate feminist idea that advocates equality in front of the law (the only possible one), and from that, a ton of freedom, for both men and women, that Let them pursue their own life projects, while interacting with each other, combining the best of themselves.
On the contrary, it has been a revenge film, a "take it off to put me on", which, far from leaving a positive message, reinforces harmful ideas that, unfortunately, have more and more room for girls, adolescents, and women, who end up seeing in man an enemy to be destroyed, and not the ally and companion that he has been since the beginning of time.