Many of my friends have asked me what my thoughts are on the Barbie movie. Overall, I thought the movie was well done, navigating deep and challenging themes with a healthy balance of seriousness and lightheartedness.
But ultimately, what I found the most powerful, was the reach and reception of the movie in general. That it has been able to reach such a wide audience and resonate so strongly with them is emblematic that as a society we are becoming ready to face some of the deep seated prejudices that we’ve been unwilling to come to terms with for so long. Recognizing that the patriarchy is both perpetuated by and harms us all is a vital step in being able to dismantle it.
The media is such a powerful force to both represent and shape popular opinion. For too long we have been fed narratives of ethnocentricity and tribal conflicts, where we, the ‘good’ humans fight against them, the ‘bad’ humans. But the reality is so much more complicated than that. With each one of us having our own shadows, we are called to acknowledge our flaws and reach a new level of consciousness.
This means we will have to reframe our thinking from finding some evil group to overpower to embracing the fact that we all have human flaws yet still must conceive a future together. The challenges that are inevitably facing us are not those that have an evil face. They are existential threats like climate change, white supremacy, and ecological decline, which impact us all. Only through collective solutions will we have a chance to create a future that can sustain us all.
That’s what I think the power of this movie represents. Because no longer are our biggest threats each other. In fact, our biggest threat may be still believing that they are.
