[Indigenous related] So, that one bit in Barbie...
stetson
Shipmate
The one where someone compares the spread of patriarchy in contemporary society to the spread of smallpox among indigenous groups during the colonial eras.
To be honest, the line came out of the blue at a moment when I wasn't devoting 100% of my attention to the dialogue, so I can't quite recall the overall conversation or how the comparison precisely worked, but that was the gist of it.
And it struck me as a little...misplaced. Even if you totally buy the comparison, to just start talking about events that led to mass death and social carnage, and then to immediately drop that theme, seemed rather insensitive to those who might still be impacted by events of the colonial period.
And as much as I'd like to say that with better contextualization it coulda been a neat lesson in intersectionality, ehhh...not really. The goal of improving girls and womens' self-image via popular culture is a vital one, but at least in this day and age, there's considerably less human-life at risk over that problem than there was over the problem of intruders were bringing foreign diseases into the western hemisphere.
I suppose I could counterpoint myself by saying that I didn't really object to Spielberg's War Of The Worlds making mention of French colonialism in Algeria, but I think the differences there would be a) most people went into that expecting to see a dark film, both because of the source material and how the film was promoted, b) it was comparing one act of violent colonialism to another(granted, the Martian one was fictional), and c) it just referenced the overall situation, not one specific horror.
My thoughts, anyway. I am neither indigenous nor female.
To be honest, the line came out of the blue at a moment when I wasn't devoting 100% of my attention to the dialogue, so I can't quite recall the overall conversation or how the comparison precisely worked, but that was the gist of it.
And it struck me as a little...misplaced. Even if you totally buy the comparison, to just start talking about events that led to mass death and social carnage, and then to immediately drop that theme, seemed rather insensitive to those who might still be impacted by events of the colonial period.
And as much as I'd like to say that with better contextualization it coulda been a neat lesson in intersectionality, ehhh...not really. The goal of improving girls and womens' self-image via popular culture is a vital one, but at least in this day and age, there's considerably less human-life at risk over that problem than there was over the problem of intruders were bringing foreign diseases into the western hemisphere.
I suppose I could counterpoint myself by saying that I didn't really object to Spielberg's War Of The Worlds making mention of French colonialism in Algeria, but I think the differences there would be a) most people went into that expecting to see a dark film, both because of the source material and how the film was promoted, b) it was comparing one act of violent colonialism to another(granted, the Martian one was fictional), and c) it just referenced the overall situation, not one specific horror.
My thoughts, anyway. I am neither indigenous nor female.
Comments
I looked around a bit for some references, and it was reminded that Gloria, the woman from the real world, delivers it. It helps - I think - that Gloria is Hispanic. (I can’t confirm it; it seems like someone mentions relatives in Puerto Rico? Her husband is also failing to learn Spanish, etc.)
As a white, American woman, I see two ways to read the line: it minimizes the importation of foreign disease that nearly wiped out an indigenous population, or it emphasizes the magnitude of the damage that patriarchy does.
I lean with the latter reading.
Here is a brief, thoughtful, article by an indigenous man who found the line out of place and insensitive: https://nativeviewpoint.com/what-was-that-indigenous-smallpox-line-in-the-barbie-movie/
I do think people who went for the campiness, as the author of the article seems to have, or who were looking for a cute toy story were probably disappointed or at least confused. I planned to avoid it, until my 21 y-o daughter showed me the dance party trailer: “Do you guys ever think about death?” Throughout the movie campy characters deliver contrasts between patriarchy, matriarcy and feminism. In a film that deliberately confronts power relationships and personal identity in relation to them, I think jarring lines like Gloria’s (and Barbie’s death line, and her contemplation of the old woman at the bus stop, Sasha’s cultural appropriation line) deliberately poke the audience. “Don’t get lost in the story and toy-nostalgia. Think about what this means.”
I’ll be interested in how other people understood the “disease” line as well as the rest of the movie.
Thanks for the link. Good article, and it helped me re-fresh my memory about the content and context of the line.
The problem with that second interpreration is that the comparison is between WHY patriarchy and smallpox spread to begin with(ie. people are helpless to fight back), not with the effects of patriarchy and smallpox.
Well, given that it IS about a famous children's toy, it was probably foreseeable that lots of people would go in expecting light entertainment.
