The Summer of Barbenheimer has long since passed. Awards season is over. The pink dust has settled. So now it’s safe to cut the shit: We need to stop pretending Barbie did anything groundbreakingly positive for “women in cinema.” Before you dismiss me as a bad feminist killjoy bitch based on those sentences alone, let’s get some things out of the way: The Barbie movie did a lot of things. It breathed new life into the long-and-slowly-dying ritual of in-person moviegoing, raked in over $1.4 billion, made Greta Gerwig the highest-grossing female director of all time, convinced Chloe Sevigny stop wearing pink, and apparently pissed off Shakira’s son. What it did not do, however, is open up some boldly optimistic new frontier for women in the field of filmmaking. With Barbie, Gerwig demonstrated that a female-centered story could join the ranks of the Blockbuster Boy’s Club. In short, she proved that you can make a Marvel movie for girls and actually achieve Marvel movie numbers. That’s great if you believe the goal of movie-making should be to make as much fucking money as possible, and Ms. Gerwig should be laughing all the way to the bank (as she should, and as so many men have done before). But to say Barbie deserves a bunch of Oscars is like saying you think Avengers should have won Best Picture. Look — if you really loved Barbie, if it spoke to you on what felt like a deep, personal, feminine level, if you shed a single tear during America Ferrera’s “being a woman is so hard because we aren’t perfect” monologue, I’m glad it worked for you. But what the film’s success has done for the state of modern filmmaking — especially for women — is to shift the window even further in favor of big-budget, clout-bomb cast, ultra high-production studio cash cows. Buying in en masse to the idea that the film is some sort of feminist revolution is like if the next giant tech overlord happened to be a woman, and we adored every minute of having our data mined because it was being done by a girlboss. For the record, an ‘Oscar-worthy blockbuster’ is not an oxymoron. Jaws, which pretty much every Intro to Film class in America points to as the original summer blockbuster, is also famously shown in film classes for its groundbreaking and experimental camera work. (Google “Jaws simultaneous track and zoom”). It won the Academy Awards for Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Original Score, and it was nominated for Best Picture. It’s not wrong for a movie to make money. Fuck, it’s not wrong for a movie to want to make money — don’t they all?? But the more we wax poetic about the incredible, feminist feat of cinema that was Barbie, the more we are lying to ourselves. What I’d personally love to see are more movies made by women about shit that isn’t doused in pink and written around some middle-school level feminist monologue about how much it sucks to be female. Surely us girls have other things we’d like to say — maybe things that people who aren’t women might feel like hearing, too. What Barbie proved is that women can play the Hollywood game just like men. What it didn’t prove is whether women can make interesting and creative movies about real people in the real world — movies that aren’t selling franchisable IP and a whole two season’s worth of monochromatic clothing and a Mark Ronson-and-Dua-Lipa produced soundtrack. But for that, you’ll just have to watch Anatomy of a Fall. —Bitchy Barbie You are reading a pseudonymous post from a friendly neighborhood writer as part of our limited-run Hate Read pop-up newsletter! These are not real names! Stop trying to Google them lol!
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