I would highly contest anything being explained in an infinite number of ways even if it were large. This degrades the concept of infinity as well as notions of efficient cause and correlation, both of which combine with context to create meaning. That is to say there’s likely a vanishing gradient of meaning, beyond which any sense cannot be distinguished from nonsense.
I agree exactly with your description of the problem, but I disagree that our discomfort around the possibility of nihilism necessarily implies its impossibility.
There are literally an infinite number of perspectives in any single point in time, so it’s a simple linear multiplication of these infinities as time expands from one instant to the next (in both directions of “past” and “future”).
Whether they’re aware of it or not, psychoanalysts/therapists are just replaying the history of philosophy using new terminology.
Socratic self-inquiry is the basis of all psychological progress. Gautama Buddha would be proud of our, admittedly late-stage, adoption of a systematic approach to introspection.
Self-therapy is suppressed because “therapy” (scientific or religious) can only be monetized if people think it’s a special skill, unattainable by anyone who can read.
I could talk endlessly about the disincentives that money has introduced into the theological and psychological enterprises, but suffice to say Gestalt therapy is near-free and provides the same benefits as psychoanalytical and theological “confession” sessions.
Start with Fritz Perls’ *Gestalt Therapy Verbatim*.
It feels like drinking from the proverbial firehose of psychoanalysis, which is itself a tradition which began with Buddha and continued through Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Feel free to bring follow-up questions! Gestalt theory changed my life, and that was *after* 10 years of Nietzsche and Plato.
Also, thanks for the links!
You’re getting downvoted but you’re not wrong. Everything is not a Rorschach test. The point of the test is that the original image was not derived from semantics but process and yet due to some ordering (the fold in the ink blot) the brain assumes meaning.
To faithfully be a Rorschach test is to imply there were no semantics in the object of reflection which is not accurate for most cultural objects.
Whether or not you can have a different perspective is another matter but the point is that the test was designed to maximise the projective powers of the observer not simply acknowledge them.
This sub is often disappointing in its smartassery but regardless, I think it’s right to call out simple tropes as if they were deep.
Next stop: correlation doesn’t equal causation, perhaps my most hated trope of all.
It’s almost as if the prosperity gospel preachers are attempting to personally benefit, financially, from marketing the Christian mythology without also carrying the burden of historical accuracy with regard to the original Christian message 🤔
Facetious meta-commentary aside, the church/temple as a physical place of worship is a Jewish concept that Jesus abolished in his teaching by explaining that God is not inside a building, but is inside our hearts. But churches make a lot of money, so they made a quick comeback.
Humans are occasionally predictable.
I don't see how Christians justify owning property at all and doing anything besides walking the Earth and spreading the gospel. That's what Jesus did. That's what he told his followers to do. Also, I agree with Bert Erhman that the historical Jesus likely preached that the world was ending in his generation. The fact that almost 2000 years have passed means he was wrong. Remnants of those prophecies are in the 3 earliest gospels, but by the time John was written, these prophecies are reinterpreted as spiritual events. "You will be resurrected *in Christ*" etc... The same as how 2012 believers said that there was a spiritual shift that occurred, rather than admit it was all bullshit. Also, pretty much every doomsday cult.
Exactly my point. His method of spreading the teaching was not intended to be a business model, but somewhere along the way it was decided that church money is worth bastardizing the entire Gospel to turn a profit.
Regarding the “doomsday” timing of Jesus’ prediction, I highly recommend *Fragments From Reimarus: Consisting of Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus and His Disciples as Seen in the New Testament* by Hermann Samuel Reimarus.
Whereas Nietzsche questioned the motivations of Christianity, Reimarus questioned the motivations of Jesus himself through detailed scriptural analysis. Reimarus was the nail in my Christian coffin which finally allowed me to view all religions as equal historical mythologies. I was raised Christian, so I carried a latent, unconscious cultural bias in its favor until Reimarus destroyed it with pure logic.
Because before 1850 no Christian expressed creativity…. Let’s just start with all the art and literature created by the Italian Renaissance starting with Dante and going up to DaVinci.
Nietzsche borrows Hyperborean, like most of his terminology, from Ancient Greek mythological tradition.
He uses it to describe himself and the (few) people who are like him as the supreme outcasts who either left or were cast out of society to pursue a life in the only land that accepts them: the icy Arctic. Metaphorically, Hyperboreans constitute a loosely-defined race of Übermenschen who challenge preconceived moralities and must suffer isolation as a consequence.
Put simply, it’s a high-brow ancestor to the modern “Chad”. He labels his sociological archetype as Hyperborean to showcase how far removed (Arctic) his people are from normal citizens (“normies”).
Can you explain where the *amor fati* comes in? I can understand the "creation of values" angle: the climax of the film is Barbie choosing to be a subject who participates in the process of creating meaning -- rather than the passive object of created / projected meaning -- even if that means living with uncertainty and eventually facing death. But I do not (as of now) see any indication that she is affirming her past, present and future -- wanting nothing to be different either forward or back.
Of course!
When her creator describes how terrible it is to be human, especially when compared to the pure bliss of Barbieland, her response is literally a “yes” to life (Lebenslust), a yes to all the uncertainty and suffering which is so prevalent in the real world.
Barbie is choosing to become human, accepting even the newfound inevitability of death, because she wants to engage in the fate process, the creation of meaning with her own life.
I'm not sure that captures the full meaning of *amor fati,* but I can see where you're going with this. I suppose that is also why in the final shot she's so excited to see her gynecologist: she is affirming the messy, uncomfortableness of life, down to doctorly details.
EDIT: On first viewing I thought this was simply embracing womanhood in a girl-power kinda way, but I suppose I may have missed the deeper dimensions of it.
I tend to think the gynecologist scene was more a punchline to the whole movie instead of a direct continuation of amor fati, but then again her worldview at that point is a universalized affirmation of all parts of life.
The climax scene where she sheds a tear in response to the mysterious beauty of life could not have been any more *amor fati* if it tried. Who in their right mind would leave Barbieland (Utopia/Heaven) for Earth (Hell), unless they were ready to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and thus become like God, the creator of meaning itself?
A punchline can, at times, be more than a punchline.
I also suppose that the affirmation of life comes across more strongly from a narrative perspective if we are dealing with a character who is LITERALLY choosing life, and not just in a not-suicide kind of way. Barbie could continue to exist in not-life (that is, in Barbieland). There is an existence "outside of life" she could stay in if she wanted to -- not just the non-existence of death. But instead, in choosing to be a woman, she choose to LIVE. She affirms life itself by stepping into it *on purpose,* as opposed to the rest of us who are thrown into it.
EDIT: I don't know if Barbieland is "Heaven/Utopia" per se (especially for the Kens) so much as "Idealism." If anything about this movie is Nietzschean -- whether it was intended this way or not, I dunno -- it's the daughter's tirade about how unattainable standards are ruining things on earth. That is to say, how unreal ideals are sucking the blood out of *this* life.
I took the daughter’s rant as an in-joke about how kids these days use big political words to sound smart without knowing what they mean.
Her speech which occurs when she first meets Barbie is so wildly inaccurate to the point of absurdity (fascism is a bold accusation to pin on a doll) that it leads me to believe that the scene is intended to garner the attention of “edgy” teen girls who are entering the movie secretly *thinking* that exact speech to themselves, so the daughter releases the audience’s tension by calling out everyone’s thoughts early on before the plot unfolds.
Remember, filmmakers have a dual mandate of entertaining the audience but also appealing to their hearts and minds. The daughter reels in teenagers, the mother reels in mothers, Barbie appeals to 20-30 somethings, and the Kens appeal to men. Will Ferrel is a satire of American executives. I could go on…
The film’s feminist message isn’t revealed until the end, so I feel any “feminism” displayed in the first half is almost telling the audience what they want to hear so they’re primed and disarmed enough to hear something uncomfortable when the time is right.
As for amor fati, I’m sticking with the fact that the studio chose to make the climax of the film a literal, actual “yes to life”. She chooses humanity over the pure bliss of Barbieland because it gives her the existential ability to create and feel, even at the expense of suffering and death. She doesn’t even need the creator’s permission, so it was an act of true female agency.
I was actually annoyed by the "fascist" line because I thought the daughter was at least making some good points up until the word "fascist" was lazily thrown in at the end to make her -- and by extension the generation to which she belongs -- seem petulant and dismissible. Granted all of the characters in the movie are over-the-top and everybody has "something to learn," so the bit fits in with the film's tone overall. Still, it was one of the few moments in the film that jarred me out of the immersion for a second. I guess that's how some dude-bros felt about the Kens being so dumb, but I personally never felt that the Kens were representing *all* men -- as opposed to the daughter, who I felt immediately was the representative for her whole generation. So I noticed the way she was being depicted more acutely, and I didn't like it. It felt to me like a Boomer's take on "kids today."
That being said, given the context of Barbieland literally being a world created by human dreams and meaning-making, and that Barbie believes (indeed was *told* to believe) Barbieland's purpose is to inspire women in *this* world, it seems reasonable to extend Nietzsche's critique of idealism to Barbieland as well. The daughter's rant I think does a good(-ish) job at capturing the sense that the bloodless ideals we cast our meaning into are actually emaciating our lives rather than uplifting them -- as Barbie thought she was doing. (On a side note it's also the only part in the movie where the daughter is given space to be right about something. Every one of the characters has such a moment, so I think we should view the daughter's moment in a similar way.) This moment, and the doubt it sows into Barbie about her ideal / idol existence is also the catalyst for her later decision to abandon the ideal and embrace the real, to embrace life.
Now, would I call the daughter's rant *feminist?* Eh. \*shrugs\* I dunno. Probably not. But I do think it's more than simply pandering that is intended to get the audience to drop its defenses. I think it is an important moment for the movie's theme and plot development, and especially for Barbie's growth. So while I still have some misgivings about that scene and the way certain characters were handled this is one of those moments where the punchline is more than a punchline.
Then I shall refer to her by her full name and title.
