Fantasyland

Because it has broken records for opening weekend gross at the box office this summer, against my natural instincts, I relented and watched the Barbie movie trailer. I couldn’t bring myself to actually drop $12 and 114 minutes to watch the entire movie. From what I got out of the trailer, the premise of the movie is something like this; Barbie is living in her fake Barbie utopian world with a slew of other fake Barbies, and she has a revelation that the world in which she inhabits is not the real world. She is then asked to make a matrix-like “red pill” choice between her world of high heels and the real world of flats. She chooses the flats, and then is thrust into the “real world” while her utopian synthetic Barbie world disappears.

At that point, the movie apparently devolves into a man-hating anti-patriarchy screed where every man in the “real world” is portrayed as either an idiot or evil. So, Barbie decided to leave her fantasy utopian world disconnected from reality and entered another world conjured in the minds of feminists who see everything that is female as great, and everything that is male as infected with toxic masculinity and unnecessary. So, the so-called “real world” that Barbie is now a part of, is no more real and no less a fantasy than the synthetic Barbie world that she had just left. In the Barbie movie, every woman in the “real world” is portrayed as smart, talented and sympathetic. And somehow, if we could just empowered women and turn the world over to the female of the species, then everything would be right in the world.