August Bonus: WTW DESTROY Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Barbie
It's an Ample Sample (tm)(butnotreally) of the August Bonus which goes out to 2nd tier patrons and above! Pledge at that level to get the whole thing, but I wanted to share a large chunk of it with everyone, because we put our hearts into it and want to share it widely! This was a massive recording. You'll hear, I originally thought it was going to be episode 7, but it went on so long and we couldn't avoid playing a TON of Ben Shapiro, so I called an audible and it became the August bonus! I hope you amazing patrons enjoy. Lydia and I put a lot into this one. It's a bit personal too. We're excited to share it with you! Get the full thing at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
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Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
All right, folks, this is something that I am glad I thought of starting to do, because on not only Where There's Woke, not only this show, but Serious Inquiries Only, the bonus monthly stuff that we're doing is so often like labor intensive, Super fun, interesting two plus hours of content.
And that's why I thought of like, oh, I should share, you know, the first maybe half of it, even like a full nice length of a bit to non patrons so that at least even if you can't become a patron, you get, you know, a good chunk of it.
And then if you want to become a patron, you get all of it.
But I just felt like there was so much good stuff here that I wanted to be on the main feed.
So this is, I think a little more than half or around half of mine and Lydia's review of Ben Shapiro's review of Barbie.
And it was a lot of fun.
This is a movie that we both really liked and you know, we get into some a little bit of personal stuff in this because the movie was very touching and had some personal implications and stuff.
So this is us reviewing Ben Shapiro's review.
Hope you enjoy it.
If you want to hear the rest of it, the whole thing, go to patreon.com slash where there's woke.
And also, I'll add in, we did a bonus episode while we were on our trip, because some big news came in.
No spoilers, but some big news came in, and no, it is not a fourth kid, though that was a very funny joke.
It is not that.
It is show-related news, and so patrons got a sneak peek of that too, so go All good reasons to go to patreon.com slash where there's woke plus the ad free shows.
So here for everybody is a good chunk of our Barbie review of Ben Shapiro.
A lot of fun.
Hope you enjoy it.
Hello and welcome to where there's woke.
This is episode seven.
I'm Thomas Smith.
And with me on this one yet again, my lovely wife, Lydia Smith.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
How are you?
Doing well.
No, I wasn't playing with my dolls just now.
I was ready to go.
So today we're going to take on, we're going to destroy Ben Shapiro, destroying the Barbie movie for 43 minutes.
Here's the description, which I think makes this very relevant to our program.
My producers dragged me, I already, fuck you.
I already, fuck you.
Sorry.
My producers dragged me to see Barbie.
We know you're going to do a review of it.
Who is that for?
Is that just like, so we can try to pretend like he as a man, an alpha male was not going to go see Barbie or something?
Yeah.
Against his will.
It's okay to just be like, so I watched Barbie in order to review it.
Like, that's fine.
Yeah.
Drag Me to See Barbie, and it was one of the most woke movies I've ever seen.
Watch to find out why.
So, we watched Barbie.
We did.
Yeah, we took the kids.
Yeah, and I fucking loved it.
How did you feel about it?
I also loved it.
It was great.
I loved seeing the yellow rollerblades.
Brought a lot of nostalgia for me.
I felt super 90s.
I loved that.
And I haven't told you this, but you know that sweatshirt that Ryan Gosling wears at the end that says, I am knuff?
So Mattel started pre-orders for that, and I definitely bought myself one.
I love it.
So good.
Come September, that's what I'll be wearing.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
And also, my only experience with Barbies is from my little sister.
I think one of the ones we had was rollerblading.
Nice.
I think.
Because that seemed familiar to me as well.
I think it was like a Barbie and a Ken maybe that rollerbladed?
I don't know.
According to the movie.
Oh, I thought that you were saying that was a set you had.
No, no.
I think I had the accessory rollerblades.
I don't think I got the Barbie with the rollerblades.
I had teacher Barbie.
Classic.
I'm not a teacher, but it fits with, like, who I was, I think, as a child.
And I had gymnast Barbie.
That was a big one for me, too.
I can't remember the rest.
I'll have to ask my mom.
I'm pretty sure like I just did the classic thing of just taking the clothes off of them like those.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
I mean, I think every kid does that.
That's fine.
I think our kids already do that.
Remember nude blobs.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We also had like a hair, I say we, I think my little sister got a hair growing one.
Really?
You had the hair growing one?
Yeah, but it like didn't make sense or didn't work.
I think she cut it and then it was like ruined instantly.
I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I never... Are you sure it was a hair growing one or one that she thought the hair was supposed to grow?
Because my sister did that where she thought, she said the commercial showed, you know, one of the toys growing its hair.
So she cut it and it never worked.
My mom was really mad.
No, it was definitely the hair growing one.
I can kind of envision the hair coming through the head in a way that's supposed to grow.
Kind of disturbing, too.
Yeah, we couldn't really get it to work.
We're just establishing our Barbie credentials here, which I have none.
Were Barbies meaningful to you?
Going into this movie, how did you feel?
Was this like, oh, I'm going to go see this movie because I love Barbies so much?
Yeah, I mean, I think for me it was like, I love Greta Gerwig, right?
Sure.
Greta Gerwig, Barbie.
Yeah, I had that one.
Yeah, Greta Gerwig, Barbie.
Big fan.
For me, I don't think I felt, like, an intense relationship with Barbie.
And I also didn't really have, like, the other side of the coin, right?
With, like, the major conflicted feelings about Barbie and what she meant growing up and some of those body image issues and stuff that I'm sure everybody's very familiar with.
And how kind of non-inclusive Barbie was for a while.
I am just sort of that similar demographic.
So I didn't really have strong feelings one way or the other.
I just thought the movie looked really interesting, really good.
Love Greta Gerwig's interpretation and spin on things.
And of course, just that 90s nostalgia for me.
Like the rollerblades, I think, is definitely like a very 90s thing, isn't it?
Or maybe it's like late 80s, but yeah.
And also, just the song Barbie Girl and Aqua.
And you know, that played a big part in my life, too.
And our kids, I think, didn't really understand it.
They just kind of... Arlo fell asleep eventually.
Arlo fell asleep, yes.
He's super cute.
I think I took a picture of him.
I can't remember.
I think Phoebe stayed awake.
Phoebe said she liked it.
Yeah, yeah.
That's the weird thing about it.
It's not really for kids much.
No.
We can talk about it more when we start playing the most annoying sound anyone's ever heard.
Which is any Ben Shapiro video.
Well, let's maybe we should just get into the video.
I'm sure that'll allow us to talk about a lot of different things.
Oh, and by the way, I mean, I guess spoiler alert.
Oh, yeah, it is pretty new.
Yeah.
So we're going to discuss Barbie and it's probably a lot of it in its complete.
I don't know how much we need to go through the entire plot or anything, but no, I mean, we'll just talk general themes, I think.
Yeah, but you probably will have wanted to see Barbie unless you don't care.
There's not really a spoiler heavy movie, I don't think.
I don't know.
Anyway.
All right.
Let's hit play on this.
I just got back from the theaters seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer.
I'm about to review both of them.
I'm going to tell you which one of these is the best blockbuster of 2023 and which one is maybe the worst.
I love that movie, right Ken?
What was that supposed to be?
I don't know like he's he throughout the video I know he does this he like just kind of layers in stuff from other Barbie TV shows movies or whatever that are for kids and like but edits them in such a weird way that none of it makes sense.
It zooms in on Barbie's face and does this voice and I want to know what the fuck this is.
of 2023, and which one is maybe the worst.
I bet he loved our movie, right Ken?
Oh, I see.
Okay, so it's Ben Shapiro I'm imagining.
Is that him?
Yeah, so it's him trying to do like a Valley Girl sort of accent, right?
That's awful.
That's nothing.
I bet he loved our movie, right Ken?
That's so bad.
Yeah.
For those of you who can't wait that long, I'm going to give my review of the Barbie movie in the most Oppenheimer fashion.
Oh, he throws the Barbie in the trash can and he's lighting it on fire.
What is this?
Yeah, it's not funny.
It's not even funny.
It's not a critique.
Yeah.
It's, oh, the Barbies are burning.
Like, what grade level would you say that humor is?
Like, we probably, you know, me and my friends would sometimes try to make funny, like, videos back in the day before YouTube.
Yeah.
And, like, we would have been over this level of humor by certainly 10th grade.
Yeah, I was gonna say, it's probably, like, pretty young and then a resurgence in middle school for boys, is my guess.
What?
Okay, here we go.
So the things I do for my audience, my producers dragged me to go see the Barbie movie.
He does it because it makes him money.
And I have thoughts.
This video is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Let me begin.
I gotta cancel my ExpressVPN.
I think I have that.
Do you really?
Yeah.
Oh God.
With my generalized assessment of the movie.
This movie is not just a piece of s***.
This movie is a flaming piece of dog shit piled atop an entire dumpster on fire, piled atop a landfill filled with dog shit.
It is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Such creative... How many times can he say shit?
Yeah, it's just a lot of... The joke there is a lot of shit.
That's the joke.
Like it wasn't... Let me mansplain this to you.
See, it's not just a little bit of dog shit, hun.
This is hilarious because it's like a lot more dog shit than you thought.
Right, than I expected.
Yeah, exactly.
So brilliant.
I think it went over your head.
That's probably why you weren't laughing at all, so maybe I'll play it again for you.
No, I'm just kidding.
He has gotten so many makeovers.
I didn't know this.
I haven't watched this asshole in a while.
You can clearly see that zillions of dollars have been put into his appearance now.
Yeah.
And he's got the fucking beard, the five o'clock shadow-ish beard.
Somebody apparently told conservatives that that, you know, they caught on to the beard thing ten years later than everybody else, but now they all have caught on.