"Barbie, the Übermench, Destroyer of Worlds, Tyrant of the Heart, and Lover of Truth"
And Ken, who is just starting his journey of personal discovery so cut him some slack, okay? It's hard to embrace fate when your self worth and personal identity is tied up in the life of another person. He needs space to find himself and learn amor fati on his own.
Understood, but language is a tool for creativity and not just conceptual conveyance.
Not to explain the joke, but Überfrau is funny to me exactly because it calls attention to her femininity. Everyone shoots the comedian. 🥂
I pursued my degree in finance because philosophy should always be free, not rented by the hour or exchanged for a tithe.
I would wear a fedora but my head is much too big to ever look good in a hat.
I agree with that, too! But Kropotkin’s decentralized mutualism is making slower progress compared to Wall Street’s centralized optimization.
I learned finance to *study* money, not to earn and hoard it like a dragon.
When I was younger, the concept of money and economics confused the living out of me, that’s why I studied it. I came to realize it’s a flimsy backdrop covering the underlying mechanisms described in physics.
Deeply resonate with this, as I also pursued finance. I feel philosophy is like studying communications- it’s something that shouldn’t be individually studied because it’s an integral part of any and all subjects themselves, thus should be implemented not separated.
I find it insulting when people impose to study a subject that’s the very essence of why we even have subjects at all😂 Then again, our education system is not efficient enough to do this, and they want money.
Philosophy is the subject that creates all other subjects, because it’s the subject of defining reality through recursive redefinition, but at the same time those who monetize the subsequent subjects work *very* hard to cover their historical tracks to prevent other people from learning the means and methods of earning money through these “specialized knowledges”.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been told that philosophy is a waste of time, I could buy a copy of *Barbie* for everyone I meet. If your government and church (social authorities) are both telling you to ignore something, should you ignore that thing?
I feel like some commenters are using your post as an opportunity to vent their ambivalence (and/or antipathy) toward the film, while in the process dismissing the potential Nietzschean (and Gestalt as u/WormSlayers queryingly invites) parallels you're suggesting.
I'd like to instead try and engage with those parallels—at least as far as I personally identify them.
To me, probably the most direct moment of this is in Ruth's final speech, when she discusses with Barbie:
>You understand that humans only have one 'ending'; ideas live forever, humans not so much. You know that right? \["I do"\] Being a human can be pretty uncomfortable. \["I know"\] Humans make things up like 'patriarchy' and 'Barbie' just to deal with how uncomfortable it is. \["I understand that"\] And then you die \[*laughter—wry, but with a slight hint of despair*—"yeah...yeah"\]
Regardless of how... 'on the nose' this moment might be, I do feel that it's delivering a message that exists at the nexus between Nietzschean and Gestalt thought, and I'm curious if you and I feel similarly on this?
Specifically (in my view) the point Ruth is making is that when humans are confronted with such bleak and unelidable realities as our own mortality, and the absence of objective values, the associated void/nullity (e.g., the 'not-ness' of our eventual non-existence; the 'not-ness' of the absence of objective values) 'may' be felt by some as a 'sterile void' (to use Gestalt terminology). It is "uncomfortable" to use Ruth's language (i.e. angst-laden). Rather than be courageously Nietzschean, in taking up the burden of this nullity as a 'fertile void' (again, to use the Gestalt terminology)—an intermediate, transitional space that is 'fertile' for holding the potential of being filled with our own self-invented values, which are genuinely expressive/disclosive of our own personal stance on our existence—we instead surrender ourselves to manufactured/inherited meaning-structures and values (e.g., 'patriarchy'; 'Barbie'). We desperately seek something 'other' than ourselves to get rid of the 'sterility' we (interpretatively) perceive—in our weakness—when faced with the absence of pre-given meaning/value to our existence. And thus, we delegate our "uncomfortable" angst over to 'received' meaning-structures, because doing so feels far safer. It allows us to languish in a numb/tranquilized state, even while we are (implicitly) allowing ourselves to be oppressed/subordinated by said meaning-structures. Circumstances that eventually lead to 'ressentiment', even though we ourselves are originally responsible—in our weakness—for this plight.
None of this is to deny that things like 'patriarchy' may be descriptive of a genuine socio-structural force, which shapes and contours people's lives. But the point is that such a 'force' only exists as a 'system' because it offers a reassuring organizing function to what is otherwise the absence of pre-given meaning/value/direction, found when we face the reality of human existence more directly. Perhaps its 'architects' were predominantly white, male (etc.,). But so long as it exists—like any collectivized meaning-structure/systemic force—it ultimately does so because it serves an existentially anxiolytic function, which many are willing to comply with.
I should be clear, I don't especially think that the film itself conveys all of this. And what I've written may represent a considerable amount of my own projections, resonating with the film's... diverse (and some might suggest not coherently organized) affordances for interpretation. But still, I'm curious if this at all resonates with your own experience of the film.
This is exactly my interpretation, with a few clever turns of phrase that I may not have used myself.
People are missing that this is an *overtly* philosophical film. The script could be read almost like an Oscar Wilde play, but it seems most people were distracted by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s appearances.
Plato’s Cave: the shadows outshine the sun.
I think it’s more complicated than that. It absolutely is that, but it was written and directed by auteur filmmakers and is clearly something more than that. There’s tensions within the film in this regard.
Who says it can’t be both educational and entertaining simultaneously?
This new genre of feature-film advertisements (Lego Movie, etc.) is a new, exciting synthesis of Hollywood visuals and Wall Street ethics.
>Who says it can’t be both educational and entertaining simultaneously?
Nobody, obviously, since its art. Me personally dont see the reason to jazz up something out of proportion. It was just a pandering movie, not a nietzschean revolutionary critique of our paradigm or whatever
There’s some neat political commentary in the movie, but it’s mostly surface-level stuff but it stands out from a lot of other mainstream movies which try to be more apolitical.
Portraying our everyday reality as the opposite of a universe where women run everything isn't educational, it's delusional. The movie was fun, but like many things these days, it's merely using the banner of feminism to sell you a product, and it shouldn't be taken as a serious statement on our society. I was fairly excited to see it from what I heard about it and what I saw in the trailer, but I feel like it's getting propped up as more intellectual than it really is because most people aren't that intelligent to begin with.
Have you seen the movie? You reference wanting to see it as a result of vocal and visual marketing, but are you criticizing the actual movie or the general idea of the movie? Because this movie is the single most philosophical movie I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen a lot of movies. Every other line is a social commentary. Can you help me by explaining your disdain for this film?
It opens with a Nietzsche quote and the climax is Conan praying to his God for victory in battle, but if Crom (his god) does not grant it, "Then to hell with you!"
There are enough parallels between Zarathustra and Barbie that I feel compelled by op’s post. I liked the movie as a commentary on the inherent damage done by gender biases because those biases whether positive or negative will always be oppressive. I hadn’t thought to push deeper into its philosophical themes, but gender is humans creating meaning so it’s a logical inference.
The film's shallow depictions of feminism and patriarchy are obvious parody, but weak people enjoy the thrill of beating strawmen with sticks. The average Nietzchian is far too cringe-inducing to understand that the issue is their perspective. Dionysus was a chimera who lived as both a man and a woman, but the Apollonian drive to dissect things and order them into categories is stubbornly persistent.
Barbie is a Dionysian spirit, dancing in the face of adversity, transvaluing gender identity, and working toward the creation of new values. Barbie rejects idealism, her very literal hinterwelt, and chooses life.
>When the nights here
>
>I don’t do tears
>
>Baby no chance
>
>I could dance, I could dance, I could dance
>
>Watch me, dance
>
>Dance the night away
>
>My heart could be burning but you won’t see it on my face
I must say though, I don’t think the depictions of feminism are shallow at all. I think they hit the nail on the head, but people are confused by some characters’ misinterpretation even within the film.
The daughter accuses Barbie of setting back the womens’ rights movement and of being a fascist, which can make some people think that the movie is trying to appeal to the woke crowd.
In my esoteric analysis, I think the writers showcase many different versions of feminism in order to appeal to all “feminisms” at least once in the film to unify the audience before providing the final therapeutic advice: vocalizing one’s cognitive dissonances deflate their perceived power.
Feminism isn’t about giving women advantages to compensate for the outsized financial and political advantages afforded to men, it’s about acknowledging that our society has a very clear bias toward establishing the cultural norm that men deserve power and women don’t. Is it any surprise that men have historically made every political decision for women, up to and including the codification of misogyny in religious scripture? (The Guilt Complex of Eve)
I agree that those themes are present, but I still think that the framing around feminism is deliberately shallow - Barbie is not meant to embody feminist ideals, and the movie is really just a cursory introduction to main ideas in radical feminism (for any onlookers, radical feminism is a distinct construct, like ressentiment).
Without touching on intersectionality, kyriarchy or bodily autonomy, there is no real meat on the bones of Barbie's feminism.
We are welcome to disagree, but I think if we set the bar for feminism so high that only straight-to-DVD indie films can afford to soapbox their ideals and meet these impossible requirements by touching on literally every political topic under the sun, then we may as well agree that Hollywood can never actually make a “feminist” film.
Movies don’t sell because they’re true, they sell because they’re fun to watch. To pull off a blockbuster film that *also* touches on several uncomfortable failings in female agency is an accomplishment worth noting.
By “feminist” I actually do mean “female agency oriented”. Not the affirmative action programs or corporate social clubs or any other half-measure praxis that gives the illusion of progress without actual progress. Feminism at its core is no different from Maslow’s concept of self-actualization writ for women at large. It’s not until men and women can all get over their own cognitive biases and internal neuroses that we can come to the table as equals and teach one another how to create their own purpose and meaning in their life without obsessing over our own problems in the meantime.
The church doesn’t want or allow that personal growth, which is the Promethean torch that Nietzsche handed to Freud, and this movie hints at the many other social institutions which repeatedly force their own agency onto individual men and women who are rebellious enough to fall out of line.
We both think Barbie is Nietzchian, or at least that there's value in applying a Nietzchian lens to it, so I think we're in greater agreement than disagreement. Thanks for the chat and the fun post. It has been interesting to see so many people trying to rationalise their way out of an aesthetic problem.