Granted, most kids' movies these days contain in-jokes and topical references so the parents don't get bored, so if someone has a basic awareness of that trend, they might have seen something like that line coming, though probably not that grim.
Yeah, I was cool with most of that audience-poking. Just that a reference to something that directly caused widespread death doesn't really fit, even into that milieu. Maybe if the comparison had been to indigenous people losing their culture via non-violent assimilation, or to the whole post-1492 event(see my War Of The Worlds example), it would have been less jarring.
As for Gloria being Hispanic, well, yeah, but the screenwriters, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, are not, as far as I know. So, there were no actual, real-life indigrnous people expressing that idea. (Unless we count the actor, who apparently has Central American indigenous ancestry. But she was just reading lines written by someone else.)
Well, "parental guidance for under 13s"(ie. under-13s can see it alone but parents might wanna be concerned), with the stated reasons being "brief language" and "suggestive references", doesn't exactly prep you for an out-of-the-blue reference to genocide.
Initially, COVID was quite devastating worldwide, but now a natural resistance to it has built up. Yes, new variants are still forming, but they are not having as big of an impact on the population as the initial variants. Yes, there are still people who are dying but at not as high rates previously.
BTW, smallpox was not the only European disease contracted by the indigenous people. There were STDs, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, chickenpox, diphtheria, influenza, pneumonia, typhoid, and the common cold that came over on the early ships. While those diseases had little impact on people from the Old World, they were very devastating in the new world.
It is said that before the Pilgrims arrived 2/3rds of the native population in North America had been wiped out by these diseases.
As an aside, my father was raised in a remote area in Nebraska. He was not exposed to many of the "childhood" diseases that were common in the 50s and 60s. Consequently, when he contacted them from his kids, he was quite sick. I remember the mumps almost killed him.
When I went to the theater to see Barbie, I wished I could have left the world behind and just laughed at a silly, campy movie.
Man wants to go to see a feminist film to laugh at the silliness of it. Where is the head-banging emoji when you need it?
Could it be the Barbie movie was making a comparision between the Smallpox epidemic among indigenous people and the recent Covid Epidemic worldwide.
No. It's quite explicitly stating that when Ken brought the concept of patriarchy back to Barbieland from the Real World, the Barbies in Barbieland had no defences against it, never having experienced patriarchy before. Which is slightly odd, because Barbie had heard of fascism, but not patriarchy.
(In the film, Sasha calls Barbie a fascist, and Barbie reflects "She thinks I’m a fascist?! I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce!")
@Gramps49
Nothing about the context would lead me to think that there was an intended comparison with Covid. They're just discussing
Well, I was gonna make a qualified defense that maybe Schilling didn't know about the feminist content before going in. But, he's apparently the film-and-adjacent critic for that news site, so should probably have been able to anticipate the ideological angle, for a number of reasons, eg. most light-hearted films have something like that these days; the creators are not known for silly, campy fare(eg. Gerwig's Little Women); studio publicity that promoted the feminist angle; word-of-mouth buzz.
We are essentially saying the same thing.
Besides, looking at this history of Barbie, I would say it was the initial creation of patriarchy. Barbie had to have the perfect body according to men. Over time, I would grant women now control the production of recent generations, but still, the ideal Barbie is anorexic.
Just this weekend I had a conversation with a traditional African woman (Gen X), her 10-year-old daughter, and a Millennial Tanzanian man. We were discussing the tendency of the ideal healthy body of American girls to be anorexic. The traditional woman could not believe how thin American girls though they should be. Her ten-year-old explained she feels the pressure to be thin and curvy. The woman asked the Tanzanian man if this was becoming an issue in Africa too. (The woman had left Africa nearly twenty years ago). The man said it is becoming that way also among the younger generation of girls in his country.
The woman gave a look that implied "What is this world coming to."
If I understand what you're saying here, yeah, I agree: there's a bit of revisionism afoot in portraying Barbie as having been a feminist icon from the start, and I think the script leans a little heavily on the various high-status occupations that Barbie has been invested with over the decades.
One thing, though...
Actually, the original creator of the doll was a woman(who appears as a character in the film). Though I'm not sure how much influence she had over the various career overlays onto the character.
And yes, Barbie did encourage girls to think of male dominated careers, I agree.