That that universally beards.
Look, let's face it.
They look good.
I like beards.
And so fucking Ted Cruz figured out that was the best way to cover as much of his disgusting face as you could.
Yeah.
And fucking that other guy from Florida.
Right.
Didn't he grow one?
Oh, Donald Trump Jr.
Yeah.
Matt Gaetz.
Did he grow one?
No, maybe not Matt Gaetz.
I don't know if he can grow one.
He needs to look like a child for all of them.
Donald Trump Jr.' 's got his disgusting hair plug, beard.
Matt Walsh.
Yeah, Matt Walsh.
They all figured it out and I hate it.
But he's got very, very immaculately done eyebrows.
Did you notice that?
Has anyone ever pointed that out?
For pretending you aren't into the left or woke Hollywood, you sure are very L.A.
He's got a jean jacket on.
He's put a lot of effort into his gender-affirming care.
He's an Alan.
Every possible level, it is a horrific movie.
The only thing that can be said for this film is production design.
The production design is really nice.
The costumes are really nice.
Also, it's really hard to screw that up.
It's really hard to screw that up because you literally have this to model after.
All you have now is this.
He says this, it's a Barbie house that he, I guess, has.
I don't know.
Yeah, it was gorgeous to look at.
I 100% agree with that.
And I think it's a little insulting to the people who worked really, really hard to make that vision come to reality that he would go there.
Yeah, it actually doesn't just make itself like a lot of a lot of thought was put into that.
God, also costuming, not even just the design, but just the work to build the costumes.
It was a pretty big cast, too.
So that's a lot of work.
What a jerk.
But put aside all of the beautiful costumes, which is there for the ladies and all of the production.
Of course, yeah.
Didn't he just say he enjoyed it?
Like, what?
I don't know.
Ben, it's okay, man.
Like, you can just say, like, yeah, I enjoyed the costume.
I enjoyed the- I don't know shit about fashion or anything, personally.
But, like, yeah, I mean, I like when it's good costuming versus bad.
I can kind of tell.
I don't know.
I'm a man.
I enjoy- what- why is that for the late- what a fucking idiot.
To me, it's just so funny how fragile the masculinity is.
And it's always fun to point it out when it's these people who think they're so masculine and just are not.
Design and the Barbie universe and all of that.
Every joke that happens in this film happens basically within the first 45 seconds of the film.
So, for example, Barbie turns on the water and there's no water.
Oh, because, you know, like in Barbie House, there's no actual water.
Do you get it?
And then she drinks, but there's no actual liquid in the in the actual in the actual cup.
Oh, my God, because she's a Barbie doll.
Oh, I get it.
OK, that's all the jokes.
There are no more jokes for the rest of the film.
No, that's just not true.
I don't know what to say.
What was the thing?
There's a lot of things later on that.
Oh, yeah.
The end.
Well, you know, yeah, not to skip ahead, but the the sequence of the Barbies manipulating the Kens at the end is the funniest thing.
Yeah.
When they're all on the beach.
Yeah.
And playing guitar.
I loved that bit.
That was so good.
It's so funny.
Just, like, objectively speaking, that's not true, that that's all the jokes.
I think even he will admit that's not all the jokes.
Like, he will bring up another joke.
The Duolingo jokes.
Oh, yeah.
I, like, laughed out loud.
He had, like, three lines, and they were all perfect.
Yeah, no, that was really good.
Also, I love him mocking the, like, oh, there's no water, do you get it?
And it's like, well, so wait, are you saying you disagree with that creative choice?
Right, we shouldn't have to set the tone in the Barbie movie, like why can't we take five seconds to set the tone in a Barbie movie?
Yeah, does he think there should have been water?
Because the way he's saying it, it's like, oh, ew, no water, get it?
It's like, yeah, they're just setting up the, you already acknowledged that you can't go wrong with the design because it's all the Barbie world and you have that to work off of.
And then when they're they're like, OK, as part of that, there wouldn't be any water.
There's no water in the thing.
Now you're mocking that as like this feeble attempt at humor that that didn't land.
It's fucking stupid, man.
The movie's a shitshow.
OK, so conceptually, the movie is a shitshow.
I want to ask this.
Who is the intended audience for the film?
Who's the intended audience for this film?
So I'll tell you who the intended audience for this film is, and I can tell two ways.
One, the previews on the film, and two, the people in the audience.
So, the intended audience for this film is moms and their eight-year-old daughters.
That's the intended audience.
I strongly disagree.
First of all, I mean, he gets into this.
It's rated PG-13, right?
So even if you're looking at the rating, it's not for eight-year-olds.
That's in the name there with the PG-13.
Right, right, exactly.
But then also, my feeling was, if you watched any of the trailers for Barbie, you kind of feel like, okay, this is not Like, this is not a kids movie.
This is not Barbie on the streaming services and stuff, right?
The TV shows that have existed that are terribly animated.
No offense to all the animators out there.
I just don't think they're very good.
But I think, for me, it could have been for people like moms, right?
And maybe the trailers at the beginning are, oh, that looks good.
I take my kids to that, you know?
Ah, that makes sense.
Yeah, because when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle trailer came on, we were both like, oh, that looks great.
The kids would probably love that.
We're going to go back and see that movie with them.
I was like, oh, they finally made one that's not disturbing like a Cronenberg nightmare.
God, I never watched them just because the previews were so disturbing.
Who made those fucking things?
Was that Michael Bay?
Michael Bay, maybe?
Was it?
I don't know, I'm going to find out.
That's what came to my mind.
Anyway, no, you make a great point.
I was going to have a different answer, but I think yours is better or maybe mine is still valid.
I don't know.
But my answer was going to be, this is what Ben Shapiro loves to do.
He loves to take one minor logical point that is based on a shaky premise and then use that to say that everything that disagrees with it is wrong.
So like, I don't know if I put that in the best way, but so he takes, for example, this point.
Oh, who is this for?
Well, what are the previews?
The previews are kids movies.
Therefore, it's for kids.
Fucking ipso facto.
You can't argue with, you know, like, yeah, well, OK, but there's a lot of ambiguity in that, man.
You can't just that's what all his destroys are based on.
It's taking one little feeble argument that like maybe kind of holds a little, but not.
And there's plenty of room for disagreement.
And then just takes that as like, those are facts.
And everything else is just a bunch of, you know, feelings.
Feelings, yeah.
It's like, my answer was going to be, okay, first off, yeah, PG-13.
Secondly, I enjoyed the movie, so I could be part of the audience.
Right.
And I looked up just for fun, I was kind of poking around for research, and someone posted in the Reddit slash AskMen, and they said like, hey men, if you saw Barbie, what did you think of it?
And I was actually really surprised.
I was like, Oh, great.
What's this going to be?
Every top voted comment, like I went through at least like, I don't know, 10, 15 of the top voted comments.
They were all positive.
I think this movie is just a success.
Like you can try to make it out to be, Oh, it's cause it's woke, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I mean, there may be some wokeness.
Also, there may be some corporate feminism that I would disagree with a little bit in it.
But you can't argue with the fact that people just like this fucking movie, dude.
Sorry, you're just wrong.
A lot of people really like this movie.
In fact, just for fun, I can make this point now.
I checked the Rotten Tomatoes, and it's 88% critic and 84% audience.
That's just consensus a good movie.
That's consistent between the two.
And consider that the audience is likely composed of a bunch of fucking Ben Shapiro fans who go and harass movies down to the, you know, zero, which I think they have some protections for now, but I think that's still going to be an effect basically for any movie that's perceived as like a woman's movie or a woke movie or a progressive movie.
There's way more often an army of angry fucking incels that goes and downvotes stuff versus Ben Shapiro's theory, which we'll get to later on, is, oh, if you just make a movie that has anything woke in it, you're guaranteed a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is just so fucking delusional.
What I was going to say is the previews before the movie, I mean, that's just like your opinion, man.
That's just a corporation's opinion of what people might want to also see.
They might be wrong.
Like, literally, they might just be wrong about the audience of the movie.
I think your point is better.
Your point is, oh, yeah, it's one way or the other.
It's likely going to be a lot of parents at this movie and maybe some kids.
And so these kid movies will be good ones to do previews for.
I think that's a better point.
But my point is even if that were wrong or something, you can't just say because production companies or however they buy the previews, however that transaction works, because they made a judgment that this would be a good movie to advertise their movies on.
Therefore, that's the fucking gospel God's truth of who the audience is.
That's just what some people perceive the audience to be, they could be right or wrong.
And it's just a microcosm of like, he just uses that method so much of just like a very shaky point that could be true, but also could easily not be true and takes that as like, any disagreement with that is fucking stupid.
That's his whole shtick.
I know, because the previews for the film were all kids' movies.
I'm talking, like, G- or PG-rated kids' films.
We're talking, like, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Trolls 4, or whatever it is.
Those were all the previews, right?
All the previews are actually directed at what the audience is supposed to be for this film.
And if you look in the audience, it's a bunch of moms.
So now he's saying that the trailers are a better indication of who the movie's made for than the fucking movie.
Wouldn't you think the movie would be a better way to judge who the movie's made for?
Yeah.
Like, if some, like, you know, yeah, the trailers, okay, maybe the film studio decides what trailers go there and maybe that's an indication, okay, but then just watch the movie and then you can see who it's made for and that would be a better indication.
And by the way, if there's a big mismatch there, for example, if The movie was made in a way that was like, oh, fuck, I thought I was seeing one movie, but I was actually seeing, you know, Saw 5 and whatever.
I think we could expect that Rotten Tomatoes reviews would probably reflect that.
It would be like, what the fuck?
I was sold a bill of goods, as they say.
I took my child to see this.
And while you do see a few crying fundamentalist Christians on YouTube saying that, pretty universally positive reviews everywhere else.
