Ben Shapiro blasted Barbie as a “flaming garbage heap of a film” and “one of the most woke movies I have ever seen.” Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec said that the “man-hating” “horror show” was a mere “woke propaganda fest.” From the mainstream to the alt-right, conservative elites seemed united in their loathing of the first live-action adaptation of the world’s bestselling doll.
But red states evidently didn’t get the memo.
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In the battle of “Barbenheimer,” the rivaling debut weekend of Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited Oppenheimer, it was the fictional doll that dominated Trump-supporting states over the World War II biopic. And the margins that each state favored Barbie almost exactly mirrored the salience of support Trump scored in the 2016 election.
Behold; the 2023 US Election! pic.twitter.com/uYnIHpKios
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The film industry widely expected that Barbie, a two-hour comedy about a universally known figure, would outperform the three-hour-long Oppenheimer, and both managed to smash expectations to result in the fourth-highest-grossing domestic weekend in Hollywood history. But outside of the outliers of a couple of swing states and the Great Plains, what explains Barbie’s dominance in the states that vote Republican the most?
Perhaps ordinary Republican voters aren’t so terminally online as the conservative commentariat, and unlike those of us who are paid to find enemy propaganda and wrongthink everywhere we go — if I’m being honest, this includes yours truly — normie GOP voters aren’t looking for subliminal messaging to be mad about. But in the case of Barbie in particular, I don’t think it’s the general right-leaning audience that’s off the mark. Let’s break down the narrative structure of the film.
Barbie essentially inverts the biblical saga of the fall of man, but in this case, “Paradise” is the matriarchy of “Barbieland,” and Margot Robbie’s eponymous protagonist is urged to choose the knowledge of the real human world. When Ryan Gosling’s Ken tags along for the ride, he learns about “the patriarchy,” but the real world turns out not to be one. In the end, Ken has a better chance of changing Barbieland into a patriarchy than he does in the real world, so he returns to Barbieland (though the Barbies insist it will take time before the Kens even achieve completely equal representation).
But Robbie’s Barbie chooses to leave Barbieland. If our hero decides to leave her matriarchal utopia in favor of our world, clearly, ours isn’t quite so sexist and patriarchal, right?
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The right-wing punditry has also been taking the film’s humor a little too seriously and literally. A character — especially a fictional doll or angsty, irrational tween girl — is not meant to represent the authorial voice, and yes, the humor is meant to be somewhat higher brow. This is not a children’s movie but one rated PG-13.
The culture spends enough time belittling and maligning regular conservatives for the sins of professing our faith and defending our freedom. Pretending Barbie is one of the offenders only serves a self-defeating narrative of national divorce when audiences see the situation otherwise.