My impression of "stereotypical Barbie", as the film calls her, is that she was basically just supposed to be a conventionally attractive woman, living a high-end leisure life, with her source of income going unexplored.
I think I was vaguely aware of Barbies stylized into various occupations, but they weren't front-and-centre in whatever part of my mind is occupied with Barbie.
Indeed, they're not. Patriarchy and its ways of thinking are the whole point of the movie. It was colonialism and the attendant horrors that I thought were being treated in an inappropriately fleeting manner(*), as a five-second comparison, with no prologue or follow-up.
(*) I don't say a joking manner, because I don't think the line was meant humourously.
But another sort of comparison is needed for the fact that the Barbies are brainwashed and let the Kens take over, all happily. That doesn't really fit the colonialism analogy - unless you use lack of immunity to a disease carried over. And of course the patriarchy can be seen as harmful like a disease, causing deaths as a disease does. Two very different but very serious issues, caused by one group of people invading another and taking over their home.
I think people who think it's making light of small pox and the many deaths it caused are missing the serious point of the movie, because of its deceptive pink light-heartedness. And they are missing that the deceptiveness of the pink light-heartedness is actually the whole point, highlighting the vast difference between appearance and reality.
I'm certainly not denying that there are fruitful parallels, as you have outlined, between the spread of patriarchy and the spread of colonialism(*). Just that it was somewhat ill-timed in that particular context.
And, yes, some audience members might have gone into the film overly swayed by all "the pink light-heartedness", but I don't think that's entirely on them. For example, up until a few days ago, if you googled "Greta Gerwig", "Margot Robbie", or "Ryan Gosling", the results came up with a lot of decorative pink all over the page, with not much to indicate that this was to prep you for the stark juxtaposition with darker themes. I have to think Mattel and Warner Bros. were compliant with this marketing strategy.
(*) Though if we're being specific, the comparison is not between patriarchy and colonialism, but between patriarchy and smallpox. IOW, an ideology is being compared with a literal virus, which I have to say, strikes me as disconcertingly sociobiological.
Is this just a publicity stunt?
Or is it patriarchy reacting to the idea that a doll has shown how girls can go into whatever career they may want?
I certainly think it is abusive to any child who has ever had a Barbie Doll.
All your points make sense, @stetson.
Considering the potential for damage, I do think it's best for writers, directors, etc. not to step into someone else's cultural territory. And if "it just has to be there" it's better for the writers, etc, to consult heavily with the folks who really know. Gerwig probably didn't. And that's a shame.
I am interested in going over this from fineline, and I hope I'm not veering too far from the OP. While I really liked the Barbie movie, I don't know that it needs another thread. But this: Shifting away from historic colonialism, I would like to look at the difference between power relationships and identity before the Kens take over and after. There are a few key differences that show that feminism is not the same thing as patriarchy with the genders reversed.
Some important clues: The Barbies share their power with each other in a democracy. They give and receive credit for hard work (the writers awards -- "I deserve this!" because she really did the work that won the award.); they respect each other for whatever work they do (Barbie stops to tell the construction Barbies what a great job they are doing, and she really means it.), have no interest in controlling anyone, or making anyone subservient, etc. They love to see other people doing fulfilling things.
Barbie is, however, insensitive to Ken's utter dependence on her approval; she tells him he can't stay over, because it's girls night -- like every night is. She cannot comprehend his dependence; she is NOT dependent on other people's approval or attention. Even though she's experiencing an existential crisis, she knows she has an important job to do. Ken does not. All the Kens exist to be half of a relationship with Barbie. (Now, isn't that a twist!)
When the Kens take over things are not simply switched. The way power is handled is entirely different. The Barbies are expected to give up their Selves to serve the Kens; the Barbies already had purpose and self. The Kens demanded they give that up and be something different.
After things are set right, and Barbie and Ken are talking, Barbie tells Ken he needs to figure out who he is. The problem was always HIS problem, all the Kens' problem. They didn't have power, because they didn't bother to participate in it at all, much less appropriately. They didn't have purpose, because they never sought purpose beyond being with Barbie. That's not the Barbies fault or responsibility.
In the end, the Barbies don't simply hand over half the reigns to the Kens, because they know the Kens can't yet be trusted (yet). They need training. When the Kens are finally competent, then they can talk about sharing power. Until then, they need to figure out a few things.
