To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn't just about horses, I lost interest.

Barbie - 3.5/5

This movie is difficult for me to place my finger on. It's wiggly. “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing,” as Greta Gerwig says, and I am stuck somewhere around there. Figuring out if she succeeded, I guess? It's a movie that's very aware that it's making A Barbie Movie. It's full of expectations and the feeling that, in order to exist in this world we live in, it must uphold those expectations while also subverting those expectations while also very obviously subverting those expectations. It must be light and pink and deep and red and bleeding from her vagina. It must be beautiful, and against beauty. It wants its cake, and to eat it, too—but to still stay skinny, duh. It has to make it okay for everyone to like Barbie. It must walk the center line. Listen, it's a hard task, and walking the middle aisle, hovering in the air between two powerful magnets pulling its arms in each direction. Its desire to live within contradictions break its easy painted-on smile. It has become sentient; aware. Though it's not so much self-aware as constantly aware of itself — much as women are constantly aware of being a woman!! In the end, it's a movie that befits the toy – designed to be analyzed, poked at, prodded; hair to be combed, body to be dressed, legs to be split, views to be contorted as the viewer sees fit to shape it through their own ideological lens. How much can it hold between its rigid plastic fingers? Must it carry the full weight of feminism and femininininity? As subjects and objects, all are inextricably linked to... not controversy, but opinions. It's a movie made to be discussed on the internet. It's an Instagram explainer of feminism, designed to be Instagram explainer-ed. It's a product about a product with us as the long-tail product. It's very possibly the most defining movie of our time. And any issues I have with it are not that it had something to say, but that the message wasn't perfect. I'll sum that criticism up as "female power fantasies are still fantasies of power," and go no further. ALSO BECAUSE I CAN'T HELP IT I'LL JUST SAY THAT SOMETIMES THE EDITING CHOICES FELT A LITTLE LESS IMPACTFUL THAN I THINK THEY COULD HAVE BEEN? But all that to say, the movie befits the toy. Barbie The Movie and Barbie the Character are magical mirrors for those who gaze into it, reflecting back themselves.