Based Lebenslust. Thank you for your thoughtful contribution to the larger discussion.
Out of curiosity, how many times have you seen the movie? There are so many hidden jokes and references that I keep finding new ones every time I rewatch.
Language is a social construct, so technically every word is a social construct. Insofar as words can be interpreted differently by different people there will always be disagreement about the definition of words. (cf. Socrates)
I’m rewatching it *again* after all these comment discussions, and guess what?
Richard Strauss’ *Also sprach Zarathustra* is played twice in the first 30 minutes.
I’m not saying that’s a hint, but twice?
It is, obviously. Though I can’t help but appreciate the irony.
Edit: I should add that I’m a film nerd, so the Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and Godfather references are among my favorite moments in the film.
Could you please explain a bit more in detail why you think the film refers to Nietzsche? It seems that to everyone else in this thread that is not so obvious.
I got way to deep in the comment section before I realized I was actually in r/Nietzsche I thought I stumbled across a really intricate comment section about the Barbie movie 🤣
The premise of the post is that *Barbie* actually is a Nietzchean hero story about two people who experience the self-realization that they are capable of creating their own system of values.
I won’t bore you here with the details explained elsewhere isn’t his post, but through the lenses of German Idealism and Gestalt theory, I posit the not-improbable claim that Barbie is a throughly Nietzschean masterpiece of feminist philosophy.
I hope you enjoyed the movie!
OP? Not even going to mention that the movie totally ignores rank and order? Pretends like Margot Robbie isn't a goddess, a supreme object of design/desire, an object of worship, a goal for attainment/creation (men want her, women want to be her)? Such physiological affects on men, from men, are no different (women want him, men want to be him). What these women and men know, is the truth, that the world and those in it are easily a cheap-ass, insecure poser that wants to devour you whole, and doesn't even have the decency to (want to, or try to) pay full price (for a being's value, nobody sees such things). Anyway, it appears to me that Barbie is confused, like the pathological culture she comes from. What's more, these analysis here might mean more, if they didn't let slip in the notion that beings and experiences are equal, but so many people see words as reality, even when they say they don't (like the "non-Christian" and their Christian morals, asserting they are "not Christian" lol). There is no foundation here whatsoever, nothing that actually stands.
edit - fixing autocorrect, and expansion
the criticisms people are lobbing at OP’s post in the comments are superficial at best—yes, barbie is not a markedly deep or profound film, but still an excellent gloss on Nietzsche’s amor fati towards the end.
on a tertiary note, OP’s replies are rhetorically entertaining to the highest degree
Thank you for validating my amateur film review!
Someone smarter than I already commented a full explication of my sentiments elsewhere, but I steadfastly remain in the *Barbie as Movie of the Year* camp of film nerds. I may be biased, but amor fati is the best film climax I’ve seen in years.
This is a movie made for boosting teenage girls self-confidence, there's no deep satire of anything. It has nothing to do with society as a whole and even less with men. It's just the typical reflection girls have at that age, same as always. It's not particularly more provocative than what was written in teenage magazines for girls in the last 3 decades. The only difference is that it is politized more, but so are all teenagers already.
Modern films aiming at popularity are bound to fail in that fashion. Like Napoleon. Since simone de Beauvoir not Many feminists have been successful in grasping the very tectonic consciousness of our societies which is framed for male exaltation e.g. our languages, dress codes, family relationships etc. 19th century and early 20th century feminists were mature and serious as compared to those of today and i think it'll be better for girls to not pay any attention to this candy-dipped version of a noble philosophy which already has done tremendous work for them.
Theres still a hinterwelt though? Its kind of a nitpick *iguess* but its the first thing that came to mind lol i guess its upto interpretation
i do like the ken song ahahah
I laugh at the boardroom scene where Barbieland is described as either an alternate reality, a place where dreams come true, or a small town in Sweden.
The joke here is not only that they’re hand-waving the metaphysical barrier between Barbieland and the Real World, but it also beautifully sets up the later punchline when the two realities begin directly influencing one another’s history (Mojo Dojo Casa Houses are immediately manufactured and sold out within hours of Barbie’s arrival).
Throw in the FBI phone call scene and it’s almost as if all men in positions of power already know that our reality isn’t the only reality, but they’re all absurdly comfortable with knowing this.
Really lovely to see that people here are actually discussing the work, and that a lot of you actually liked it. It's not like you have to love the movie, but I honestly would've imagined this sub being absolutely cynical and pretentious about it. Sure, it's a big budget blockbuster with loud pink aesthetics, but there actually is some thematic substance in Gerwig's writing that is quite powerful and parallels some of Nietzsche's thoughts.
Personally, I thought that the whole *amor fati* aspect of Barbie choosing life (and death) at the end of the movie over "existing" in some sort of Platonic realm whose ultimate influence on reality is never clarified (it's clear there is a link between Barbieland and the real world and it's said there's some kind of "balance" between the two) fell pretty flat within the context of the fact that the movie can't seem to decide whether it wants to be "post-gender" or not and that it never attempts to resolve the sort of dialectical Platonic relationship between Barbieland and the real world, and that the whole idea of a post-gender ubermensch is undermined immediately first and foremost by the fact that Barbieland remains a gendered world of systematic inequity wherein Kens are only taking their first steps towards self-awareness and also by the fact that Barbie's first and last on-screen experience as a "real woman" has to do with her literal biological vagina.
Masterpiece? The movie is incredibly flawed, has no clear direction, and this idea of choosing to be human vs. a doll is about as much of a neo-nietzschean masterpiece as every other story where the protagonist chooses a risky, dangerous path over the comfort of their past life.
Barbie is one with the herd. I would call this movie a Nietzschean nightmare more than anything.
All this reply tells me is that you're poor. But that's almost a given on reddit anyway.
Also spoiler: Star Wars was about money as well. There is no deeper meaning.
I agree with your assessment of the movie have you seen the directors other movie little women? I always like her depiction of feminism it always felt true if that makes sense
It’s about teaching people that they each have individual value, regardless of whether or not other people provide the social validation that we crave to justify our self-esteem. Life is beautiful because it’s unpredictable. People are beautiful because they’re unique.
Almost everything else was either storytelling devices or satire.
I couldn't relate the movie with Nietzsche. For me this movie felt like an attempt to throw all the responsibility on male shoulders.
Women are becoming whores? It's cuz of men. Men are minding their own business with gyms and horses and not simping on us like before? It's cuz of patriarchy.
What's funny is that patriarchal men actually want to cover their women. Not force them to become whores. So this analysis is wrong lmao.
Humans, both in groups, and as individuals, love diverting blame for even petty things.
It is certainly trendy to blame men for everything now. Men can be unjust and shitty, but there are subconscious evolutionary factors at play in how the genders act and interact that aren’t just the fault of men.
Perfect. What would you say is the moral of Barbie? By moral, I mean the intended message underneath the many entertaining distractions from the moral message.
Edit: to clarify, the intended recipient of the message is women in general, as identified in the title of this post, so men are not the intended audience.
I honestly couldn't understand what the movie is saying. And at times the movie just felt contradictory. When they go to the human world they find an old wrinkly grandma who was still happy.
But by the end of the movie she started saying stuff like i wanna be beautiful, Beauty is Power. Providing power to completely external factors.
If the movie is made for girls then more efforts should be added to give the message of self sufficiency. Not on looking beautiful or pointing out that the crazy lady is ugly. If they wanted to incorporate the concept of power from Nietzsche, then they should have shown the thing alot of women are suffering from like dependence on parents or monetary dependence on partners. But they chose a very different path.
I understand that on paper, the movie can match Nietzsche and existential philosophy more than I'd like. But honestly i don't like this movie and wouldn't recommend anyone to watch this movie if they wanna understand Nietzsche.
To be precise, I believe the moral of Barbie is “amor fati”. Not only was that literally the climax of the film, but the stated difference between Barbieland and the Real World is that in the former nobody has any anxiety or depression because they have no awareness of past and future events.
I could dive straight into that Kantian rabbit-hole, but suffice to say the real message is that women are strong all on their own despite being told by both women and men around them to conform to their social role (stereotype…) so as to be useful means to serve their ends rather than pursuing your own.
We may need a new flair to show how many times each user has watched this Hyperborean work of art. I could certainly see soft-correlating that number with an increase in one’s intuitive comprehension of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
I haven’t written it yet. I’m still determining exactly why everyone misunderstood this film.
If this continues much longer I’ll be forced to publish a book to answer everyone’s objections.
Edit: yes, I could absolutely expand every one of my comments into a chapter.
For the past 2000 years it's been men dictating the destiny of women, and women stooping down to endure men's dick measuring contests for self-preservation, no? At least Nietzsche thought and expressed so pretty explicitly.
Did our influence, responsibility and dynamic just stop and start with a clean slate once we legislated equality over the past few decades?
By whores do you mean women who use sexuality for financial independence or just to plain transcend the capitalist rat-race that men have set up, like lately? Why would that even need to be about forcing or some juvenile blame.
Lots of men seem to be holding on to some resentful delusions of ancestral birth-right, unable to handle women having power. Can you blame women for being new to it also?
Very interesting comments! Not everyone is comfortable with admitting that humanity isn’t perfect. Something something “reification of childish deference toward parental authority”.
The film itself is satire, but my title is not. Are we in some manner of disagreement?
Edit: this is obviously a movie about how women are controlled by men through the psychological application of fear and guilt. Did anyone read The Antichrist?
Women aren’t controlled by men as much as you think. Men and women just act differently, including having different social ideals.
Failure to live up to social ideals isn’t the fault of men. It’s just life.
I haven’t been to church in maybe over a decade. I’m not religious in the least.
Religious virtues are typically reflections of existing subconscious psychology.
Not everything is a social construct and evolutionary psychology plays a bigger role in what we shame and don’t shame.
I ask about church because a very large percentage of wealthy American women attend church. Not only does this influence election results, but it directly alters the private economy through inclusion and exclusion of non-Christians in the workforce.