[Writing this out with colonialism in mind, I think, there might be a contrast between power structures in indigenous cultures vs. the colonizers'. I'll need to think about that some more, too.]
If you read all this, YOU like Barbie, deserve an award. ; )
I think he might have just been using it as something convenient for a symbolic smashing of sin. As he whacks it, he doesn't say anything about feminism or even Barbie, but rather cell phones and women's phone numbers.
Maybe if he deliberately sought out such a child and did it in front of them, with the purpose of upsetting them. Other than that, I don't really see that it's harming anyone who isn't there in the audience.
And, yes, some audience members might have gone into the film overly swayed by all "the pink light-heartedness", but I don't think that's entirely on them. For example, up until a few days ago, if you googled "Greta Gerwig", "Margot Robbie", or "Ryan Gosling", the results came up with a lot of decorative pink all over the page, with not much to indicate that this was to prep you for the stark juxtaposition with darker themes. I have to think Mattel and Warner Bros. were compliant with this marketing strategy.
Firstly, its a 12A.
Secondly the trailer has
a)Barbie saying "Do you ever think about Death?"
b)The bit where Barbie is roller-skating, becomes uncomfortable by the way the real-life men are looking at her, then one of the men slaps her bottom.
c)The line "Humans only have one ending. But ideas live for ever"
All that in a 2 min 41 sec trailer. If someone watched that trailer and thought - Death and (minor) sexual assault! This is clearly going to be a fun, light-hearted movie, well, I don't think that person was paying attention.
Assuming I watched the right trailer, yeah, the sexual assault is there, but the context doesn't really portray it with the sort of gravitas that would lead you to expect references to indigenous genocide: the bottom-slap, the retaliatory punch, followed by blonde-in-a-mugshot, and all scored to upbeat music. Pretty slapsticky, overall.
Now, yes, someone raised to believe that unsolicited buttock-slaps are sexual assault, full stop, could possibly ignore the other stuff and just interpret it that way. But that probably doesn't describe all of the older people who'd be at the screenings, alot of whom would have experience seeing it portrayed in media as, at worst, just a little on the boorish side(*).
Sorry this is belated, and long-winded. You can have the last word about this admittedly subjective contrast of interpretations.
(*) See, for example, Matthew McConnaughey's similar action in Dazed And Confused(1993, so aimed at people now in their late 40s/early 50s), where the audience is just supposed to regard it as a bit of Texas good-ol'-boyism.
By "someone raised to believe", I don't mean to imply we get all our beliefs from our parents. More like "someone raised in a society in which the belief is the expected one, at least among that person's peers".
"Older" people are entirely capable of learning something other than what previous experience of media portrayals would tell us about having our asses slapped. I was very confused in the 6th grade the first time someone grabbed my ass on the street, but at 60 I know full well it was sexual assault, largely because women older than I am recognized it as such.
My point is, not everyone is going to interpret that scene from the trailer as portraying a particularly offensive action, and hence might not have adequate prep for the other dark subject matter portrayed. I still maintain that, on average, the number of people viewing buttock-gropes as somewhere between harmless fun and a minor annoyance is going to be more heavily, though not exclusively, concentrated in the older generations.
Though I recall a surprising number of women nodding along with the "locker room talk" defence of a certain indicted former president's bragging about groping women.
In any event, it does seem like there’s some risk of mansplaining here.
Well, I didn't say the only people who would be misled by the content and tone of the trailer were women. But FWIW, in the late 80s and early 90s, working in an office heavy with female representation, I witnessed a non-chalant attitude toward the behaviour from both men and women.
Those are both fair points.
For a political example involving a non-fascist lunatic, check YouTube for a news report from 1984: "PM John Turner grabs Ilona Campagnola's butt".
That became a minor controversy, even brought up in the TV debates, but was not widely treated with the gravity of sexual assault(Turner ran in one more election, and died a respected statesman). I think it would be treated more seriously today, at least among the kind of people who vote for the Liberal Party of Canada.
Just to be clear, I'm not telling women how they should regard buttock-grabbing. I'm just telling anyone reading the thread that it was regarded in the past as less of a serious violation than it is today.
I think the counter argument is that this view reflects more how much predatory men had control of public discourse than it does changes in how women feel about it.
