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Who Was Barbie? | Online Only | n+1 | A. S. Hamrah, Ari M. Brostoff, Christine Smallwood, Lisa Borst, Cecilia Corrigan, Jon Dieringer, Jasmine Sanders, Arielle Isack, Mark Krotov

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My mind was racing with questions like, Why is there a transfemme Barbie but no transmasc Ken? Did I just pay $17.50 to witness the spectacle of capital subsuming dissent? Have the filmmakers deliberately cast “Weird Barbie” with an actress who dated Bari Weiss and played “Hallelujah” on the piano while dressed as Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election in order to politically center “weirdness”? Why is there no mention of doll materials designer Jack Ryan and his past employment engineering missiles for Raytheon?

When a movie becomes a mass culture phenomenon, like Barbie, any negative criticism of it runs the risk of coming off hysterical. Any meanness toward it becomes the mirror version of the reactions of fans who see the movie in the theater again and again, who cry during certain scenes each time, and who tell the world about it on social media with a great sense of pride and purpose, or even with a certain amount of shock about its power over them. Similarly, rushing to write a takedown, a counter-phenomenon more prevalent with every big new release, shows the same shocked inability to hold…

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