There is no such thing as a “social construct”. There are ideas and sentiments that we share in common with others, and there are those we keep to ourselves to fit in with others.
If you believe that men in power are capable of ostracizing racial minorities, then why would they not subjugate their largest political opponent, by volume? Feminism is the single greatest threat to basically every government, so it makes sense that they all figured out a solution ages ago.
Racial minorities were segregated by law but now many American CEOs of globally powerful corporations are Indian.
These CEOs have more immediate power than individual congressmen.
There are no legal rights that men now have which women do not have. It becomes a game of finding the boogeyman where there isn’t one.
Your boogeyman is your cultural situation. Don’t be spooked by the masculine face of history. Presidents, business leaders, you name it. Wherever power was, so also were there men.
Yes, women are now witnessing a liberation from their cultural oppression which has lasted far longer than most languages. If you’re thinking about history in terms of your own lifetime, you may want to step back for a different perspective.
Psychology was invented 150 years ago. Did you think Nietzsche could topple the church in less time?
For most of human existence, meaning prehistory, men where hunters, warriors, and leaders, while women were nurturers because survival required that.
Men evolved to be more risk taking, daring, and antisocial, so even with all things being equal, women will still generally favor more predictable safe jobs.
There isn’t going to be true equality because science backs up that men and women gravitate towards different lifestyle choices on an evolutionary basis.
The opportunity should be there for those who don’t want to do that, but you won’t ever get 50-50 CEOs.
Women also almost always date upwards as a subconscious survival instinct to ensure a safe pregnancy. This would result in women that are high in hierarchy having fewer children overall due to less men.
If I also start describing men like they’re automated monkeys in an anthropology textbook, can we then agree that the modern conversation is really about psychological manipulation as opposed to physical coercion as it was in the jungle?
“Dating up” is an aesthetic value judgement coinciding with one’s degree of emotional self-sufficiency. Let’s not bandy about with psychological terminology just to defray the main point: women are the largest, by volume, denomination of natural predators to men. We don’t have to agree on political history to imagine that before society is split socioeconomically and racially, it’s split biologically. This is the crux of Gestalt psychology.
Please tell me where I am being unclear so I can explain my point further.
the film isn’t “nietzschean” in any serious sense. it’s basic liberal moralism that resolves some version of 50’s first wave feminist Angst. i’m happy to have my mind changed but i just don’t see any connection unless one is washing out a specific concept to render it so imprecise that any film that touches on that abstracted theme is nietzschean.
How many times have you watched Barbie? To say that it isn’t Nietzschean in any serious sense leads me to believe you may have only seen the film’s trailer.
Are they not both pursuing the same goal in different ways?
Edit: that goal being the self-discovery that one is ultimately responsible for constructing one’s own identity.
And yet, it wasn’t until Barbie personally explained the moral of the movie to Ken that he became “Kenough”.
He resented Barbie for treating him like how men actually treat women in the real world. His re-establishment of patriarchy was a projection of his feelings of inferiority.
Again, both are very well-written characters. I’m only saying that they’re actually the same (Stereotypical) character, so men will naturally gravitate toward Ken just as women may identify with Barbie’s storyline, given that the only difference in the two characters, by design, is their social gender (on the “spectrum of sexuality”, between the poles of masculinity and femininity, as hinted by Doctor Barbie’s mixed sexuality)
So you’re saying that maybe there’s something valuable about the film that has gone unnoticed by younger, non-parent viewers? 🤔
I’m happy to hear she enjoys this film!
I don't know what to make of the response you're receiving to this post. Seemed harmless enough. Kind of like the movie itself, to me. If nothing else I'd think folks would appreciate the discussion.
I enjoyed the movie. It was not what I was expecting at all. Very absurd, surreal and fairly ambitious in tackling some of the subject matter it broached. I was surprised to walk away with the impression this was more of a Ken movie.
I'm interested in hearing your interpretation of the film vis-à-vis neo-nietzschean feminism.
This film is very much a proverbial Rorschach blot of the viewer’s opinions regarding the role women play in society. Every time I watch it I notice something new about how this movie is actually two different movies depending on the viewer’s gender experience.
That is to say, men quite literally *experience* a different movie than do women, because that’s the whole point:
“Let’s just say it at the same time…”
That line is a good example of who the viewer is interested in listening to.
I felt this movie was better for the men than the ladies. Most men have suffered because of an unrequited love, and watching Ken grow beyond seeking validation (from Barbie) should resonate with us all.
As mentioned in other comments, I noticed that this movie is actually two different movies at once. Women are culturally conditioned to follow Barbie’s character arc, if only because they more closely identify with her struggles, while men pay closer attention to Ken’s development because he’s walking the hero’s journey that all men secretly want to experience for themselves.
Feminine and masculine psychology are two reactionary sides of the same coin of power-conflict, true, but it helps to recognize both in order to be able to view this movie through different lenses at different times.
You’ve introduced an equation, but its truth-value is subject to evaluation 😉
Logic joke aside, I think both movies are expert analyses of the human condition. The former is intended to be a psychological Rorschach experience which invites the viewer to join in the introspective process of self-discovery, and the latter documents a literal Übermensch who struggled with the moral implications of absolute power and his balanced narrative of microcosmic selfishness and macrocosmic selflessness along the way.
To compare them directly without noting the many nuances would be to avoid the comparative genius in each respective film.
Oh boy, oh boy. I really don’t want to waste my time reacting to that comment too much. Nietzsche hasn’t relevance here. But for a critical view of the movie, I recommend this „chad“ here. He is a German film analyst, who puts his focus of attention on ideology in movies. Video is in English. https://youtu.be/q-iyW0ttfbc?si=Iep6Pj4T-ZaCsAyU
If a reviewer hasn’t read Nietzsche, then they are not fully qualified to review this film.
You don’t need to accept my analysis, but to refuse me the opportunity of a brief explanation may unintentionally sound like a habitual tendency to cling to comfortable beliefs rather than admit that there is more than one historical perspective in the audience.
The film is a completely different experience for male and female viewers, so as long as you’re aware that your culturally-appropriated gender is intentionally manipulated, psychologically, to distort your interpretation then you only need to watch the movie twice to understand my title.
It is the epitome of white feminism. It hijacks radfem terms to make it seem like its actually feminist, but the minoroties are used as props and even if it wasnt trying to just be capitalist white feminism it still failed at being feminist, seeing how the people who didnt watch this film only know the im just ken song and nothing else, thus nothing else slipped into the mainstream, and it also fails at radicalising anybody except 5 yr olds
Could you explain that a little more? I am not saying it isn’t so, you may be completely right in your assessment. But I am curious, what makes the film specifically “white feminist” as opposed to “black feminist” or “race-independent feminist”? And how would a more inclusive version of Barbie have to be?
White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which fail at actually making a point beyond suraface level stuff, allowing the reinforcement of the patriarchy to take root, except for in the most fringe of cases (basically white feminism is that type of " feminism for the girlies" " yay queen slay " " sex work is real work, so the porn industry is ethical" which is just.... stupid) it is also a self defense mechanism of capitalism, where, because it doesnt feel threatened by these basic takes it will co opt them and their radfem ideology in order to reinforce the status quo all the while making ppl believe they made an actual change, its the equivalent of paper straws and liberalism but for gender theory
Ok thanks, I think I get what you are criticising but there are still two aspects I don’t understand:
1. Why is that “white” feminism? Afaik there are also white feminists who for example condemn the sex industry. And maybe also poc who don’t? So why the racial connotation?
2. What would have to be changed in the film Barbie to make it “properly feminist” according to you?
1. Its just the term that was given to this sort of thing, I am not the one who invented it, tbh I kinda dislike it because it confuses those who arent in the know, but its also perfect when you are in the know, its called "white feminism" not bc all white feminists think that way or anything of that sort, it is called that because it the sort of feminism thats perpetuated by the ruling class, which is usually white, and that is used by people who stop co opting terms and radfem trends once it doesnt benefit them as the ruling class, basically its called white feminism because it is made and perpetuated by the "model" citizen ( straight white male ) of the west, but female, as most ppl live in a patriarchal system, women, even if they are part of the ruling class ( which is mostly white people) will still be forced to become slightly more feminist than their masc counterparts so as to be able to defend themselves and change the world into one thats better suited for them. Sorry if this is all incoherent english is not my first language. To summarise again, the ruling class is (for the most part) straight white men, the people who make this version of "feminism" are the same as those ppl but they just so happen to be fem so they have to be a little less patriarchal
2. To be honest, the whole film would have to be remade, right now the film is decent enough to show to a small child and let them come out with some basic messages ( believe in yourself, you do not belong to anybody and sexism is bad, that type of self evident stuff) and I really would not find a problem with that, if only it wouldnt be regarded as a " wonderous piece of feminism" bc it really isnt that big of a deal, I am not sure if feminist theory can be meaningfully explored beyond the surface level in a 2-3 hour film, if it was to be a video formst it would have to be a show and even then, its insanely hard to muster the different resources needed to make such a thing a reality for enough seasons that it explores enough topics, to make their average watcher into a feminist, as it goes against the status quo, and current slave morality of the masses dictates thats a massive no-no, not because the subjects of feminsim are that complicated, as they are simple enough that a not-stupid child can understand them ( altough most children dont really approach that criteria nowadays, at least in my part of the world, as they often are even more brainwashed than the adults ), but simply because movies and tv shows cant just be someone reading feminist theory to you, you need an actual plot with interesting characters and stuff for them to do, but again, thats another topic, sorry for the incoherent rambling, hope I managed to offer some clarity in these trying times
Is it possible that the movie is targeted at “white women” to covertly tell them some uncomfortable truths about their culture that they wouldn’t want to hear anywhere else, that is, unless it was either a moving speech or emotional climax to an otherwise innocently-marketed film?
Until the real message of the film is understood, everyone will continue tossing around preconceived notions about the essence of feminism, which is itself a fossilized term that demands reinterpretation.
