Before we dive into anything, I just wanted to disclaim that this article is a highly personal opinion and does not wish to hurt or impose upon other people’s perspectives on the same.
Greta Gerwig's Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, is an important film that celebrates imperfections in a plastic world. The movie starts off light and pink, showcasing a picture-perfect, fantasy world that has been every young girl’s dream. It brings about feelings of nostalgia and warms you up from the inside.
Now, the movie has also been controversial and labeled as ‘feminist propaganda’ time and time again. But what possibly can be the psychology behind this?
Numerous reasons can be found when looking at it from a psychological point of view as to why there were vast differences in terms of how the movie was perceived.
To start off with, people weren’t mentally prepared for the wide variety of social evils portrayed in the movie. Patriarchy, body image issues, identity crisis, and a myriad of other issues were covered which can be a lot for people to process in under one hour and fifty-four minutes. People, including myself, with the mindset of watching a lighthearted movie, would have been displeased when the storyline didn’t go as per their expectations.
Secondly, I personally felt that it all got very messy because the storyline tried to encompass a lot of societal problems all at once rather than focusing on one or two issues. It made the movie come off as extremely feminist. The complicated nature of the issues wasn’t covered in depth and was kept very shallow, making it difficult to understand the perspective from which the movie was made.
The fun element, combined with the gravity of the social evils, made the entire movie feel like a badly portrayed satire when that wasn’t the motive of it at all. The change back and forth between jokes and actual problems was confusing, making viewers think time and time again when it was appropriate to laugh and when it wasn’t.
Now, even despite a lot of challenges, the movie has been able to invoke feelings in viewers in a masterful manner. It played well on the psychology of its audience in a lot of ways.
Firstly, it exhibited patriarchy in its very primitive form, reminding us that no matter how much society makes us believe that it is an equal society, it is not. It focuses on very minute aspects of it such as mansplaining, machismo, and degradation of women, in its trivial but very much prevalent embodiment.
The other thing that was a slap of reality for the viewers was the issue of ‘brainwashing’. How people do not even realize that they are being subjected to so much unfairness and injustice. It takes a lot for a person to get out of the trap made by their own brain over time when serious problems are normalized like they still very much are in our present society.
Lastly, it amazed me how simply and easily understandable the entire movie was produced to be. It could be easily understood by people of all ages. At the same time, they can all get an eye-opener on the severity of a lot of things still happening around us. It wasn’t heavy, making the contrast of bad in an almost perfect world stand out like a sore thumb. Everyone could feel how wrong it was, which, to the movie makers' credit, isn't an easy thing to do.
Feminist propaganda? Definitely not.
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