Well, respectfully toward @Ruth, there wasn't alot in her post to indicate that the "older women" who raised her awareness about the issue were representative of the thinking of the time period. In fact, it's not clear at what point over her stated 50-year time span she encountered the women and listened to their ideas.
Well, that office I mentioned working at in the 80s was an interesting one, and some of the unsolicited buttock-contact was done by the female boss. Presumably, she wasn't someone who was really opposed to the practice, but had been cowered by the patriarchy into going along with it. Nobody was compelling her to actively do it.
And, yes, there were probably lots of women at the time, a majority even, who fit the description of "opposed to it but silenced by male discourse." It still remains the case that someone(male or female) raised with and accepting those attitudes will not likely view the scene in the Barbie trailer as particularly horrible, and hence be insufficiently prepared for the film's out-of-the-blue reference to the annihilation of indigenous communitues via smallpox.
(Especially given that, as I say, the trailer itself doesn't do much to establish the neccessary tone of seriousness.)
Well, lemme just end it with this...
If I were to say that buttock-grabbing were viewed as negatively in the past as it is now, and hence the average opinion held about it was as negative at that time as it is now, that would not ring true to me at all. So I am not going to agree with that.
Now, that said, this being Epiphanies, I have no desire to sideline anyone's lived experience, so will not press this case further. Anyone who wishes may make a final reply to my posts.
Please do tell us about the past as if none of us were also there at the time!
Thing is, despite my disagreement with you about how "older" people view ass-slapping, I agree with your general point. The smallpox line was utterly bizarre. In my mind it belongs with some of the other lines, like the references to white savior Barbie and cultural appropriation, and the husband trying to learn Spanish (I immediately recognized the Duolingo sound effect), in which the writers shoved things into the movie in an effort to poke the audience, as @Kendel says, but also to distance themselves from the fact that they were making a movie that's a huge advertisement for a doll made by Mattel and say they're cool. The smallpox line just really overshot the mark a whole lot.
The thing I've read that I've liked the most is this piece by Maria Bustillos:
The movie is supposed to be feminist, but I think it is a caricature of feminism that veers badly into what anti-feminists have said for years: feminists hate men and just want to crush them. Barbie does concede at the end that it doesn't have to be girls' night every night, but the Kens still have no representation in government.
I keep thinking of my grandmother, who in the 70s said she didn't understand "those women libbers": "Why do they want to be equal to men? We're better than men!"
I think Bustillos misses some important differences in the movie between the way Barbies and Kens handled power, and in the differences in the Barbies’s and the Kens’ self-concepts.
At the beginning the Barbies didn’t share power with the Kens, because the Kens never showed an interest in doing anything but being with Barbie and “beach.” Ken had no skills or education, because he never pursued them. The Barbies on the other hand were doing meaningful work of all kinds from road repair to writing books.
When Barbie concedes that every night doesn’t have to be girls night, it’s in a conversation where Ken reveals he has no purpose but to be with Barbie. Barbie is astonished that someone could have no real self concept. She tells him he needs to figure that out for himself. That would be true of all the Kens as well.
No, the Barbies are not oppressors. Oppression requires a use of “force” to deprive others of autonomy and maintain an imbalance of power.
Yes, at the end of the movie the Barbies are clear with each other that they are not interested in sharing leadership power with the Kens, but who would want to at that point? The Kens are all uneducated, unskilled and clueless. The Kens need to get their acts together so they can do a good job leading, rather than whatever the mess was they made as “patriarchs.”
I agree that this movie is NOT intellectual feminism by any stretch. But it’s not a charicature, either.
As far as “far right” go, we have nothing for them. Period. Nothing we value in regard to the personhood and rights of people unlike themselves will make sense to them. Leveling of power among all social groups, particularly social minorities, feels to them like oppression. They will treat it as such as long as their people continuing to seek equity.
Ken has nothing to do but wait around for Barbie to notice him because that is how he is conceived of as a doll. Barbieland is the way it is because of Mattel's production of dolls. Barbie dolls just are president and astronaut, etc - they come that way out of the box, and that informs the movie. Ken never had a choice until he left Barbieland. Nothing ever really happened in Barbieland before America Ferrera's character gave Barbie thoughts of death - it was always the same, day after day.
So the oppressors are the folks over at Mattell HQ.