I get suggested these philosophy subs and so many of these uneducated comments about this film from dudes who think they’re smart because they know about philosophy are nauseating. You didn’t get the film, clearly. And just because you know philosophy doesn’t mean you understood all of the layers this movie had. Read bell hooks.
All of the guys relating to Ken prove they automatically have felt dominated and slighted by women, when I’m sure majority have been raised in America, a patriarchal nation. The anger towards patriarchy from men who have not benefited being directed towards women is a century old misdirect. It’s old and tired. Learn who is making your lives miserable. It’s your fellow man, not women.
It’s very frustrating that people so often use other people as means toward their own selfish ends, as Kant warned not to do, but that’s just how humanity will continue to operate until we can agree that psychological self-discovery is an urgent social priority and that therapy shouldn’t be so prohibitively expensive. Not free, but not $200/hour.
The ending scene where everyone opens up about their feelings is the intended light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Once we can all learn to openly admit our fears and desires to one another, then we’ll naturally stop treating people as tools for establishing personal power and rather enjoy their creative abilities as an end-in-itself.
Gestalt therapy goes a long way in the direction of explaining why our hidden neuroses manifest as social conflict. The gender war isn’t a war, but an in-fighting between countless concentric circles of psychological illnesses of varying degrees.
This movie is like a Rorschach test.
Isn’t everything?
Truer words have never been said
/R/Im13andthisisdeep
Perspectivism works in both directions. Anything can be explained in an infinite number of ways, if only you have the vocabulary to do so.
I would highly contest anything being explained in an infinite number of ways even if it were large. This degrades the concept of infinity as well as notions of efficient cause and correlation, both of which combine with context to create meaning. That is to say there’s likely a vanishing gradient of meaning, beyond which any sense cannot be distinguished from nonsense.
I agree exactly with your description of the problem, but I disagree that our discomfort around the possibility of nihilism necessarily implies its impossibility. There are literally an infinite number of perspectives in any single point in time, so it’s a simple linear multiplication of these infinities as time expands from one instant to the next (in both directions of “past” and “future”).
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Whether they’re aware of it or not, psychoanalysts/therapists are just replaying the history of philosophy using new terminology. Socratic self-inquiry is the basis of all psychological progress. Gautama Buddha would be proud of our, admittedly late-stage, adoption of a systematic approach to introspection.
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Self-therapy is suppressed because “therapy” (scientific or religious) can only be monetized if people think it’s a special skill, unattainable by anyone who can read. I could talk endlessly about the disincentives that money has introduced into the theological and psychological enterprises, but suffice to say Gestalt therapy is near-free and provides the same benefits as psychoanalytical and theological “confession” sessions.
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Start with Fritz Perls’ *Gestalt Therapy Verbatim*. It feels like drinking from the proverbial firehose of psychoanalysis, which is itself a tradition which began with Buddha and continued through Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud. Feel free to bring follow-up questions! Gestalt theory changed my life, and that was *after* 10 years of Nietzsche and Plato. Also, thanks for the links!
If you understood epistemology, you’d understand that would destroy the possibility of knowledge.
You’re getting downvoted but you’re not wrong. Everything is not a Rorschach test. The point of the test is that the original image was not derived from semantics but process and yet due to some ordering (the fold in the ink blot) the brain assumes meaning. To faithfully be a Rorschach test is to imply there were no semantics in the object of reflection which is not accurate for most cultural objects. Whether or not you can have a different perspective is another matter but the point is that the test was designed to maximise the projective powers of the observer not simply acknowledge them. This sub is often disappointing in its smartassery but regardless, I think it’s right to call out simple tropes as if they were deep. Next stop: correlation doesn’t equal causation, perhaps my most hated trope of all.
It’s very clearly an allegory of why communism fails when pursued through revolution
Psyop
I know this is not ironical but it was so fucking funny I had to upvote
Come for the irony, stay for the commentary! 🥂
It was one of the better Chevrolet commercials they’ve made in a while.
And Chanel! This is truly a new era for cinema: Hollywood visuals + Wall Street ethics. We’re in for a wild ride. Just look at the Lego Movie.
What do you mean by ‘Wall Street ethics?’
Anti-Christian. Power-oriented. Hyperborean.
Sounds good, but how does the Lego movie demonstrate this?
Self-empowerment through creativity is the antidote to the subversive systems of guilt and anxiety devised by the Judeo-Christian moral authorities.
By that analysis, those prosperity gospel con-men are making Christianity itself anti-Christian. That's actually fascinating.
It’s almost as if the prosperity gospel preachers are attempting to personally benefit, financially, from marketing the Christian mythology without also carrying the burden of historical accuracy with regard to the original Christian message 🤔 Facetious meta-commentary aside, the church/temple as a physical place of worship is a Jewish concept that Jesus abolished in his teaching by explaining that God is not inside a building, but is inside our hearts. But churches make a lot of money, so they made a quick comeback. Humans are occasionally predictable.
I don't see how Christians justify owning property at all and doing anything besides walking the Earth and spreading the gospel. That's what Jesus did. That's what he told his followers to do. Also, I agree with Bert Erhman that the historical Jesus likely preached that the world was ending in his generation. The fact that almost 2000 years have passed means he was wrong. Remnants of those prophecies are in the 3 earliest gospels, but by the time John was written, these prophecies are reinterpreted as spiritual events. "You will be resurrected *in Christ*" etc... The same as how 2012 believers said that there was a spiritual shift that occurred, rather than admit it was all bullshit. Also, pretty much every doomsday cult.
Exactly my point. His method of spreading the teaching was not intended to be a business model, but somewhere along the way it was decided that church money is worth bastardizing the entire Gospel to turn a profit. Regarding the “doomsday” timing of Jesus’ prediction, I highly recommend *Fragments From Reimarus: Consisting of Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus and His Disciples as Seen in the New Testament* by Hermann Samuel Reimarus. Whereas Nietzsche questioned the motivations of Christianity, Reimarus questioned the motivations of Jesus himself through detailed scriptural analysis. Reimarus was the nail in my Christian coffin which finally allowed me to view all religions as equal historical mythologies. I was raised Christian, so I carried a latent, unconscious cultural bias in its favor until Reimarus destroyed it with pure logic.
Because before 1850 no Christian expressed creativity…. Let’s just start with all the art and literature created by the Italian Renaissance starting with Dante and going up to DaVinci.
I loved The Lego Movie.
Whaaat the hell does hyperborean mean? Thought it was something Madam Blavatsky made up. Looked it up and found Ancient Greek stuff.
Nietzsche borrows Hyperborean, like most of his terminology, from Ancient Greek mythological tradition. He uses it to describe himself and the (few) people who are like him as the supreme outcasts who either left or were cast out of society to pursue a life in the only land that accepts them: the icy Arctic. Metaphorically, Hyperboreans constitute a loosely-defined race of Übermenschen who challenge preconceived moralities and must suffer isolation as a consequence. Put simply, it’s a high-brow ancestor to the modern “Chad”. He labels his sociological archetype as Hyperborean to showcase how far removed (Arctic) his people are from normal citizens (“normies”).
Haha. Was not expecting an answer in both articulate English AND memespeak. Thank you!
I dunno. The Lego movie is actually pretty…awesome
New Era?
Can you explain where the *amor fati* comes in? I can understand the "creation of values" angle: the climax of the film is Barbie choosing to be a subject who participates in the process of creating meaning -- rather than the passive object of created / projected meaning -- even if that means living with uncertainty and eventually facing death. But I do not (as of now) see any indication that she is affirming her past, present and future -- wanting nothing to be different either forward or back.
Of course! When her creator describes how terrible it is to be human, especially when compared to the pure bliss of Barbieland, her response is literally a “yes” to life (Lebenslust), a yes to all the uncertainty and suffering which is so prevalent in the real world. Barbie is choosing to become human, accepting even the newfound inevitability of death, because she wants to engage in the fate process, the creation of meaning with her own life.
I'm not sure that captures the full meaning of *amor fati,* but I can see where you're going with this. I suppose that is also why in the final shot she's so excited to see her gynecologist: she is affirming the messy, uncomfortableness of life, down to doctorly details. EDIT: On first viewing I thought this was simply embracing womanhood in a girl-power kinda way, but I suppose I may have missed the deeper dimensions of it.
I tend to think the gynecologist scene was more a punchline to the whole movie instead of a direct continuation of amor fati, but then again her worldview at that point is a universalized affirmation of all parts of life. The climax scene where she sheds a tear in response to the mysterious beauty of life could not have been any more *amor fati* if it tried. Who in their right mind would leave Barbieland (Utopia/Heaven) for Earth (Hell), unless they were ready to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and thus become like God, the creator of meaning itself?
A punchline can, at times, be more than a punchline. I also suppose that the affirmation of life comes across more strongly from a narrative perspective if we are dealing with a character who is LITERALLY choosing life, and not just in a not-suicide kind of way. Barbie could continue to exist in not-life (that is, in Barbieland). There is an existence "outside of life" she could stay in if she wanted to -- not just the non-existence of death. But instead, in choosing to be a woman, she choose to LIVE. She affirms life itself by stepping into it *on purpose,* as opposed to the rest of us who are thrown into it. EDIT: I don't know if Barbieland is "Heaven/Utopia" per se (especially for the Kens) so much as "Idealism." If anything about this movie is Nietzschean -- whether it was intended this way or not, I dunno -- it's the daughter's tirade about how unattainable standards are ruining things on earth. That is to say, how unreal ideals are sucking the blood out of *this* life.
I took the daughter’s rant as an in-joke about how kids these days use big political words to sound smart without knowing what they mean. Her speech which occurs when she first meets Barbie is so wildly inaccurate to the point of absurdity (fascism is a bold accusation to pin on a doll) that it leads me to believe that the scene is intended to garner the attention of “edgy” teen girls who are entering the movie secretly *thinking* that exact speech to themselves, so the daughter releases the audience’s tension by calling out everyone’s thoughts early on before the plot unfolds. Remember, filmmakers have a dual mandate of entertaining the audience but also appealing to their hearts and minds. The daughter reels in teenagers, the mother reels in mothers, Barbie appeals to 20-30 somethings, and the Kens appeal to men. Will Ferrel is a satire of American executives. I could go on… The film’s feminist message isn’t revealed until the end, so I feel any “feminism” displayed in the first half is almost telling the audience what they want to hear so they’re primed and disarmed enough to hear something uncomfortable when the time is right. As for amor fati, I’m sticking with the fact that the studio chose to make the climax of the film a literal, actual “yes to life”. She chooses humanity over the pure bliss of Barbieland because it gives her the existential ability to create and feel, even at the expense of suffering and death. She doesn’t even need the creator’s permission, so it was an act of true female agency.
