Barbie: A Review of the Movie and its Attempt at Wholesale Resetting of the US in the Middle of Its Midlife (Political and Cultural) Identity Crisis, Part I

 Review of Barbie, the movie: Hollywood and the powers that be decided to revive and reset Barbie, one of the icons that helped defeat communism, mold generations of American middle-class women and give millions of men the idea of a perfect woman-dream.

The movie starts with a quasi-Satanic introductory ritual modeled on 2001: A Space Odyssey and the new (and better, Hobbesian) creation of the new artificial woman alias Barbie who teaches American girls to symbolically smash and kill their dolls or babies and to trade motherhood (now spurned and shunned) for beauty, sex, new confidence, career, and success.

The movie catches with an aged Barbie who is no longer the idol representing the unquestioned, sexy or even sexed-up image of the materialist, self-confident, rich US as the new youth of today's and tomorrow's humanity, driven by American teenagers and new teenage U.S. feminine beauty and their culture, trailed by Ken and a toy-dog that can also poop (poop plastic, that is) as part of her accessories. Barbie is now middle-aged, still speaks in programmed curt cliches and thinks cliche, but popular thoughts. But, as a middle-aged woman, she enters her own mid-life crisis ushered in by the thought of mortality and death--her own death, to be precise. Death spoils the exuberant "naivete" (even though that too was just an act) of the previous perfection and its roaring decades. Part of this middle-aged crisis is a realization that at least some Barbies (American women), in the movie at least one, were severely abused. The abuse one is called "Weird Barbie." In addition to the sudden Heideggerian existential specter of death that makes Barbie literally flat-footed overnight, there is the ever more massive collision between the US Barbie pink and rosy bubble and "reality" and the growing inability and impossibility of American girls and women (and men) to meet all the, as a rule, mutually exclusive and opposing prompts, programs, and commands.

The US of today, the US of the Barbie in the middle-age crisis, is where women no longer look like Barbies--unless you are someone like Melania Trump or a Hollywood celebrity or some other US "real housewives" from a "Reality TV" show. No, the aged Barbies who now began to face their own mortality and rediscovering Heideggerian bleak existentialism (if not corporate fascism), are depressed, suicidal, addicted to drugs, angry, tired, medicated, more and more alone (and single) and fleeing the high seas of the high heels into the safe and stale harbors of the quotidian unflattering sandals.

As the old idol and icon of the original and artificial Barbie made like her whole world with unnatural (and possibly toxic) colors is eclipsed, the middle-aged Barbie enters the new "real world" where the US teenage female youth no longer looks for most part like her and does not even want to look like her (nor can it afford to look like her). In their mass (at least in the movie), US teenage females are made in the image of the tomboys and butch women and girls. No generation of US women before looked as masculine or manly--not even the women from the time of the conquest of the American native land and its last frontiers. Likewise, we will find that, except for some random characters on the streets, the world of this Barbie has as a rule a place only for variously feminized men to play any speaking or more notable role there. That includes Ken--or rather the whole army of various Kens, including Allen--the only male character in the Barbie world who is not like everyone else a (MKULTRA) multiple--or at least that what he thinks.

The new aged Barbie finds herself (along with everyone else) in the world of deep and severe cognitive dissonance where she begins to sense that all these years she has been lacking self-reflection and deeper self-understanding and that she, more than she would like to admit, she has been programmed and brainwashed--so that everyone else could be programmed and brainwashed. Not only she comes to think that Ken, her nominal or official boyfriend might not even had a penis, but Ken himself begins to think that he had and has no idea what it means to be a man. So Ken has his own midlife crisis--all his previous existence and its meaning was about to get Barbie and Barbie's attention, admiration, and appreciation--but, as now he suddenly realizes, only to impress some other Ken and in order to follow everyone's expectations about what Ken is and what he has to be and want.

In this crisis, Ken rediscovers patriarchy and horses--power animals, animals or even beasts of power as the new "true" extension of man and his manhood. Barbie does not extend or expand him any more. She is no longer his essence, his dream, the meaning of his life.

During the trip of the aged, depressed and disoriented Barbie to "the real world"--which is Los Angels/Hollywood--the new midlife-crisis Ken decides to "man up" for the first and last time in his life and carried a cultural and political (contra)revolution in the Barbie land--he installs a patriarchy based on new methods of brainwashing and manipulation and its new "conservative," "traditional" and "fundamentalist" values along with contemporary U.S. country songs, beer, trucks, and culture. But even as a new and reinvented man, he still acts and dresses like a pimp.

Faced with this massive identity crisis of herself and the nation (the US), Barbie tries to win back her power, status, and popularity. This means to unseat and reprogram (again) Ken--all the Kens of the US--and to reinvent American woman and the meaning of US feminism once again--and to realign all this with the idea of death along with the idea that a US teenage girl can no longer lead the world where it is necessary. It is now up to the middle-aged and older American woman along with her therapist and social worker. But, as the movie shows, saving the world of Barbies through aged Barbies for aged Barbies can be accomplished only with the help of the creators of Barbie herself--with the faceless corporation and the clique of its CEOs (Men in Black). And--also with the united help (and consumerist and buying choices) of the new American tomboys and butch and other masculine feminists. (To be continued).