So Ben, I think the movie was made for exactly who fucking saw it is what I would say.
This movie is going to make a bunch of money week one because the marketing effort has been extraordinary.
And whoever's the marketing team over at Warner Brothers is doing an amazing job.
Week one, this thing is going to clean up at the domestic box office.
My prediction is going to just absolutely fall off a cliff after that.
No.
They didn't.
- No. - The whole thing of business on this movie is going to be non-existent.
Because it was written by two people who are so smug and self-satisfied, and Greta Gerwig and Noah Bamba, that they have no audience.
Who thought it's a great idea?
Let's bring on the people who wrote "Lady Bird" and "Marriage Story" to make a movie about a plastic doll that is generally played with by five to nine-year-old young girls.
That's a very easy claim to fact check.
And I think one of the highlights, one of the hallmarks of conservative bullshit, anti-woke content is making predictions or claims about the future and then never fucking checking back on them.
The world's got the pizza ovens are going to be gone.
The world's ending all the time.
Men don't even have penises anymore.
And then nobody just like.
Yeah, non-existent.
Like, wait, did that happen?
So let's talk about it.
Okay.
So he predicts a second weekend drop off.
That's going to be just massive.
Biggest of all time.
I think he said, didn't he say it would be that?
Yeah.
Non-existent.
So I think checking averages, it seems as though a typical movie has a drop off of something like 40 to 60% is the normal range.
I didn't know it was that much.
That's actually pretty surprising.
But I guess that makes sense.
People really, really, really want to see it.
And they play for a while.
So it's still going to make a bunch of money.
Still going to be people seeing it.
But I guess all the people who really, really wanted to see it, see it first.
And that's enough to make a drop off of 40 to 60 percent.
I thought one that would be a good comparison, like I could read you a bunch of historical movies and we could, you know, not really.
I thought I found a good one that I think would be a really good way to compare for most people.
And that is MCU films.
So somebody on Reddit kind of collected a list, at least as of, I don't know, 2022, of the MCU film Second Weekend drop-offs.
And I was like, oh, that'll be good because we all like kind of know what those are.
We're going to, you know, that's going to tell us.
And it's like, it's a similar-ish kind of movie.
You know, it's not like a prestige drama or a cartoon or whatever.
It's It's kind of similar.
Like an excited fan base.
Yeah, excited fan base.
So the lowest seems to be Black Panther, wow, which was 44.7%.
So if you see there, these are unambiguously successful movies.
Even though I haven't been the biggest fan, I'm not going to argue, they're definitely successful movies.
And they have a drop off, the lowest of which is 44%, the highest of which is Black Widow, 67%.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, and Thor 11 Thunder actually made not much.
Boy, I didn't realize Black Panther was so successful.
Wow.
Yeah.
That was the third highest grossing one from this, anyway.
I don't know if these numbers have changed over time or anything, if they include all that crap in the long-term financials or anything, but Infinity War is what I would have guessed, or Endgame.
Those two were massive, and they had a drop-off of 55% and 57%.
And I mean, part of that calculation is also the more dedicated to the movie people are, the more they're probably going to see it at midnight fucking showing.
Right.
And a lot of people, you know, some people see, go back to the theater and see it again.
But like, I've got to guess not too many.
Like even my favorite movies ever.
I think only the Lord of the Rings movie when I was in high school did I see a second time in theaters.
I don't think there's any other time I've ever done that.
I saw The Village twice.
But it's because I saw it once with friends and then a boy I liked wanted to go see it.
Of course, yeah.
So then I went again.
Yeah, and that one, that is the best.
I couldn't have written a better joke.
Because yeah, it's like once you've seen the ending, I mean, it's kind of interesting to watch again when you know the ending.
Yeah.
I'm going to go ahead and say it.
The Village, underrated film.
I liked it.
I fucking liked that movie.
I thought it was pretty good.
It's hard to have any opinion positive about an M. Night Shyamalan movie because he's so bad now, but I liked that movie, but I haven't watched it in a thousand years and I'm not going to so that I can keep having that opinion.
Anyway, point is, Even really good movies, there's also a weird trade-off.
Like I said, the more people want to see a movie, you might have a bigger drop-off because more people will see it right away.
Right.
And won't come back and see it.
So, 40-60% seems to be pretty average.
But even good movies, even objectively money-making movies, like Spider-Man No Way Home, 84 million, had a drop-off of 67.5%.
So, that's some context.
So, what did you find when you looked up this claim on Barbie?
All right.
So Barbie in its first weekend made $162 million.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Really, really, really big blockbuster.
And then in its second weekend came in with $93 million.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
So 42% drop off is what it's looking like.
Wow, so not only is that a shitload of money, that seems very successful.
It didn't drop off very much.
So I think we just destroyed Ben Shapiro on that point.
Facts don't care about your feelings, Ben.
I know you felt like maybe the movie sucked and wouldn't be successful in the second week.
Hey, guess you were fucking wrong.
Can't wait to see the apology video.
So the basic idea of the film, they really have no basic idea of the film.
They don't know whether they hate Barbie or that we're supposed to kind of like Barbie.
It seems they kind of despise Barbie as a fascist emblem, as we'll get to.
The basic sort of premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides and they hate each other.
And literally the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women.
Oh, my God.
We could do two hours on just that last couple sentences because it so completely misses the point.
I want to know how you felt about this, hun, but I felt like the point of the movie was society and feminists and women and everybody really have mixed feelings about Barbie.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
I think, you know, the intention of Barbie and some of the criticisms of Barbie at the beginning, it was, I mean, the movie talks about it, right?
That the way that you played with dolls eons ago was it was always in this caretaker, caregiver role, right?
It was always a baby doll.
And so the girl was always in the role of the mother for those things.
And Barbie was the opportunity to play with a doll that was not a baby.
It was, you know, a teen or an adult or whatever.
But it also brought along these societal expectations with it that were really big in the country anyway, in terms of beauty ideals, body image, and all of those things.
And it was, you know, like Barbie was a fun doll to play with, but then she was just a woman.
As a doll and then they started stepping into I think the astronaut Barbie as an astronaut doll came out in 1962.
So pretty soon they started thinking of Barbie as the chance to show girls that like yes you're playing with a doll and this doll can be anything.
Still had those body image things, inclusivity issues on other respects too and then stepped into incorporating more of what people actually look like there.
I think one of the really interesting things, too, in the movie was, I don't know if this doll exists out in the world.
I haven't walked down the Barbie aisle in a while.
Surprisingly, even with Phoebe.
But they had, you know, a fat Barbie in Barbieland, too.
And the way that the character was is that she was just a Barbie, right?
She was a Barbie like every other Barbie.
She wasn't changed into Chelsea or Skipper or whatever, right?
Like the little sidekicks or the little sister.
Which is kind of how they used to handle anyone else for a while.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyone who looked different than your stereotypical Barbie didn't get to have the Barbie name.
And this was a chance to see that Barbie, like in Barbie land, really could be anybody.
Because that's the ideal, right?
Like that's what we hope is that for women in society and little girls growing up is that They can understand that they can pick a career that means something to them.
And just because they're a girl doesn't mean that it's not going to be an opportunity for them.
That just because the way they look doesn't mean that they're going to be excluded from these things that they really love and mean something to them and give them purpose.
And give them excitement in the world.
That's the contrast we're looking at is in Barbie land where that's true and what you have to give up in order to achieve that kind of thing versus the real world where it's much more complicated, but then what you also get from that too.
So yeah, it's a complicated thing that neither world is perfect.
You have to pick, you know, the Birkenstock or the high heel, right?
Which one is going to bring you value and purpose in your life.
And yeah, no spoilers.
By the way, Astronaut Barbie 1965.
Oh, 1965?
I was like, 62, that'd be before, like, they even, yeah, so a little early on that.
But yeah, still, that was before we landed on the moon.
I know.
It was definitely before there were any female astronauts at all, so that's interesting.
And then also, to your point, I just pulled up, like, the Barbie timeline to have handy here.
They introduced a black Barbie, well, they introduced Christy, who was black in 1968, but as you say, very notably, not Barbie.
Right.
Which is interesting.
You make a great point.
And also, I think maybe people might not have thought about how difficult a movie this would be to make.
Like, when I thought about just how many different constraints they had to try to make... By the way, even if you wanted to make a Woke Barbie movie, like if that was your express purpose, that would be fucking difficult.
Because keep in mind, this is still Mattel.
This is still Mattel's intellectual property.
You don't just get to make whatever movie you want about Barbie and make one where you hate Barbies because they give you negative body images and you can do whatever wokeness you want and totally shit on the toy itself.
No, you have to make a movie that Mattel is okay with, and also that people who are nostalgic on Barbie are okay with, and also a broad audience as possible are okay with.
Right.
And still make some feminist points, some amount of, we'll say, woke points, Well, staying true to your values, right?
I imagine Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are not going to be writing something that feels like they're propping up something dangerous or something that really makes them feel vile.
Right.
Just to be able to do all of those things and have it not be a piece of shit is actually really hard.
I was amazed.
The whole time I was wondering, how are they going to end this thing?
I was very nervous about how they were going to end the movie because it just seemed so difficult to do so in a way that wouldn't be too preachy, but wouldn't, you know, but also- Like not betray the work that they did all the way up to that.
Well, and because you're doing such gender politics stuff and there's such like clear representations of different Ideologies there, like you had to be very careful how things ended up because of what that would say.
You know, like it's just a very, I'm just really impressed that they pulled that off.
And so I just love his point of like, why would you pick the person who made Lady Bird?
And the person, it's like, well, it sounds like that was who could make it.
This idea that like he has decided that what Barbie ought to have been as a movie is like a cartoon for little girls.
