Barbie Movie (Where’s the Ken Movie?)
The Barbie movie made it to my top 5 movies for the year. To me, a movie succeeds when I makes me think about and talk about long after I’ve seen it. And the Barbie movie did just that. It came out in July and I didn’t watch it until November, but I talked about it quite a bit before and after I watched it (Note: I did not like everyone asking me if I was taking my 5 and 8 year old to see it. It is PG-13 for a reason).
Even thought it succeeded in it’s purpose as a movie, I was actually quite troubled by the movie. I loved the outfits, how they used different filming techniques to show different things: I watched and read so many interesting commentaries about it. I loved this one especially) But when I finally saw it for myself, I was actually shocked at one little part:
SPOILER
At the end, a Ken asks “Please may the Kens have one supreme court justice?” President Barbie replies, “Oh, I can’t do that. But maybe a lower circuit court judge?”
No.
What I would have loved here would be a reply like “I, as President Barbie, will not rest until I have worked to provide the adequate education, training, and opportunities to see half of our supreme court made up of Kens, as you make up half of our society, and we value and need your representation.”
This simple change would have had me standing up and cheering in my seat.
Instead, it made me wonder if the Barbies had really learned anything at all. This led me down a path of realizing that what I really wanted was a Ken movie…all about the hard, daily work of growing and building and becoming. Where at the end of the movie, there were four, or five Ken Supreme Court judges.
But I doubt that movie will ever be made (well, maybe because Ryan Gosling is just amazing). Because people make movies about war, not about reconstruction. Stay with me in this jump: Barbie was about civil war. The Barbies oppressed the Kens and didn’t work on the things that needed to be worked on until the pressure built up and exploded. War movies are popular. Glory and gory. They play on our desire to release all that pressure and finally have it out. To burn it all down. To begin fresh—but wait-really?
No, it actually isn’t a movie about reconstruction. Do they actually begin fresh? Stop and think: when is the last time (or anytime) you can think of a movie that was actually about reconstruction? The last five minutes of most movies imply a reconstruction: but reconstruction movies aren’t fun. Because guess what? Reconstruction is hard, and we American’s stink at reconstruction. I don’t think we can make a good movie about it, because we’ve never actually seen it happen in a healthy manner in history.
War is easy, compared to reconstruction. If you look at history, most of the time we fail so miserably at reconstruction that things just build up pressure until they explode into another war. In fact, it seems like as soon as an oppressed people group gains freedom/power, they use it to oppress someone else instead of work harder to share that kind of freedom. That makes me really sad, and why I’d really like a Ken reconstruction movie.