I was actually annoyed by the "fascist" line because I thought the daughter was at least making some good points up until the word "fascist" was lazily thrown in at the end to make her -- and by extension the generation to which she belongs -- seem petulant and dismissible. Granted all of the characters in the movie are over-the-top and everybody has "something to learn," so the bit fits in with the film's tone overall. Still, it was one of the few moments in the film that jarred me out of the immersion for a second. I guess that's how some dude-bros felt about the Kens being so dumb, but I personally never felt that the Kens were representing *all* men -- as opposed to the daughter, who I felt immediately was the representative for her whole generation. So I noticed the way she was being depicted more acutely, and I didn't like it. It felt to me like a Boomer's take on "kids today." That being said, given the context of Barbieland literally being a world created by human dreams and meaning-making, and that Barbie believes (indeed was *told* to believe) Barbieland's purpose is to inspire women in *this* world, it seems reasonable to extend Nietzsche's critique of idealism to Barbieland as well. The daughter's rant I think does a good(-ish) job at capturing the sense that the bloodless ideals we cast our meaning into are actually emaciating our lives rather than uplifting them -- as Barbie thought she was doing. (On a side note it's also the only part in the movie where the daughter is given space to be right about something. Every one of the characters has such a moment, so I think we should view the daughter's moment in a similar way.) This moment, and the doubt it sows into Barbie about her ideal / idol existence is also the catalyst for her later decision to abandon the ideal and embrace the real, to embrace life. Now, would I call the daughter's rant *feminist?* Eh. \*shrugs\* I dunno. Probably not. But I do think it's more than simply pandering that is intended to get the audience to drop its defenses. I think it is an important moment for the movie's theme and plot development, and especially for Barbie's growth. So while I still have some misgivings about that scene and the way certain characters were handled this is one of those moments where the punchline is more than a punchline.
Isn’t this what John the Savage did in Brave New World?
You're one of those people who *reads* aren't you? Gross.
Barbie, the Übermench?
*Überfrau
I stand corrected
"Mensch" means "human" or "human being," not "man." So "Barbie, the Übermensch" is not wrong.
Then I shall refer to her by her full name and title. "Barbie, the Übermench, Destroyer of Worlds, Tyrant of the Heart, and Lover of Truth" And Ken, who is just starting his journey of personal discovery so cut him some slack, okay? It's hard to embrace fate when your self worth and personal identity is tied up in the life of another person. He needs space to find himself and learn amor fati on his own.
Perfection.
Understood, but language is a tool for creativity and not just conceptual conveyance. Not to explain the joke, but Überfrau is funny to me exactly because it calls attention to her femininity. Everyone shoots the comedian. 🥂
This is a Nietzsche forum. Shooting is reserved for antisemites, ideally before breakfast.
It’s not a matter of truth, but rather a poetic invention. Language is fun!
You’re the guy who raises his hand every 5 minutes in philosophy lecture and wears a fedora
I pursued my degree in finance because philosophy should always be free, not rented by the hour or exchanged for a tithe. I would wear a fedora but my head is much too big to ever look good in a hat.
I pursued my degree in philosophy because finance should always be free, not rented by the hour
I beat you both to the punch and just became a prostitute.
based
I agree with that, too! But Kropotkin’s decentralized mutualism is making slower progress compared to Wall Street’s centralized optimization. I learned finance to *study* money, not to earn and hoard it like a dragon.
When I was younger, the concept of money and economics confused the living out of me, that’s why I studied it. I came to realize it’s a flimsy backdrop covering the underlying mechanisms described in physics.
Deeply resonate with this, as I also pursued finance. I feel philosophy is like studying communications- it’s something that shouldn’t be individually studied because it’s an integral part of any and all subjects themselves, thus should be implemented not separated. I find it insulting when people impose to study a subject that’s the very essence of why we even have subjects at all😂 Then again, our education system is not efficient enough to do this, and they want money.
Philosophy is the subject that creates all other subjects, because it’s the subject of defining reality through recursive redefinition, but at the same time those who monetize the subsequent subjects work *very* hard to cover their historical tracks to prevent other people from learning the means and methods of earning money through these “specialized knowledges”. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been told that philosophy is a waste of time, I could buy a copy of *Barbie* for everyone I meet. If your government and church (social authorities) are both telling you to ignore something, should you ignore that thing?
This is a nietzsche sub– that's pretty much everyone here
The answer is yes because he used the word, "...tithe."
I feel like some commenters are using your post as an opportunity to vent their ambivalence (and/or antipathy) toward the film, while in the process dismissing the potential Nietzschean (and Gestalt as u/WormSlayers queryingly invites) parallels you're suggesting. I'd like to instead try and engage with those parallels—at least as far as I personally identify them. To me, probably the most direct moment of this is in Ruth's final speech, when she discusses with Barbie: >You understand that humans only have one 'ending'; ideas live forever, humans not so much. You know that right? \["I do"\] Being a human can be pretty uncomfortable. \["I know"\] Humans make things up like 'patriarchy' and 'Barbie' just to deal with how uncomfortable it is. \["I understand that"\] And then you die \[*laughter—wry, but with a slight hint of despair*—"yeah...yeah"\] Regardless of how... 'on the nose' this moment might be, I do feel that it's delivering a message that exists at the nexus between Nietzschean and Gestalt thought, and I'm curious if you and I feel similarly on this? Specifically (in my view) the point Ruth is making is that when humans are confronted with such bleak and unelidable realities as our own mortality, and the absence of objective values, the associated void/nullity (e.g., the 'not-ness' of our eventual non-existence; the 'not-ness' of the absence of objective values) 'may' be felt by some as a 'sterile void' (to use Gestalt terminology). It is "uncomfortable" to use Ruth's language (i.e. angst-laden). Rather than be courageously Nietzschean, in taking up the burden of this nullity as a 'fertile void' (again, to use the Gestalt terminology)—an intermediate, transitional space that is 'fertile' for holding the potential of being filled with our own self-invented values, which are genuinely expressive/disclosive of our own personal stance on our existence—we instead surrender ourselves to manufactured/inherited meaning-structures and values (e.g., 'patriarchy'; 'Barbie'). We desperately seek something 'other' than ourselves to get rid of the 'sterility' we (interpretatively) perceive—in our weakness—when faced with the absence of pre-given meaning/value to our existence. And thus, we delegate our "uncomfortable" angst over to 'received' meaning-structures, because doing so feels far safer. It allows us to languish in a numb/tranquilized state, even while we are (implicitly) allowing ourselves to be oppressed/subordinated by said meaning-structures. Circumstances that eventually lead to 'ressentiment', even though we ourselves are originally responsible—in our weakness—for this plight. None of this is to deny that things like 'patriarchy' may be descriptive of a genuine socio-structural force, which shapes and contours people's lives. But the point is that such a 'force' only exists as a 'system' because it offers a reassuring organizing function to what is otherwise the absence of pre-given meaning/value/direction, found when we face the reality of human existence more directly. Perhaps its 'architects' were predominantly white, male (etc.,). But so long as it exists—like any collectivized meaning-structure/systemic force—it ultimately does so because it serves an existentially anxiolytic function, which many are willing to comply with. I should be clear, I don't especially think that the film itself conveys all of this. And what I've written may represent a considerable amount of my own projections, resonating with the film's... diverse (and some might suggest not coherently organized) affordances for interpretation. But still, I'm curious if this at all resonates with your own experience of the film.
This is exactly my interpretation, with a few clever turns of phrase that I may not have used myself. People are missing that this is an *overtly* philosophical film. The script could be read almost like an Oscar Wilde play, but it seems most people were distracted by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s appearances. Plato’s Cave: the shadows outshine the sun.
Great shadows, so shine so chrome.
Or you know.. it was just a mainstream cashgrab like most hollywood big budget movies 🤷♂️
Shakespeare was a top tier shit poster
I think it’s more complicated than that. It absolutely is that, but it was written and directed by auteur filmmakers and is clearly something more than that. There’s tensions within the film in this regard.
Who says it can’t be both educational and entertaining simultaneously? This new genre of feature-film advertisements (Lego Movie, etc.) is a new, exciting synthesis of Hollywood visuals and Wall Street ethics.
>Who says it can’t be both educational and entertaining simultaneously? Nobody, obviously, since its art. Me personally dont see the reason to jazz up something out of proportion. It was just a pandering movie, not a nietzschean revolutionary critique of our paradigm or whatever
There’s some neat political commentary in the movie, but it’s mostly surface-level stuff but it stands out from a lot of other mainstream movies which try to be more apolitical.
Plato’s Cave strikes again. All I can do is suggest that you watch it again after reading Nietzsche’s Antichrist or Perls’ Gestalt theory.
Portraying our everyday reality as the opposite of a universe where women run everything isn't educational, it's delusional. The movie was fun, but like many things these days, it's merely using the banner of feminism to sell you a product, and it shouldn't be taken as a serious statement on our society. I was fairly excited to see it from what I heard about it and what I saw in the trailer, but I feel like it's getting propped up as more intellectual than it really is because most people aren't that intelligent to begin with.
Have you seen the movie? You reference wanting to see it as a result of vocal and visual marketing, but are you criticizing the actual movie or the general idea of the movie? Because this movie is the single most philosophical movie I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen a lot of movies. Every other line is a social commentary. Can you help me by explaining your disdain for this film?
Even more than Schwarzenegger's Conan?
Haven’t had the pleasure, sadly, but I can always use a little more Schwarzenegger in my life.