And anything different than that is bad because he says it is, but the studio was took a more like, again, I don't love corporate America by any means, but the studio and Mattel and whoever was involved in making this took a more sophisticated view, which is, well, we can't just make like a corporate worshiping, like propaganda Barbie.
No one's going to like that.
It's going to suck.
They're going to hate us.
How do we do this?
Well, I think maybe we find a way to hire people who will pitch us on like, can we make a Barbie that works in 2023?
That does all the things I just said.
And I don't know, maybe those two people were the perfect people to do that.
It seems like to me.
It's really funny how often he just decides his view of the world is what things are.
And then anyone who deviated from that was like an idiot, even though they made a hugely financially successful thing that everybody universally likes.
But no, they didn't go with his thing.
Like, I just love how often facts and the feelings thing, because he always says facts don't care about your feelings, and how consistently he fucking breaks that every single other sentence.
You know, like he feels like Barbie should have been a certain way.
Well, I don't know.
Look at the fucking facts, you idiot.
It was incredibly successful.
Well, and I think also when you look at the Barbie timeline, every time Mattel is willing to evolve Barbie and kind of push limits a little bit and step into, like, the next phase is when they see those spikes in success, right?
That's a good point.
Because it's reaching more and more and more people.
They see themselves in Barbie now.
It's not reserved for the people who look like stereotypical Barbie.
I got bad news, hon.
We're three minutes into this movie review, so... Oh, boy.
All right.
I was trying to separate this into problems with plot and problems with character and problems with the politics of the film, but they're all intertwined because the thing is just a mess.
It doesn't make any sense.
Plot-wise, it makes no sense.
Character-wise, it makes no sense.
So let's just go through it from the beginning.
There's going to be lots of spoilers, but believe you me, I'm about to save you so much time because this movie is two hours.
It feels like it is longer than Wagnerian Ring Cycle.
It does not.
Oh, that's the smart reference because he's smart.
He's really smart.
That's a long thing, but it's a long thing.
That's a smart reference that I don't know because I'm not smart.
Every scene is at least two minutes too long.
Every single scene, every beat is two minutes too long.
It is a bad film.
Put aside the politics.
It's all too long.
And the only way we can get through listening to him talk is at least one and a half speed because it's impossible to listen to him.
Like, he's too long.
His beats are too long.
God.
He's doing a 43 minute review of this movie.
Right.
They're with a bunch of my producers.
I'm a little bit more political than my producers.
My producers were watching this.
Putting the politics aside, it is a bad movie.
So why is it getting 91% on Rotten Tomatoes?
Because the way that it works for the reviewers is if you have the right politics and those policies are sufficiently slyly inserted, then it will get a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, even if the thing is just crap.
And I mean, boy is this Drek.
This is a Death Star sized piece of Drek.
It is like, that's no moon.
That's a Drek station.
That is, that this movie.
Okay, so.
I'm sorry, I can't resist.
So he even like shows the Star Wars clip.
That doesn't make any sense.
Like the way he's doing the reference.
Lydia's seen Star Wars one or two times.
I don't know if you know what Star Wars is.
No, not to this level.
Okay, so.
Here we go.
He's using that to mean like, oh, it's not just a little bit of, what is he saying?
Drek?
Drek, yeah.
Another super smart guy word that I haven't come across that word much actually.
But anyway, he's saying it's not just a little bit of it, it's a space station.
And then he's referencing the, that's no moon, it's a space station.
But the point of that scene in Star Wars is not, that's not a small thing, it's a big thing.
The point is, no, the Death Star is so huge that he thinks it's a moon.
He's like, yeah, it's by that moon.
And he's like, that's not a moon.
That's a fucking space station.
That's insane that that thing that big is a space station.
Do you see how that makes no sense?
It's not like, oh, it's not a moon-sized thing.
It's a space station.
No, the moon is bigger, actually.
A moon typically is a way bigger object than a space station, but it's just that the Death Star is so huge, he thinks it's a moon.
And then he's like, you know what I mean?
He's using it wrong.
I can't resist, because it's so fucking annoying.
He thinks he's so smart.
Anyway.
Drek.
Let's jump into it.
I have like pages and pages of notes on this horrific piece of shit.
I can't emphasize enough how universally acclaimed this movie is.
Now, obviously, you're finding the counter, the naysayers of the culture are going to come in and say why they don't like it.
But like, we already talked about the reviews, the audience score, the tomato score.
Apparently, the tomato meter dropped 3% since he recorded this, because it's 88 now.
But 88%, audience score 84.
By the way, just crossed a billion dollars.
Yep.
Worldwide, like he's just wrong.
He's saying every single moment of it is bad.
Everything's over long.
It's like, I don't know, man.
I think you're just wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, my goodness.
OK, so let's start right at the beginning.
So from the beginning, you know what this movie is going to be, and it's going to be a very cynical take on what Barbie is, which is so weird.
I don't know why Mattel would turn over its IP to filmmakers who clearly hate the IP.
It's not cynical.
I don't see it as a cynical view of Barbie at all.
I think it's the juxtaposition of the two worlds and, you know, what happens if you're Barbie and you feel like there's something missing in the complexities of humanity and stuff, right?
It's not a cynical look at Barbie.
There's plenty of people in Barbie land that don't have those same existential crises that Marco Robbie has.
I mean, he's a conservative.
He's all about the market.
He's all about capitalism.
He's all about that.
And he's got a corporation that decided to okay this version of their intellectual property.
Yeah.
He's got the people paying now a billion dollars worldwide to see it.
Every single indication is telling the world, like if you're just a cold hearted capitalist, you can be like, well, fuck, this thing is amazing.
Like, this is great.
Just lean into that.
Yeah, it made a billion dollars.
And this guy's like, it sucks.
I don't know why.
The beats were too long.
Yeah.
I don't know why Mattel would have authorized this billion dollar movie success.
Anyway.
It's as though you were going to make Toy Story, except the toys are all evil.
They're all bad.
And you're supposed to hate them and you should burn them.
Because that's kind of the message of the film is that no, the Barbies are bad for the world.
OK, so it begins.
Not at all.
By trying to uphold the original vision of Barbie.
What was the original magical vision of Barbie?
We have Helen Mirren here to tell us in the form of a narrator, apparently played by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who's speaking from heaven.
And we get a 2001 A Space Odyssey flashback.
Okay.
Who's the audience for this?
Okay.
I meant to signpost this early on.
There are several ways in this review that Ben Shapiro just reveals that he doesn't think women are people.
Keep on the lookout for that.
It references, variously, Marcel Proust, Robert Evans, and the cinematography of The Godfather.
It references 2001, A Space Odyssey.
This is a movie made for moms and their seven-year-old girls.
Yeah, you just said it.
Yeah.
So moms are not a thing.
They're not a, like, moms aren't human.
Like, they don't get to enjoy, like, how revealing is that?
What are all these smart references in here for?
It's just for moms.
Like, yeah, dude, you're just telling on yourself.
Maybe moms would like that.
Well, and I think he's also kind of countering his opinion before that this is a movie made for kids when he's saying, well, listen to all these references.
That's not for kids.
Yeah, maybe it's not a movie for kids.
You're right.
Two hours were on my deathbed.
I will wish that I had not spent that time doing it.
It makes me viscerally angry.
But I'm going to talk to you about something that makes me much happier, and that is I really want to know.
You know he said on his deathbed he will be regretting that he wasted two hours like viscerally regretting and I don't know if Twitter will exist or whatever it'll be when that happens but I expect an update from him and if he doesn't produce an update while on his deathbed I think everyone should Hound him for a while.
I think he'll be proven to be a dishonest interlocutor at that point.
We got him.
It starts with Helen Mirren explaining that back in the day, girls would only play with dolls.
Dolls that looked like babies.
And then she says that this could be fun, at least for a while anyway.
Ask your mother, because your mother actually hates you and doesn't like being a mom, you see.
So if you ask your mom, she wants to play at not being a mom sometimes.
Okay, so the basic premise is- Holy crap.
I can't even track all of that.
It's just insane.
And okay, so first of all, it's not that girls played with baby dolls.
That was the only kind of doll that existed.
So if a kid wanted to play with a doll, it was a baby, literally.
That was the only option.
And I'm a mom, and I would say, yeah, I need a break every now and Well, also by his logic, I guess boys should always be playing with little baby dolls as well.
Otherwise, we don't like being a father, right?
Right.
It is so obvious how misogynistic his worldview is.
Mothers aren't people.
And also, if women don't exclusively only like playing with literal baby dolls their whole childhoods, then that means they hate you.
If they have kids.
If they have kids, they hate their kids.
It's like, Jesus, what a bleak picture that paints of what he thinks things should be like.
And he's proving America Ferrara's monologue at the end right, honestly.
Yeah, can't wait to hear him talk about how that's not right, even though he's literally proving it.
Barbie is supposed to be the independent woman who liberates all womanhood, but she fails.
And she fails for two reasons.
One, she's actually a tool of the patriarchal capitalist system.
And two, the real world has rejected the message of Barbie, which is that women should run everything.
Okay, so this is all not implicit.
This is explicitly said.
At the beginning, the monologue, you have Helen Mirren saying, because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.
At least that's what the Barbies think.
See, in the real world, women can't be anything, and that's one of the messages of the film.
In the real world, men run pretty much everything, which is weird.
Who greenlit this piece of shit?
I mean, Greta Gerwig is a lady.
She's making a good living off of this.
Margot Robbie is playing the lead.
In fact, the entire cast, aside from basically Ryan Gosling, is women.
There's a lot of Kens in the movie.
Again, put aside the metalogic of it.
No, no, no.
I'm not allowing you to say, put aside the logical part.
No, dude.
You can't point to one thing that has women and be like, guess women are doing fine.
