We probably should have seen this coming, huh? Just as films aimed at women (you know, that group of people that makes up a sizable percentage of the world’s population) have historically been underestimated at the box office, so too have films like “Barbie” typically been given the short shrift when it comes to discussions concerning their artistic merit. I’m not going to try and convince you that “Barbie” is the best film of 2023 — it wasn’t even my favorite film of the year! With that being said, it’s hard not to feel like Gerwig and, by extension, her movie was scrutinized in ways that it wouldn’t have been, had it been geared towards men.
Take “Oppenheimer,” a film that, like other Christopher Nolan works, explicitly spells out its themes and messages through its dialogue (so much so that, at times, it feels as though the movie’s characters are addressing the audience as much as one another). So why it is, then, that “Barbie” is the film that gets raked over the coals for being just as “unsubtle” with its social commentary? And why is it that esteemed filmmaker Oliver Stone felt perfectly comfortable dismissing “Barbie” as being “part of this infantilization of Hollywood” before even seeing it, yet refrained from declaring “Oppenheimer,” I dunno, “Dad Movie Nonsense” or some equivalent moniker ahead of time?
Stone, to his credit, has since apologized for “speaking ignorantly” about “Barbie” and more or less acknowledged that his previous comments were based on his preconceptions of the film, but that just goes to prove my point: A movie like “Barbie” is deemed “low art” until otherwise proven innocent (even with an established auteur like Gerwig at the helm), whereas a film like “Oppenheimer” receives the opposite treatment.