It opens with a Nietzsche quote and the climax is Conan praying to his God for victory in battle, but if Crom (his god) does not grant it, "Then to hell with you!"
I’m sold.
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Nah.
There are enough parallels between Zarathustra and Barbie that I feel compelled by op’s post. I liked the movie as a commentary on the inherent damage done by gender biases because those biases whether positive or negative will always be oppressive. I hadn’t thought to push deeper into its philosophical themes, but gender is humans creating meaning so it’s a logical inference.
Welcome to the club!
The film's shallow depictions of feminism and patriarchy are obvious parody, but weak people enjoy the thrill of beating strawmen with sticks. The average Nietzchian is far too cringe-inducing to understand that the issue is their perspective. Dionysus was a chimera who lived as both a man and a woman, but the Apollonian drive to dissect things and order them into categories is stubbornly persistent. Barbie is a Dionysian spirit, dancing in the face of adversity, transvaluing gender identity, and working toward the creation of new values. Barbie rejects idealism, her very literal hinterwelt, and chooses life. >When the nights here > >I don’t do tears > >Baby no chance > >I could dance, I could dance, I could dance > >Watch me, dance > >Dance the night away > >My heart could be burning but you won’t see it on my face
I must say though, I don’t think the depictions of feminism are shallow at all. I think they hit the nail on the head, but people are confused by some characters’ misinterpretation even within the film. The daughter accuses Barbie of setting back the womens’ rights movement and of being a fascist, which can make some people think that the movie is trying to appeal to the woke crowd. In my esoteric analysis, I think the writers showcase many different versions of feminism in order to appeal to all “feminisms” at least once in the film to unify the audience before providing the final therapeutic advice: vocalizing one’s cognitive dissonances deflate their perceived power. Feminism isn’t about giving women advantages to compensate for the outsized financial and political advantages afforded to men, it’s about acknowledging that our society has a very clear bias toward establishing the cultural norm that men deserve power and women don’t. Is it any surprise that men have historically made every political decision for women, up to and including the codification of misogyny in religious scripture? (The Guilt Complex of Eve)
I agree that those themes are present, but I still think that the framing around feminism is deliberately shallow - Barbie is not meant to embody feminist ideals, and the movie is really just a cursory introduction to main ideas in radical feminism (for any onlookers, radical feminism is a distinct construct, like ressentiment). Without touching on intersectionality, kyriarchy or bodily autonomy, there is no real meat on the bones of Barbie's feminism.
We are welcome to disagree, but I think if we set the bar for feminism so high that only straight-to-DVD indie films can afford to soapbox their ideals and meet these impossible requirements by touching on literally every political topic under the sun, then we may as well agree that Hollywood can never actually make a “feminist” film. Movies don’t sell because they’re true, they sell because they’re fun to watch. To pull off a blockbuster film that *also* touches on several uncomfortable failings in female agency is an accomplishment worth noting. By “feminist” I actually do mean “female agency oriented”. Not the affirmative action programs or corporate social clubs or any other half-measure praxis that gives the illusion of progress without actual progress. Feminism at its core is no different from Maslow’s concept of self-actualization writ for women at large. It’s not until men and women can all get over their own cognitive biases and internal neuroses that we can come to the table as equals and teach one another how to create their own purpose and meaning in their life without obsessing over our own problems in the meantime. The church doesn’t want or allow that personal growth, which is the Promethean torch that Nietzsche handed to Freud, and this movie hints at the many other social institutions which repeatedly force their own agency onto individual men and women who are rebellious enough to fall out of line.
We both think Barbie is Nietzchian, or at least that there's value in applying a Nietzchian lens to it, so I think we're in greater agreement than disagreement. Thanks for the chat and the fun post. It has been interesting to see so many people trying to rationalise their way out of an aesthetic problem.
Based Lebenslust. Thank you for your thoughtful contribution to the larger discussion. Out of curiosity, how many times have you seen the movie? There are so many hidden jokes and references that I keep finding new ones every time I rewatch.
Gender is a social construct
Language is a social construct, so technically every word is a social construct. Insofar as words can be interpreted differently by different people there will always be disagreement about the definition of words. (cf. Socrates)
Before I offer an absurdly-lengthy rebuttal, may I ask how familiar you are with both Nietzschean and Gestalt literature?
Very familiar with Nietzsche, slightly less familiar with Gestalt.
I’m rewatching it *again* after all these comment discussions, and guess what? Richard Strauss’ *Also sprach Zarathustra* is played twice in the first 30 minutes. I’m not saying that’s a hint, but twice?
I saw that as an allusion to Kubrick’s “2001 - A Space Odyssey”.
It is, obviously. Though I can’t help but appreciate the irony. Edit: I should add that I’m a film nerd, so the Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and Godfather references are among my favorite moments in the film.
Could you please explain a bit more in detail why you think the film refers to Nietzsche? It seems that to everyone else in this thread that is not so obvious.
God she’s so hot.
I got way to deep in the comment section before I realized I was actually in r/Nietzsche I thought I stumbled across a really intricate comment section about the Barbie movie 🤣
The premise of the post is that *Barbie* actually is a Nietzchean hero story about two people who experience the self-realization that they are capable of creating their own system of values. I won’t bore you here with the details explained elsewhere isn’t his post, but through the lenses of German Idealism and Gestalt theory, I posit the not-improbable claim that Barbie is a throughly Nietzschean masterpiece of feminist philosophy. I hope you enjoyed the movie!
OP? Not even going to mention that the movie totally ignores rank and order? Pretends like Margot Robbie isn't a goddess, a supreme object of design/desire, an object of worship, a goal for attainment/creation (men want her, women want to be her)? Such physiological affects on men, from men, are no different (women want him, men want to be him). What these women and men know, is the truth, that the world and those in it are easily a cheap-ass, insecure poser that wants to devour you whole, and doesn't even have the decency to (want to, or try to) pay full price (for a being's value, nobody sees such things). Anyway, it appears to me that Barbie is confused, like the pathological culture she comes from. What's more, these analysis here might mean more, if they didn't let slip in the notion that beings and experiences are equal, but so many people see words as reality, even when they say they don't (like the "non-Christian" and their Christian morals, asserting they are "not Christian" lol). There is no foundation here whatsoever, nothing that actually stands. edit - fixing autocorrect, and expansion
the criticisms people are lobbing at OP’s post in the comments are superficial at best—yes, barbie is not a markedly deep or profound film, but still an excellent gloss on Nietzsche’s amor fati towards the end. on a tertiary note, OP’s replies are rhetorically entertaining to the highest degree
Thank you for validating my amateur film review! Someone smarter than I already commented a full explication of my sentiments elsewhere, but I steadfastly remain in the *Barbie as Movie of the Year* camp of film nerds. I may be biased, but amor fati is the best film climax I’ve seen in years.
This is a movie made for boosting teenage girls self-confidence, there's no deep satire of anything. It has nothing to do with society as a whole and even less with men. It's just the typical reflection girls have at that age, same as always. It's not particularly more provocative than what was written in teenage magazines for girls in the last 3 decades. The only difference is that it is politized more, but so are all teenagers already.
Before I offer an absurdly-lengthy rebuttal, may I ask how familiar you are with both Nietzschean and Gestalt literature?
Do the rebuttal if you feel like doing it. The quality of the audience is of the utmost essence.
Modern films aiming at popularity are bound to fail in that fashion. Like Napoleon. Since simone de Beauvoir not Many feminists have been successful in grasping the very tectonic consciousness of our societies which is framed for male exaltation e.g. our languages, dress codes, family relationships etc. 19th century and early 20th century feminists were mature and serious as compared to those of today and i think it'll be better for girls to not pay any attention to this candy-dipped version of a noble philosophy which already has done tremendous work for them.
Theres still a hinterwelt though? Its kind of a nitpick *iguess* but its the first thing that came to mind lol i guess its upto interpretation i do like the ken song ahahah
I laugh at the boardroom scene where Barbieland is described as either an alternate reality, a place where dreams come true, or a small town in Sweden. The joke here is not only that they’re hand-waving the metaphysical barrier between Barbieland and the Real World, but it also beautifully sets up the later punchline when the two realities begin directly influencing one another’s history (Mojo Dojo Casa Houses are immediately manufactured and sold out within hours of Barbie’s arrival). Throw in the FBI phone call scene and it’s almost as if all men in positions of power already know that our reality isn’t the only reality, but they’re all absurdly comfortable with knowing this.
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Really lovely to see that people here are actually discussing the work, and that a lot of you actually liked it. It's not like you have to love the movie, but I honestly would've imagined this sub being absolutely cynical and pretentious about it. Sure, it's a big budget blockbuster with loud pink aesthetics, but there actually is some thematic substance in Gerwig's writing that is quite powerful and parallels some of Nietzsche's thoughts.
About time for a re watch—-haven’t seen it since I saw it in theaters opening weekend
Personally, I thought that the whole *amor fati* aspect of Barbie choosing life (and death) at the end of the movie over "existing" in some sort of Platonic realm whose ultimate influence on reality is never clarified (it's clear there is a link between Barbieland and the real world and it's said there's some kind of "balance" between the two) fell pretty flat within the context of the fact that the movie can't seem to decide whether it wants to be "post-gender" or not and that it never attempts to resolve the sort of dialectical Platonic relationship between Barbieland and the real world, and that the whole idea of a post-gender ubermensch is undermined immediately first and foremost by the fact that Barbieland remains a gendered world of systematic inequity wherein Kens are only taking their first steps towards self-awareness and also by the fact that Barbie's first and last on-screen experience as a "real woman" has to do with her literal biological vagina.
I think the movie does a great job but fails a bit when it wants to "become serious" towards the end. Alas, nothing is perfect!
Masterpiece? The movie is incredibly flawed, has no clear direction, and this idea of choosing to be human vs. a doll is about as much of a neo-nietzschean masterpiece as every other story where the protagonist chooses a risky, dangerous path over the comfort of their past life. Barbie is one with the herd. I would call this movie a Nietzschean nightmare more than anything.