Look at that woman over there.
She's got an ice cream cone.
Fucking, oh, and you're going to tell me that women aren't just living the dream?
It's like, what?
Yeah, that's one thing.
You're pointing at one.
How about you look at actual statistics about anything, any data, any real knowledge about planet fucking Earth, about how long it's taken.
And by the way, this is a movie where a lot of it is sort of like a historical narrative.
It's about Barbie over the years.
It's about, you know, like, yeah, it's also critiquing now, but even if somehow a month ago we solved gender inequality and everything was 100% fine, It would still be totally fine to make a movie that's sort of like about the history of Barbie and how things weren't always great for, like, there's no level on which his point stands.
Fucking asshole.
God, I hate him so much.
And I think if he took two seconds, he wouldn't do this because it would counter his point.
But Greta Gerwig, I mean, with this movie, it's breaking records regarding projects helmed by a female director.
What we're seeing with Barbie is proof That things have been very unbalanced for a long time in Hollywood, too, in terms of, you know, men versus women and their projects.
Greta Gerwig is finally, like, breaking some of those barriers.
Finally, it's 2023, and we're seeing, like, this stuff for the first time ever.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, yeah?
A woman is vice president.
So it's like, oh, you mean the first female vice president ever?
So we're good.
We're done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's enough.
I'm going to go through like a lot of beats here.
So it starts off with the idea that mommy dolls are bad and insufficient.
But then they criticize Mattel for discontinuing a mommy doll named Midge.
No.
Midge is the pregnant doll and was discontinued.
They're like, that's bad.
But hold on.
You just said that dolls about motherhood are bad.
But then this one, don't look for any sort of logical coherence.
Oh, no, no, we can look for the logical commute.
We can help you.
No one was saying baby dolls were bad.
It was just, you know, it'd be nice to have some variety and not just play with dolls in that very strict role.
And then Midge, they didn't...
They didn't stop producing Midge because motherhood is bad.
They stopped producing Midge because kids were like, I don't know how to play with this pregnant doll.
And, you know, like, that's reasonable.
It was, you know, a money decision.
They weren't selling.
Oh, was it?
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they just discontinued it because just that was not a doll that was selling.
Yeah.
It probably doesn't make that much sense to a little kid.
Yeah.
You know, it's a fun thing to play with.
Yeah, it's two different things.
It wasn't, okay, get rid of baby dolls because motherhood is bad.
It was, no, you shouldn't have the only toy available be a baby.
Right.
And then this one is also, notably, this isn't a baby doll.
This is a pregnant woman doll, which is a different, that's just a different thing.
Like regardless of Right.
What your point is, that's two different things.
Like, you could have one stance toward one and another stance toward the other.
It's not logically incoherent.
He's just an idiot.
And honestly, like, if I could imagine right now if there was a pregnant doll, I feel like the right would probably not be okay with that.
Like, marketed towards young kids.
Don't you think?
No, I don't.
It's just, whatever.
Who the fuck knows what they will or won't be?
It's just if Q tells them to be against something, they'll be again.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's like it'll have to be.
Well, is there like a wedding ring carved into the doll to make sure it's a it's not an unwed mother?
Like if it is, then there is a Citizens United reference.
They say all of the members of the Barbie Supreme Court are women.
And then they are speaking out at Citizens United.
The corporations are not people.
It's literally a Citizens United reference.
Who is the seven-year-old girl who's like, yes, I too have a very informed perspective on the Citizens United decision?
You already said it was mothers and their seven-year-old daughters is his version of the audience.
Sahan, have you heard of Citizens United?
Is that a thing that maybe you would understand in a movie?
Yeah.
Would your fragile female brain be able to... It's so infuriating that he just tells on himself so hard and either doesn't care or it's intentional.
I don't know.
Either way, it's bad.
The idea that... Again, he's 10 levels of wrong.
It's obviously the audience isn't just mothers and their children, but even if it were, mothers was a key word in that and those are adult humans.
That means if you're a mother, you're likely Somebody who is going to probably appreciate, at least on average, that reference.
And it's also just critical to the story they're building.
The world they're building is like, Barbieland is this sort of like, at first appearance, this utopia.
And one of the ways they did that was by not allowing like corporate whatever.
So it's not like that's just part of the world building, man.
It doesn't Does he think everything needs to be in like tiny three or four-letter words so that, you know, female brains can understand?
Like, shut up, dude.
Well, no, so here's the thing.
The political references were for the seven-year-olds, right?
And then all the sexual innuendo, that's the only thing that the moms are interested in, probably.
Well, we'll see.
I'm sure we'll get to that.
Then they say that logic and feeling at the same time, it doesn't diminish us.
It proves that we are more than, right?
It's all propagandistic.
And then it sets up the dichotomy.
The dichotomy is that men and women are in complete An utter contradistinction in terms of their roles.
So women only exist if they are completely free of men, and men only exist if they are completely free of women.
And the problem for Ken, the problem I set up for Ken, is that Ken is dependent on Barbie, because Ken is kind of secondary.
And we also set up at the very beginning that Barbie doesn't like Ken.
She finds Ken annoying.
She finds Ken ridiculous.
No.
OK.
I gotta say something.
Yeah.
So for me, and I imagine this is how a lot of people interpret it, because it's More reasonable.
Ken doesn't have identity without Barbie at the beginning, right?
Like, he sees himself as, I am Ken, right?
I do beach.
And I'm your boyfriend, right?
So his sense of identity is tied up in Barbie, whereas Barbie's sense of identity is not dependent on Ken.
And that's the distinction there.
It's not that Barbie hates him.
It's that she is just fully developed, self-aware doll.
She doesn't have the human capacity or anything like that.
But her identity is within herself already.
And that's where Ken's struggle is, for my opinion.
Exactly.
Here's the thing that Ben Shapiro and I watched a few I watched like just for fun like shoe on head that fucking asshole idiot youtuber has one.
To be fair, she's like a little more positive on the movie, but she also has these absolutely stupid takes on it.
Everybody reviewing this movie seems to have forgotten or maybe never even comprehend it.
Maybe I should help out Ben Shapiro.
The references might have gone over his head or whatever.
Um, Barbieland is not meant to be how things are supposed to be.
Right.
That is not, it's actually, this is going to blow your mind, Ben.
It's actually designed to reverse roles and show the shortcomings of our current situation by role reversal.
So every time he takes like, oh, this movie hates men because Ken doesn't even get an identity.
Yeah, man, that's the point!
It's reversed.
It's supposed to be a reverse world.
And by the way, by the end of the movie, spoilers, the end of the movie isn't, oh no, the way Barbieland was is perfect.
That's how everything should be.
That's not what it is.
The way it ends is actually, I mentioned earlier, I was worried for how it was going to come in for a landing.
You know, I wasn't sure.
I love how it ended.
And I think some of the lines at the end We're so crucial to pulling it off, to having it be like a pretty good message all around, in my opinion, and completely answer every one of Ben Shapiro's stupid idiot points that he's too dumb to see, or he just doesn't want to because he just wants to critique a movie that, you know, is a round party.
And raking the money.
Yeah.
But like, this is supposed to be a smart guy.
He's completely missed the fact that it's role reversal to prove a point.
Ken is sort of against the concept of Ken and Barbie.
But the basic idea is that Barbie is an independent woman and Ken is completely superfluous.
We then go to the beach and there is a scene on the beach where Ken, the Kens are supposed to be the lifeguards and the ladies are playing on the beach.
And we get a series of gay masturbation jokes.
Ken is an audience for children.
They're talking about beaching each other off.
There's a line where Ken says to another one of the Kens, I'm going to beach you off.
Get it?
Get it?
You get it?
Because it's like, like beat you off, but beach you off.
And then they repeat that no less than four or five times in the span of 45 seconds.
I would beach you off right now, Ken.
I'll beach off with you any day, Ken.
Anyone who wants to beach him off has to beach me off first.
I will beach both of you off at the same time.
Nobody's going to beach anyone off.
Bazinga.
Because it's just such a great gay masturbation joke.
You gotta go for it.
I mean, what else will the seven-year-old girls in the audience think if you don't go for the gay masturbation joke on the beach?
Clearly.
Clearly.
Again, did the seven-year-old girls drive themselves to the movie, I guess?
It's just them.
Like, he's not familiar with the concept of more adult jokes being subtly put into children's things anyway.
By the way, we don't have to keep repeating it, but just in case, he's wrong about the fucking audience!
It's PG-13!
So yeah, but again, going with him, That's what we love about when Lydia and I watch stuff with the kids.
I don't really need any adult sex jokes in there, but I love some of the adult references or adult jokes.
That's when I know it's a good kids thing that's like, all right, thank you for tossing us some crumbs to enjoy while we're stuck there.
You know we're sitting here.
Yeah, if it's bluey or if it's another thing where it's like, yeah, no, that's really funny.
And then Phoebe, of course, always wants to know why we laugh.
She has to know every explanation.
I don't think she asked for it.
In the movie theater, she doesn't really talk, so that's good.
We've raised her right.
I'll be honest here.
I didn't really find the beach people off that funny.
Like I didn't really.
I did.
Yeah.
Like it was okay.
I'm not saying it was bad.
Like I'm fine with it, but it didn't, I felt like you needed to justify it a little more.
It didn't, they just went right into it, but I didn't, unless I missed it.
Did they set up like why that would even make sense?
Is that a thing in the world that.
Well, I mean, like what I said, you know, Ken, he knows beach, right?
Like that's what he says.
It's like, it's not even that he's a lifeguard.
He just does beach.
That's all he does.
And I think that was set up right before that scene.
I know, but it is like a line.
And then, yeah, and then they're going to compete at who's better at beach.
Yeah, like I said, I mean, whatever.
It's neither here nor there.
