This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRFH (Rad Fem Hitler) joins Richard and Mark to discuss Barbie (2023). It’s a wide-ranging discussion, about film and mythology. In this week’s sample, Richard argues that the fantasy of “Barbieland” masks a deeper desire…
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| I'm curious, in regards to Barbie, where you said earlier you think it's about fearing your own desires, like that's the ultimate horror. | |
| I'm curious where you get that read of it. | |
| Okay, so I think it's... | |
| I'll give you my take on it. | |
| So with Ken, I think it's more obvious. | |
| So Ken, he feels left out. | |
| He's just Ken. | |
| And Barbie is the star of the show, and she has the dream house, and he's riding sidecar to Barbie. | |
| And then he leaves Barbie land, and he enters the real world. | |
| And I guess kind of ironically, he learns about the joys of patriarchy. | |
| From a library, from criticisms of patriarchy. | |
| And he also learns about horses. | |
| And then I think in this way that is really realistic, he embraces this kind of dark version of being a man. | |
| He becomes Andrew Tate, in effect, but a bit of a lovable Andrew Tate. | |
| And it's just bro-ing out. | |
| He's like, do you want to be my non-committal, long-distance girlfriend or something? | |
| We got a low commitment. | |
| Right. | |
| So it's just basically like, do you want to be my sex friend? | |
| You know, friend with Ben. | |
| It's just, you're becoming the parody. | |
| And I think so many of these... | |
| Kids are like this to stay because, look, everything's screwed up. | |
| Everything's really hard. | |
| That is true, and I have sympathy. | |
| But then your response to that is to almost become the parody of masculinity. | |
| And, you know, I have heard of this. | |
| Like, kids in suburban middle school are watching Andrew Tate. | |
| Yes. | |
| And they're going into class and, like... | |
| Talking to their teacher like, "No, bitch! | |
| I don't do no homework! | |
| I'm alpha here!" And the teacher is like, "Jimmy, your father is an accountant who's an upstanding member of the community. | |
| What has happened?" And so you indulge in that kind of thing. | |
| But what is Ken's secret fantasy? | |
| What's his secret fantasy? | |
| He actually loves Barbie. | |
| You know? | |
| And yeah, he says, I'm Knuff or I am Ken. | |
| He's aware of himself and so on. | |
| But his secret fantasy is what he's fearing. | |
| So he actually loves Barbie and maybe wants to have a mundane relationship with her. | |
| But he fears that reality and thus indulges in toxic masculinity. | |
| Of the worst, but maybe most hilarious kind. | |
| So I think that is kind of an easy one. | |
| I think with Barbie, I found it interesting that at the end of the day, how do I say this? | |
| At the end of the day, the men were still fighting over the women. | |
| And that was their secret plan to destroy the patriarchy, is to get them fighting each other. | |
| But in that sense, they did the most... | |
| They created a society that was at its most ancient or most traditional, you could say. | |
| Like the rape of the Sabian women, this famous painting and all that kind of stuff. | |
| That idea of... | |
| My tribe, we fight your tribe. | |
| We take your tribe's women folk. | |
| They become our tribe. | |
| It's the most basic quality of civilization. | |
| Because all civilization is based on a lie. | |
| It's based on violence. | |
| It covers over its own violence. | |
| You can have a functioning order, but it's ultimately on... | |
| It's ultimately on bones. | |
| It's ultimately on a crime. | |
| Even America, we have this functioning liberal order with citizenship, etc. | |
| It's ultimately based on a crime of disobeying our legitimate authorities. | |
| But you can't do that again. | |
| That was the exception. | |
| But then now we can do it. | |
| And so I feel like... | |
| Maybe this is a bit of a subversive reading, but there's the objective fantasy that I think covers over a deeper fantasy. | |
| So there's the objective fantasy of neoliberal feminism, which is that, look, women can be in the Supreme Court, or women can win a Nobel Prize, or women can be doctors, etc. | |
| But maybe that's a mask hiding... | |
| A deeper fantasy, which is we want men fighting over us. | |
| Okay, you know, there it is. | |
| You can disagree. | |
| Yeah, okay. |