As apparently everyone on earth knows, I went to see the “Barbie” movie on Friday. The tweet in which we announced that I had actually seen the “Barbie” movie has roughly 60 million views at this point.
The outrage in the media at my review is astonishing because I did a 43-minute review of the film in which I went through it point by point. There were articles about my review of this movie in sources as diverse as Newsweek, NBC News, and The Daily Beast. Everyone was covering the fact that I did not like this movie.
What I did was apparently terrible. Why? Why the outrage over me not liking the film?
I have a question for you leftists. Why are you so upset? I don’t like the movie? You liked the movie? Okay, we can have those differences, so why are you so upset?
I understand why I’m upset: What I’m upset about is the lie. You created a movie that is specifically designated for little girls and you slide in a bunch of Left-wing imagery and propaganda about how terrible little girls have it in the United States.
Why are you so upset? Your movie made a lot of money over the weekend. This movie made $160 million over the weekend. It blew the doors off the box office opening weekend.
What are you so upset about? One person whom you already didn’t agree with politically didn’t like the film and yet you are upset.
Does it ever occur to you that you act like you’re more religious than I am? I’m the one here in the yarmulke attesting to my belief in God, but you guys are wearing your Barbie shirts in attestation to your idolatry of a sexual revolution moment that has played out and is riffed with deep unhappiness that you refuse to acknowledge.
Barbie is a movie that was marketed to children. It is a movie that, though it is PG-13, was clearly marketed at moms and their 8-year-old girls.
But it was a bait-and-switch because the entire movie is a feminist diatribe about the evils of the modern patriarchy. They mainstream that within a bunch of Left-wing social gobbledygook in a movie that is supposed to be sort of a fun romp with a Barbie doll.
And when you notice their agenda, they get very upset.
What they really want is approval. Don’t you dare comment in the wrong way about Greta Gerwig, the writer-director, whom they’re giving the Jordan Peele treatment or the Taylor Swift treatment or the Beyonce treatment. There are certain cultural figures, cultural idols, where if you criticize them, you have violated the sacred honor of the Vestal Virgins.
WATCH: Barbie Is Garbage, But You’re Not Allowed To Say So
To understand, you have to understand that Greta Gerwig is now representative of an actual religious worldview. When I made the kind of quirky comparison between the reaction to me burning the Barbie dolls in this review and flaming the movie and the reaction to fundamentalist Muslims over the burning of the Quran, it wasn’t a frivolous comparison.
That’s because they have an actual religious worldview that cannot be attacked. And if you attack that religious worldview, if you say that religious worldview is bad and wrong, then this means that you are a heretic and you must be punished. There’s a really serious undertone to a lot of this stuff.
I actually got some death threats over the “Barbie” review.
Why? Because there’s an ideology. It is the ideology of the sexual revolution that has been promulgated by the social Left in this country. And it lies at the center of everything they think, everything they feel.
If you question it, then you must atone. You must be brought to heel, Spanish-Inquisition style. That ideology places at the center of human life the sense of self-identity that cannot be abridged by anyone else.
If you say, for example, that women should have children, that they should get married, that men should get married, that men should have children, if you say that the height of human aspiration is not sexual pleasure or an “individualistic pursuit of subjective success,” that there are things you should do in this life that are higher and better, if you do that, that is a violation of the agreement that they think we are supposed to have, which is to place at the center of our being a narcissistic view of self.
How do I know this? Because Greta Gerwig says so.
This is the reason Greta Gerwig is now a religious figure for the Left. You must not violate the idolatry of Greta Gerwig by saying that Greta Gerwig is an overrated director and an overrated writer and that her ideology is false and does not ring true.
Greta Gerwig has a religious worldview. She did an interview with Vogue in which she talked about writing the movie, and she said that before she made the movie, she wrote an abstract poem about Barbie. She wouldn’t read the poem to Vogue, but astonishingly, she compared it to the Apostles Creed, the affirmation of certain core Christian beliefs.
That’s her language, not mine.
She apparently saw the Barbie movie as a way of rebutting certain presumptions about the Bible itself. Gerwig said, “Ken was invented after Barbie to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.”
So there is something that is deeper than a mere sort of cultural stupidity happening here: Greta Gerwig is channeling a reverse Biblical morality into a movie that is directed at children.
That is what is happening here, and you’re not supposed to notice that? But if you do notice it makes you bad.
Modern society has gotten rid of the saints. Modern society has gotten rid of Judeo-Christian traditional values or demeaned them as completely superfluous. In fact, the entire Barbie movie is about how relationships between men and women are actually stupid and impossible and fraught with tension. Separate but equal is the only way to do a proper Barbie land in the bizarre Barbie world that has been created by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her longtime romantic partner, people who both drink deeply from the well of secular humanist leftism.
Their view is an idolatrous worldview, and it demands that you be part of the idolatry.
But if you say no, the morality you are promulgating is stupid and counter-productive and it is bad when you promulgate it to kids, leftists treat you as if you violated a religious group.
Because you have.
There’s no subtlety to this movie. It’s like being repeatedly hit in the head with a sledgehammer with the nostrums of third-wave feminism.
There is one speech that America Ferrera makes in the Barbie movie that basically is the Apostles Creed of feminism. She says:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.
This is the Apostles Creed, apparently.
Yeah? Try being your grandmother. Seriously. Try being your grandmother operating without a washing machine with six kids in a home. It’s her job to make sure that everything runs on time. But you’re the real victim?
Their religion is secular leftism. And the Apostles Creed of it is the Apostles Creed of the sexual revolution. If you cross them, they become just as angry as any other inquisition; they externalize that into, “I can’t believe somebody said something bad: must protect the precious.”
It’s a form of idolatry, and it’s amusing to watch the Left try to spin it away. You hear people on the Left say things like: “My kid isn’t going to pick up on all this messaging. What do I care? It’s subtle.”
There are certain movies where things will just fly right over kids’ heads; I know, I have four of them.
But there’s no subtlety to this film at all. It is right in your face.
And it is specifically directed at kids.