I'm just saying, like, I don't love every single component of this movie because I'm a hopeless woke, you know, only going to fucking go to bat for anything woke.
I don't know, that joke was fine.
I was like, meh, okay, I get it.
And it was funny, but like, I just have to point out too, it's not a gay masturbation joke.
If you beat someone else off, there's no, they're not masturbating.
It's not masturbating.
Like, I don't.
Yeah.
Am I crazy?
Am I taking crazy pills?
Okay.
We have black female president Barbie, because this is, of course, the greatest of all possible worlds.
Kamala Harris, the Barbie version, is the president of the United States.
And then we get the break, right?
Then we get the actual plot point.
Plot point number one.
Barbie has irrepressible thoughts of death.
So again, at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, wait a second, isn't this a kid's movie?
No, you were the one who thought that.
We were all here being like, yeah, no, I'm enjoying this movie because it has adult themes that you can, yes, you can take a kid to it because the beat you off thing is the most adult thing.
And that's fine because they either don't get it or if they're old enough to get it, who fucking cares?
Doesn't matter.
You're old girls.
Nope.
It's about existential angst.
Over, over mortality.
That's what this film is about.
Again, interlaced through all of this is just more and more and more politics, right?
One of the Barbies is a trans Barbie, and this is treated totally normally as though this is a female Barbie.
Because it is normal.
A voice, again, deeper than my own.
Sorry, what's the politics in that?
That trans people exist.
Yeah.
No, Ben, explain to me the politics.
What is the, what is the, just a person?
There is also, by the way, there's also an Asian person in the, in the cat.
There's, there are black people.
Is that?
An Asian cat.
Hey Ben, is that politics?
Tell me what the politics of that is.
Well, especially in his mind that it's the Kamala Harris Barbie, right?
Yeah.
That's the only black woman in politics.
Ben, real quick.
Tell me the politics of that and tell me the for and against.
Like, what are the sides of that political?
Just real quick.
Just tell me, like, just what it is.
Like, what's the politics?
One side is, is it okay that trans people exist?
And the other side is, what?
What is it?
God, it's unreal.
Thoughts of death.
And this comes along with physical symptoms, like, for example, her feet flatten out.
Again, this is one of the few cute jokes in the movie, is that Barbie walks around.
Oh wait, I thought a second ago he said all the jokes were done after that point that he said.
Yeah.
Remember?
There are no more jokes.
But no, he actually likes this, again, because it was funny.
A normal Barbie doll, when you take off the shoes, the feet are shaped like the shoe, like the high heel.
It's funny.
But now, she's turning into like a real world person, and so her feet collapse, right?
And they're all screaming.
And so she goes to see.
Weird Barbie.
So Weird Barbie is a Barbie that has been played with too hard and has all the knowledge, not only about Barbieland, but also about the real world.
And apparently there's a connection between the people playing with the Barbies and the Barbies.
So if the people playing with Barbies are sad, then the Barbies also get sad.
Weird that this has only happened to Barbie because it turns out that lots of people are sad and have played with Barbies for a very long time.
But that's the plot point.
Fine.
Yeah, man.
We're also dealing with a world in which Barbies are real.
Like, yeah, OK, we're going to suspend some disbelief.
And I'm the guy who like, yeah, I like it when movies do their best to try to make the world make sense, like even even with suspension of disbelief.
But like, no, they even reference, I think, in the movie, don't they reference like it's happened before?
Well, Weird Barbie has to have happened before, right?
Like the way that she looks is because there is a connection between the real world and Barbieland.
She wasn't sold off of a shelf looking like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But also I think Will Ferrell maybe talks about like a different time that happened or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's like, okay, man.
Yeah.
Oh, you got them.
It should have already happened before.
Whatever.
And the concept of like a Barbie that was played with too hard is very funny because everybody has seen that before.
Oh, was that another joke that was funny after the time you said that all the humor was done after the first minute of the movie?
Somehow they make this into a not funny thing.
So Weird Barbie is he doesn't think that's funny.
It's really good makeup and all the rest of it.
And she informs Barbie she has to go to the real world and she has to find the person who is playing with her and just make that person feel better because that will heal the problem that she's having in Barbie land.
OK, so we have our plot point, right?
We have the thing that's going to launch us off into the rest of the movie.
And then it's just a complete mess from here on in.
At least to this point, it's kind of dumb but coherent.
From here on in, it makes no sense at all.
Again, Kate McKinnon sets up the dichotomy that pretty much the makers of the film hate Barbie by suggesting that you can live in fancy land with Barbie and you can take the Barbie shoe or you can take Birkenstocks, right?
You can become like a Portland lesbian and you can learn about reality.
That's going to be the choice that you have to make.
But not before she makes a joke about Ken and wanting to see the nude blob he is packing under those pants.
That's so funny.
Somebody said that?
Perfect for eight-year-old girls, ladies.
I'm a mom, and I love that.
It's amazing that a seven-year-old, I guess, had a birthday in the middle of watching this.
Yeah, it's funny.
Okay, Ben, was the theater just you and the hundred seven-year-old girls?
Was that what the theater was, or was there maybe other, like, people, like other human adult people in there who's, I know you don't want to acknowledge they exist because they're not men, but Were they maybe enjoying that joke like my wife just did?
Yeah, I loved it.
Ken and Barbie head off to the real world to try to find the person who is playing with Barbie.
And immediately upon arriving in the real world, Barbie is hit with an overwhelming tsunami of sexism.
Like right away, boom!
She walks in and a bunch of men just leer at her and say, give us a smile, blondie.
Which is something that no one under the age of 70 has said to a woman in the recent past.
You're right.
They would say way worse stuff.
Yeah, but it's a kid's movie.
Yeah, but it's a kid's movie.
But yeah, no, Margot Robbie absolutely would experience that, unfortunately, because people are terrible.
Well, and he leaves out the fact that they're dressed in the 80s Barbie thing with the rollerblades.
That also is why people are ogling them.
He tries to paint it like, I know it's audio medium here, but he does show the scene in his movie and anyone with eyes could be like, well, okay.
It's not like they're just getting ogled because of sexism.
It's also that everyone is looking at their outfits because they're really funny.
Yeah, I mean, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling both said before the movie came out, they said, you know, filming that scene and being in those costumes was really uncomfortable because they were being stared at.
You know, they felt very awkward and weird, you know, skating down the beach, near the beach and stuff in L.A.
So I think that was actually a real experience for them, that they did feel uncomfortable in some ways.
Yeah, but hun, it's not realistic to ever have been like catcalled or harassed on the street as a woman.
Oh yeah, no way.
That's never happened.
Literally never happened.
And this is fucking Ryan Gosling and Marco Raffi too.
They're beautiful.
Yeah, no one's gonna not look at them.
But like, I'm so glad you just said that because I was gonna say, I was gonna make an allowance for like, yeah, no, that line is kind of corny.
That's a weird That isn't what people say.
And I'll be honest, I didn't even think of the fact that like, yeah, obviously, because they say we're shit and you don't want to put it in this.
Yeah, it's not exclusively for seven year olds, but it is a PG-13 movie.
The kinds of stuff that I'm sure has been said to you on the street, hun, isn't stuff that you'd really want to like put in a movie.
Correct.
I don't know that a lot of it would be PG-13, honestly.
I think a lot of it would be pretty intense.
And you know he would have just complained more.
No one would ever say that.
So now that I think about it, his complaint distills down to the cat calling isn't sexist enough.
It would be more, you know, gross.
And you know what?
You're right.
You're right.
But it's, you know, some things are allowances for movie magic.
You know, we know it's a movie.
And one part of that is they have to tone down the awful sexism that women experience on the street often.
Yeah.
I'll say smile, Blondie.
Seriously.
We get Barbie explaining that all of the men who are who are leering at her.
But again, it's so funny if it's something for kids like that, where it's toned down for kids.
Oh, you idiot, stupid movie.
That's unreal.
If it's something that's like slightly adult.
But by the way, not even like explicitly slightly adult.
Oh, I thought this was a fucking kids movie!
They can't win.
Gazing at her, they have an undertone of violence.
She's threatened.
She's physically threatened because this is the real world.
The real world is not like Barbie Land.
In the real world, all women are victims.
They are deep and abiding victims of the system.
Okay.
Abiding victims.
I'm just sitting here stewing.
You can't show a single instance of something.
Otherwise, that means you're apparently claiming that's every single person ever.
If we show one instance in a movie of a woman getting harassed, oh, I guess that just means every woman is like, dude, are you five?
Like, how old are you?
How old?
Actually, for real, how old are you, Ben?
You look like you're 13, so I never know.
You're perpetually 13.
I know he like drew on a beard on himself to look older, but like, yeah, I don't know how old he is.
But then isn't this an opportunity to kind of spin victimhood, right?
Being able to talk about this, to present it, and to kind of call it out in that way?
That's a woman not allowing herself to be a victim anymore.
So then it's also not okay to present that because we're victims but we're not allowed to not be victims.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Well, it goes to, as you said, it goes to the speech at the end because I only know because he's showing me the clips.
I wouldn't have remembered this, but she just punches a guy that like slaps her butt.
Isn't that actually... I wish I could do that.
Right.
That's actually what conservatives think you can just do.
Yeah.
No.
Oh, I don't get it.
Why don't you, a hundred and fucking 40 pound woman or whatever, punch a full grown man?
Like, why don't you just do that?
That'll be fine.
That'll work out.
Great.
Yeah.
I don't know if you remember this, but you know, one time walking down the street, someone placed their hands on my chest.
Like, on my breasts.
And I just, like, stared.
And I didn't know what to do.
And then I walked away.
And I wish I could have punched them.
I remembered an incident, but I guess I didn't remember it was that.
Jesus, when was that?
It was 2013, I want to say.
Walking to the Safeway by work.
Just walking in the middle of the day.
Literally the middle of the day.
And was touched.
But surely you were wearing something that meant that someone could just do that or something.
Yeah, it's so fucking stupid.
Slacks.
But you would have punched him in the face.
That would have solved it, right?
No, I'm pretty sure I would have been hit back or something.
I mean, she also gets arrested.
There is a consequence to the choice that she makes there.
Yeah, if anything, that's like the conservative wet dream of how this goes, I think.
Actually.
Look, I don't want to get dark, but like, we know that police officers literally rape women that they have in custody.
Like, on a fucking daily basis.
- Even the police officers are rabid, raging sexist.
The police officers are hitting on Barbie. - I believe it.
- They're making observations about her appearance.
- Look, I don't want to get dark, but like we know that police officers literally rape women that they have in custody, like on a fucking daily basis.
- Yep. - Oh, but then making some sexist comments That's not in my America.
That never happens.
Yeah.
They're just fucking idiots.
They just don't know what the world is like.
It's it's conservatives are the most pampered baby.
They just don't.
They haven't ever had to grapple with actual earth.
It's so insane.
Well, it's getting super happy because Ken, who's been sort of an underling in Barbie land, now he's realizing he's part of the patriarchy and the patriarchy is awesome.
Ken is loving the patriarchy.
Now, you might imagine at this point that the way the film is going to go is that Ken and Barbie are going to have to some sort of agreement about seeing each other as equal human beings.
You might imagine that's where it's going.
Wrong.
That's not where the film is going to go.
You might have thought that what you were going to get was Ken gets treated with respect as a person and Barbie gets treated with respect as a person.
And that's a better.
Nope.
Wrong.
In the end, that is where we end.
Barbie just gets restored and the men are still subservient.
That's not what happens at all.
Not actually what happens.
So you just didn't watch the movie.
OK.
I wasn't sure if he was going to say something that would make this relevant again, but just in case he doesn't, you know, earlier he mentioned how Ken only exists if Barbie notices him and only has, you know, and we went through that, like it's role reversal.
And I was just reminded, hun, we just did on Serious Inquiries Only for the bonus, and actually the first half was on the main feed, Armageddon, not too long ago.
And by the way, there's still movies that do this every fucking day, but like Armageddon, absolutely hysterically shitty movie.
But that's 25 years ago.
And the female character just does nothing but be an object for the men at all.
That's all she does.
The whole time.
To pretend like that's some wildly insane take that, like, through the role reversal, we're showing.
By the way, through showing Ken like that in Barbieland, that is saying, I'll help you out, Ben, that's suggesting that the reverse is actually true in the real world.
And that's how movies fucking still to this day often work.
Like there's still movies that don't pass the Bechdel test all the time.
Yeah.
If I remember right, there was a recent year where like a bunch of the best picture nominees like actually didn't even pass the Bechdel test.
Like it's still to this day a problem.
It's way better, but then it's getting better.
But like it's still a huge problem.
It's absolutely a valid critique to bring up.
Okay.
Ken is walking around and he's really enjoying the patriarchy and all of this.
And he explains that men rule this world.
And he goes to Mattel and all the members of the board are men.
By the way, I'd like to see a corporate breakdown of the Mattel board.
I'll bet I can find it.
Like the CEO of Mattel for 30 years was a woman.
So there's that.
They pretended like Mattel is all run by men.
Can I chime in with some history?
Sure.
So the CEO for 30 years at the beginning of Mattel, yes, was a woman.
It was Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie.
And the reason that she was CEO of Mattel was because she and her husband, Elliot Handler, were making furniture and things like that.
He was an engineer, an inventor.
They paired up with Harold Mattson.
Mattel, right?
Mattzen and Elliott.
And they couldn't fit Ruth's name in there.
And because Elliott Handler was an engineer, he was really like the toy maker.
Mattzen died shortly after they created the company.
And so Ruth was CEO.
I personally think if Madsen were alive, I don't know if Ruth would have been CEO.
And so she ran the company for 30 years.
And then they had some tax problems and stuff.
They stepped down.
Then I just kind of looked at, OK, what did the board look like, you know, going backwards?
You know, right now it's about split, like he says, 50-50 mostly.
But in 2013, 10 years ago, there were 13 board members and three of them were women.
If you go back to 2000, there were 12 board members at that time.
There was one woman.
But 2000 is a hundred years ago.
Yeah.
We've been equal this entire time, right?
Yeah.
I want to see if he says anything more about this, because I also did some digging on some of this history.
Now I want to know who's on the board.
Okay.
Chairman and CEO is a dude.
The board includes one, two, three, four, five.
It includes five women.
Six men and five women.
Clearly patriarchal domination.
Clearly patriarchal domination.
Just wanted to look that up just for the sake of, you know, accuracy.
Whenever I do these reviews, like, oh, you're taking the movie too seriously.
The movie takes itself too seriously, guys.
Like, there is a lot of preaching in the movie.
It is, but it doesn't, you wouldn't say it takes itself seriously.
Like, it finds those moments to make serious points, but it's also very silly.
Like, it doesn't, that's not, anyway, fucking.
Pretends to be a comedy, but it's taking itself super seriously.
Fine.
So it's all men at the top of Mattel and they realize.
OK, so I looked at instead of looking at Mattel specifically, I looked at kind of just in general, like, OK, is this a valid point to make, by the way?
Because like, again, you're allowed to make points about the fucking world, even historically.
And by the way, there's a famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote where someone asked her, when will it be enough women on the court?
And she said, well, when there are nine.
Yep.
And it's like, you know, I'm not sure.
I think it's tongue in cheek, I believe somewhat, but I think it's really valuable to point out, especially to people like Ben and anyone, by the way, who has that kind of latent sexism or that unexamined feeling, a lot of progress, whether in terms of racial progress, you know, diversity, all that kind of stuff, a lot of that is met with this assumption that the minute that any demographic that's not white men hits like something around the quota,
You know, like, all right, we've got up to five women and there's still six men so they can be outvoted, obviously.
But like, shut up, stop complaining.
It's like, no, there should be like tons of companies where it's all women for a hundred years.
If we want to really even things out, we should get 150 years of the Supreme Court being nine women.
And then we'll be 50-50 after that.
Yeah, totally.
Like at the very, like if you want to say like, okay, that's not the best way forward.
Okay.
Yeah.
It might not be the best way.
Sure.
Like just practically speaking, it might be better to like still maintain some sort of diversity or something to keep people happy.
But to suggest that like, it's insane to even suggest there's been a problem with diversity because some of these things have gotten up to maybe something like parody is insane.
And so I just want, you know, again, we're talking about the ancient past here, hun.
Women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
I'm going to do, we can do a little, not trivia so much as just a guessing game.
Okay.
1995, what percentage do you think women CEOs, Fortune 500?
1985, 2%.
Zero percent.
Okay.
So that's not great.
And 1995 is, I mean, that's 4,000 years ago, right?
There's no, well, that's before Columbus.
So fucking, no, it's, I remember 1995.
But don't worry, as we went into the future, the year 2000, what do you think it leapt up to?
2005 percent.
.4 percent.
I think too nice.
Yeah, no, exactly.
So that means, I mean, we can do the math.
What does that mean?
There was like two, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's two.
And so 2000, though, again, that's before dinosaurs.
So now, let's see, 2005, though, surely, I mean, that's actually to me, that is kind of yesterday.
This is just going to make us feel old.
Yeah, you were in college.
Yeah.
OK, 2005, though, surely, you know, we fixed everything, right?
Post-history.
What was it up to in 2005?
What's your guess?
All right.
I'm going to go back down to two percent.
Oh, there you go.
1.8%.
Pretty close.
I figured it out.
Yeah.
But again, that was, you know, that's like when George Washington was president.
So like, but now in 2010, what do you think we're at?
Four percent.
Three percent.
You're doing a great job of trying to moderate.
You still can't match how pathetic the progress has been.
That's ridiculous.
Three percent.
But again, that's 2010, so that's yesterday.
Okay, 2050, I'll just finish it out.
2015.
2015, we were this close to having a woman president within a year.
What do you think it is?
5.3%.
Damn.
Nice.
Nice job.
4.8%.
Okay.
And that's looked at, by the way, we're getting into the point where people are making the argument like we don't, if there's no sexism, like we're done.
Yeah.
2020 last thing where the data is, where do you, where do you think we are?
2020?
I'm going to say 4.9%. 7.4%.
Okay.
So, I mean, still not great, but they jumped up higher than I thought they would.
I was looking at, like, no progress.
Yeah, but look at how much your expectations have been reduced.
Oh, yeah.
No, exactly.
I started off with what I thought was reasonable, and then I was like, okay, never mind.
Let me go to like your starting guest was almost the all time high.
Now, I think actually in like a few more took over.
And and there's by the way, if you don't know this, there's an interesting not you, but anybody listening.
There's a really interesting I can't remember if it was a paper or study or something like that that was done about how also a lot of the female CEOs are just installed when things are gone to shit.
Yeah.
And they just are there to like be the fucking well, isn't That's a great example.
Yeah, by the way, and I haven't heard thing one from whoever the CEO of Twitter is.
It's still fucking Elon Musk just tweeting.
But yeah, no, it's not only is it a pathetically low percentage still.
A bunch of those are they put a woman in when everything's gone to shit, probably ruined by men, by the way, so that they look good.
Oh, we're hiring a woman.
And then they expect the woman's basically going to take the fall for the thing being shitty.
And then they can be like, well, that didn't work out.
See, women can't really even do anything.
But what's funny is a lot of times the women have changed the whole shape of the company.
They've actually pulled through some of the examples.
I got to find what that was.
It was a whole thing I read.
But anyway, yeah, no, this is nothing.
Like, yeah, okay, literally Mattel might be slightly better than average.
Oh, it also has board members, by the way.
I won't, it'll be tedious to go through the whole thing.
But 1995, 9.6% board members.
Now keep in mind, that's going to be higher because this is an important thing too.
A board member seat is a thing that you can throw to a quote unquote minority that like diversity high.
Like if you're, you know, the white dude in charge, which again, we already at 1995, 100% men in charge of these.
Fortune 500 companies, 100%, not 90%, 100%.
So it was very easy.
Something like a board where it's, you know, 11, 13, whatever it is, however many people you can for PR purposes, put a woman, a person of color, a whatever on there.
And they functionally have no power, like they cannot do anything.
Right.
And so, but it makes you look good.
So that's why this will be a little bit higher, I think, because of a lot of that too.
And I think you'll also see significant growth because there was a push to diversify boards, right?
And so like you're saying, there's no risk.
One vote's one vote.
So they were like, okay, yeah, fine.
Here you go.
There's a lot of ways that obviously entrenched power will try to look like it's making progress without actually handing progress.
The curve is a little better on board membership.
I still...
I mean, again, it goes from 99.6% to 2020, latest data on this particular study, 27%.
I mean, it's better, but think about what that means.
It's almost like gerrymandering.
You could have not a single board where women could be deciding the deciding vote, whereas Literally every single board could be, if the men united and wanted to vote something, they could get it through.
Which, you know, that's probably not how, like, decisions in a Fortune 500 company work.
It's not, I get that it's not like a gender-based battle all the time, but the point being, functionally, as far as the power is concerned, that's the relationship of power.
Again, you're supposed to just be fine with the fact that, like, yeah, what was that fantastic headline?
I think it was when Kamala was either elected VP or nominated VP.
I can't remember.
Kate Mann, who I love, wrote a book called Down Girl.
She has another one either out or coming out.
Anyway, it was an opinion piece in the New York Times and the title was Women Can Have a Little Power as a Treat.
And the subtitle was, a female vice president would be tasked with wielding power in the service of a more powerful man.
That's no challenge to the patriarchy.
And, you know, we don't have to get into that.
The reading is more nuanced.
It's like, yeah, it's a constant battle of, well, it's good to be happy with some amount of progress, but also when that progress doesn't functionally do anything, it's also like, well, what do you just expect us to always be happy with, like, a little bit of progress that doesn't actually fucking change anything?
Anyway.
Yeah.
Well, and I want to say I have an interesting and fortunate position in that my day job is very full of female leadership, lots of women leaders.
And that has been very empowering for me as I've been stepping into leadership roles, you know, joining a call.
And it's woman, woman, woman, woman, woman, all up to the top of the chain, like, has just been really, really different and helps me feel confident and prepared and like I can actually attain things because I have these leaders I can look up to.
Representation makes a huge difference, yeah.
That Barbie and Ken have escaped Barbieland.
And this presents some sort of threat.
What kind of threat?
Because the writers are shitty, they don't bother explaining.
They're just like, a threat!
And Will Ferrell acts all weird and goofy, like Will Ferrell.
And he's funny, because it's Will Ferrell acting weird and goofy.
But he's not funny, because it's just Will Ferrell with no actual plot or dialogue to speak of, just being weird.
We'll fill that in later.
There's so many places in the script where it's basically like the writers just They left a gap and they're like, we'll leave a couple asterisks.
We'll fill it in later.
And then later they got there and they're like, nah, we'll just, we'll just skip right over it.
Fine.
So they figured they got to track down Barbie and Ken.
And meanwhile, Barbie is trying to track down the girl who's playing with her.
And she mistakenly thinks that it is a teenage girl who is playing with her and who is unhappy.
And at this point, she receives a lecture from the teenage girl about how Barbie has ruined the world and actually is fascist.
How Barbie is a sexualized, capitalistic emblem.
How Barbie has created unattainable feminine ideals.
How Barbie is ruining the planet with rampant consumerism.
You get like this full lecture right in the middle of the film.
It's truly awful.
It's really awful.
She's called a fascist.
By the way, it only sets up the only good line of the film.
Truly, in my opinion, there's one good line in the film.
And that is where Barbie is trying to contemplate whether she's a fascist or not.
And she says, I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce.
Now, there's only one problem with that line, as with the entire movie.
There is no character consistency.
Barbie is supposed to be an idiot bubblehead piece of plastic from Barbie.
How does she know what a fascist is?
How does she know?
So good.
about the flow of commerce.
Like again, just in terms of character consistency, like characters who actually are the characters, makes no sense whatsoever.
But anyway, I just also want to point out that he loved that line, which is again, after the first three seconds that he said, there wasn't any funny lines.
This is interesting because I think he's also missed the fact that like the speech by the, I guess, Gen Z character, that's also pretty cruel.
I like I like that scene because... I do too.
Yeah, she's saying a lot of pretty valid things, but she's also being shitty.
Yeah.
And she's just being shitty to a woman in distress in Margot Robbie.
Nuance is not Ben's strong suit.
He doesn't understand any of this.
But I liked it because it's exactly not an easy thing.
Yeah.
It's not a fucking Aaron Sorkin thing where she makes a speech and then Barbie sits down at the end of it because she's just so defeat.
No, it's not that.
It's actually she makes a speech.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's a bit of a speech.
I get it.
But like, also, it's not nice.
It's really mean.
And it has some good points.
But the point of the movie, I think, and let me know what you thought on this moment, is not to fully endorse that.
It's to set up like, okay, yeah, those are some valid views, but like, you don't have to be that shitty about it all.
Like you can still enjoy some things that you liked.
And you can still, by the way, be compassionate in the moment.
I know it's mixing kind of metaphor and reality.
But I think that's intentional.
Like, I think we've seen a lot of that just in our community.
There's times where people use progressive politics or social justice or whatever to just be really shitty and be mean to people.
And that's not cool.
Like, it's actually like I'm not a fan of that.
Some people are super big fan of it.
I'm not.
I think that's shitty.
You know, like, I think it's often people who just like to bully people finding like a socially acceptable way to do that.
And sometimes it might be valid.
I don't know.
But like, I liked all that tension in that scene, I think.
What do you think?
Well, and for me, I just felt like it was accurate in that Sasha, I think her name is, the daughter, I mean, what, they're eighth grade?
You know, they're like, people are mean in middle school.
And, you know, she's surrounded by her friends and this woman, this grown woman, like if she doesn't know that that's a Barbie, right, that she is in the real world.
And now you just have this woman that is rushing towards you on your campus and you're surrounded by your friends, you probably feel like, you know, you have this pressure to be cool and to kind of approach the situation in a way that you're not going to get made fun of, too.
And so you take this stance with, again, like you said, those are some valid criticisms of Barbie and the role that Barbie has had in the world.
And it's the first time that Margot Robbie as Barbie is hearing that those are criticisms of Barbie.
And I think that's important for her on her journey, her character arc, to hear it from a person in the real world that Barbie is not what she thought she was to humans.
And again, it is needlessly cruel, but we're talking about like a 13-year-old, so.
They're just needlessly cruel.
That's so great that you point that out because that's their entire shtick is taking what a kid said as like, that has to be representative of the entire progressive left or the woke left or whatever.
And you're totally right.
That's hilarious because yeah, like maybe a kid doesn't make all the perfect points in the best way because they're a fucking kid and that's totally fine that they might do that.
Also, just the thing about the fascists and the trains.
I thought that was funny.
That read to me as just like the people in that world.
Like, obviously it's pointless and it's just like splitting hairs, but the Barbies in Barbieland have to know something to function.
Like they're not just like blank whatever's.
And I took that as like, oh, they have like, it's almost like they have like a textbook kind of knowledge from 1960 something when they were invented, you know?
Chat GPT.
Yeah.
That's how I read it.
Oh, that's a good comparison.
Yeah, that's kind of how I read it.
Like, she just knows, like, oh, what a history textbook would define as fascism, not what, like, the real world has done in the last 50 years or whatever.
That's how I read it.
And the nuance to it, too, right?
Because, like, you see that in Barbie land.
Right.
You have this role.
It's well-defined.
It's very, you know, obvious.
Supreme Court president.
You know, you're just kind of going through it.
And the real world is a lot messier than that.
Ken is wandering around, enjoying the patriarchy more and more and more, and he keeps asking men about the patriarchy.
And at one point, he asks a dude about the patriarchy, and the guy says, well, that's not really the way that it works here anymore.
He says, really?
He says, no, it still works that way.
We just hide it really well.
Again, you can't even present the mild other side of the film.
Sorry, what?
You can't present the mild other side?
Yeah, what's the other side?
Sorry, what is this new rule, Ben?
In your world, there can't be a movie that's just for women, that says women's stuff, again, in his mind.
That's beyond the pale.
Can't do it.
What about the men, though?
What about the men?
You have to present the men, what not all men, he's not all men in the Barbie movie.
Oh my God, dude.
There's 18 levels of why he's wrong, but you also could just, you could literally be Ben Shapiro.
No, you shouldn't be Ben Shapiro.
You could be someone who agrees with a lot of his shitty takes and just be like, oh, guess that movie's not for me.
Right.
Guess someone made a movie that's not for me.
But no, that kind of person, nothing is not for them.
Everything's for them.
Well, what if it's the patriarchy?
Yeah, exactly.
Literally, it is.
All right, I'm cutting us off there, Normies.
Sorry, but I hope you enjoyed that.
That was, wow, almost 80 minutes, so definitely got your not money's worth.
No, if you'd like to hear the rest, please go to patreon.com slash wherethereswoke.
There's a lot of good stuff there, plus some callbacks that you didn't get to hear yet, so hope you enjoyed it.