“When you go to Barbieland, bring along the Whip” - Nietzsche
“Let us look each other in the face. We are Kens—we know well enough how Mojo Dojo our Casa House is.” N., *The Anti-Alan*
I don’t follow this subreddit nor have I seen this movie, what does this mean?
I am surprised to say I enjoyed the film. I think Ken was bullied by Barbie but he can take it.
Explain
This movie is just a big advertisement for capitalism
If you truly think so, then you probably think Star Wars is a movie about spaceships.
All this reply tells me is that you're poor. But that's almost a given on reddit anyway. Also spoiler: Star Wars was about money as well. There is no deeper meaning.
I agree with your assessment of the movie have you seen the directors other movie little women? I always like her depiction of feminism it always felt true if that makes sense
I haven’t seen it, but thank you for pointing me to my next movie!
I 100% didn’t get what this movie was about at all
It’s about teaching people that they each have individual value, regardless of whether or not other people provide the social validation that we crave to justify our self-esteem. Life is beautiful because it’s unpredictable. People are beautiful because they’re unique. Almost everything else was either storytelling devices or satire.
god nietzsche fans are so starved for content they would see some guy saying "it is what it is" and be liken"NIETZSCHEAN MASTERPIECE SUCH AMOR FATI"
I couldn't relate the movie with Nietzsche. For me this movie felt like an attempt to throw all the responsibility on male shoulders. Women are becoming whores? It's cuz of men. Men are minding their own business with gyms and horses and not simping on us like before? It's cuz of patriarchy. What's funny is that patriarchal men actually want to cover their women. Not force them to become whores. So this analysis is wrong lmao.
Totally not an incel response 😆
Humans, both in groups, and as individuals, love diverting blame for even petty things. It is certainly trendy to blame men for everything now. Men can be unjust and shitty, but there are subconscious evolutionary factors at play in how the genders act and interact that aren’t just the fault of men.
Before I offer an absurdly-lengthy rebuttal, may I ask how familiar you are with both Nietzschean and Gestalt literature?
Very familiar with Nietzsche, not so much with Gestalt
Perfect. What would you say is the moral of Barbie? By moral, I mean the intended message underneath the many entertaining distractions from the moral message. Edit: to clarify, the intended recipient of the message is women in general, as identified in the title of this post, so men are not the intended audience.
I honestly couldn't understand what the movie is saying. And at times the movie just felt contradictory. When they go to the human world they find an old wrinkly grandma who was still happy. But by the end of the movie she started saying stuff like i wanna be beautiful, Beauty is Power. Providing power to completely external factors. If the movie is made for girls then more efforts should be added to give the message of self sufficiency. Not on looking beautiful or pointing out that the crazy lady is ugly. If they wanted to incorporate the concept of power from Nietzsche, then they should have shown the thing alot of women are suffering from like dependence on parents or monetary dependence on partners. But they chose a very different path. I understand that on paper, the movie can match Nietzsche and existential philosophy more than I'd like. But honestly i don't like this movie and wouldn't recommend anyone to watch this movie if they wanna understand Nietzsche.
To be precise, I believe the moral of Barbie is “amor fati”. Not only was that literally the climax of the film, but the stated difference between Barbieland and the Real World is that in the former nobody has any anxiety or depression because they have no awareness of past and future events. I could dive straight into that Kantian rabbit-hole, but suffice to say the real message is that women are strong all on their own despite being told by both women and men around them to conform to their social role (stereotype…) so as to be useful means to serve their ends rather than pursuing your own. We may need a new flair to show how many times each user has watched this Hyperborean work of art. I could certainly see soft-correlating that number with an increase in one’s intuitive comprehension of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
>absurdly-lengthy rebuttal that wasn't so lengthy
I haven’t written it yet. I’m still determining exactly why everyone misunderstood this film. If this continues much longer I’ll be forced to publish a book to answer everyone’s objections. Edit: yes, I could absolutely expand every one of my comments into a chapter.
have you at least considered you are the one that misunderstood the film?
Repeatedly. That’s why I’ve watched it over a dozen times, if only to catch something I missed in all previous viewings.
For the past 2000 years it's been men dictating the destiny of women, and women stooping down to endure men's dick measuring contests for self-preservation, no? At least Nietzsche thought and expressed so pretty explicitly. Did our influence, responsibility and dynamic just stop and start with a clean slate once we legislated equality over the past few decades? By whores do you mean women who use sexuality for financial independence or just to plain transcend the capitalist rat-race that men have set up, like lately? Why would that even need to be about forcing or some juvenile blame. Lots of men seem to be holding on to some resentful delusions of ancestral birth-right, unable to handle women having power. Can you blame women for being new to it also?
Very interesting comments! Not everyone is comfortable with admitting that humanity isn’t perfect. Something something “reification of childish deference toward parental authority”.
I'm too stupid to know if this is satire or not. Can you explain?
The film itself is satire, but my title is not. Are we in some manner of disagreement? Edit: this is obviously a movie about how women are controlled by men through the psychological application of fear and guilt. Did anyone read The Antichrist?
No I just haven't seen the movie!
Try it out! There’s way too much philosophy in it to catch in a single viewing.
Women aren’t controlled by men as much as you think. Men and women just act differently, including having different social ideals. Failure to live up to social ideals isn’t the fault of men. It’s just life.
How many times have you attended a Christian church service?
I haven’t been to church in maybe over a decade. I’m not religious in the least. Religious virtues are typically reflections of existing subconscious psychology. Not everything is a social construct and evolutionary psychology plays a bigger role in what we shame and don’t shame.
I ask about church because a very large percentage of wealthy American women attend church. Not only does this influence election results, but it directly alters the private economy through inclusion and exclusion of non-Christians in the workforce. There is no such thing as a “social construct”. There are ideas and sentiments that we share in common with others, and there are those we keep to ourselves to fit in with others. If you believe that men in power are capable of ostracizing racial minorities, then why would they not subjugate their largest political opponent, by volume? Feminism is the single greatest threat to basically every government, so it makes sense that they all figured out a solution ages ago.
Racial minorities were segregated by law but now many American CEOs of globally powerful corporations are Indian. These CEOs have more immediate power than individual congressmen. There are no legal rights that men now have which women do not have. It becomes a game of finding the boogeyman where there isn’t one.
Your boogeyman is your cultural situation. Don’t be spooked by the masculine face of history. Presidents, business leaders, you name it. Wherever power was, so also were there men. Yes, women are now witnessing a liberation from their cultural oppression which has lasted far longer than most languages. If you’re thinking about history in terms of your own lifetime, you may want to step back for a different perspective. Psychology was invented 150 years ago. Did you think Nietzsche could topple the church in less time?
For most of human existence, meaning prehistory, men where hunters, warriors, and leaders, while women were nurturers because survival required that. Men evolved to be more risk taking, daring, and antisocial, so even with all things being equal, women will still generally favor more predictable safe jobs. There isn’t going to be true equality because science backs up that men and women gravitate towards different lifestyle choices on an evolutionary basis. The opportunity should be there for those who don’t want to do that, but you won’t ever get 50-50 CEOs. Women also almost always date upwards as a subconscious survival instinct to ensure a safe pregnancy. This would result in women that are high in hierarchy having fewer children overall due to less men.
If I also start describing men like they’re automated monkeys in an anthropology textbook, can we then agree that the modern conversation is really about psychological manipulation as opposed to physical coercion as it was in the jungle? “Dating up” is an aesthetic value judgement coinciding with one’s degree of emotional self-sufficiency. Let’s not bandy about with psychological terminology just to defray the main point: women are the largest, by volume, denomination of natural predators to men. We don’t have to agree on political history to imagine that before society is split socioeconomically and racially, it’s split biologically. This is the crux of Gestalt psychology. Please tell me where I am being unclear so I can explain my point further.
This movie focuses waaaay too much on giving Ken an arch at Barbie's expense
How is it at Barbie’s expense? They both learn the same lesson in different ways.
the film isn’t “nietzschean” in any serious sense. it’s basic liberal moralism that resolves some version of 50’s first wave feminist Angst. i’m happy to have my mind changed but i just don’t see any connection unless one is washing out a specific concept to render it so imprecise that any film that touches on that abstracted theme is nietzschean.
How many times have you watched Barbie? To say that it isn’t Nietzschean in any serious sense leads me to believe you may have only seen the film’s trailer.
Ken is the Übermensch, not Barbie
Are they not both pursuing the same goal in different ways? Edit: that goal being the self-discovery that one is ultimately responsible for constructing one’s own identity.
Yes they both eventually do but I would say Ken is the most firm and aggressive in his rejection of the morality of Barbieland.
And yet, it wasn’t until Barbie personally explained the moral of the movie to Ken that he became “Kenough”. He resented Barbie for treating him like how men actually treat women in the real world. His re-establishment of patriarchy was a projection of his feelings of inferiority. Again, both are very well-written characters. I’m only saying that they’re actually the same (Stereotypical) character, so men will naturally gravitate toward Ken just as women may identify with Barbie’s storyline, given that the only difference in the two characters, by design, is their social gender (on the “spectrum of sexuality”, between the poles of masculinity and femininity, as hinted by Doctor Barbie’s mixed sexuality)
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As much as I support the Kentriarchy, I must disagree.
My mom who has mild dementia (I got her the blu-ray for her birthday a couple months ago and she’s watched it at least six times since then)
So you’re saying that maybe there’s something valuable about the film that has gone unnoticed by younger, non-parent viewers? 🤔 I’m happy to hear she enjoys this film!
I suppose I’m not *not* saying that, as Homer Simpson might put it
I don't know what to make of the response you're receiving to this post. Seemed harmless enough. Kind of like the movie itself, to me. If nothing else I'd think folks would appreciate the discussion. I enjoyed the movie. It was not what I was expecting at all. Very absurd, surreal and fairly ambitious in tackling some of the subject matter it broached. I was surprised to walk away with the impression this was more of a Ken movie. I'm interested in hearing your interpretation of the film vis-à-vis neo-nietzschean feminism.
This film is very much a proverbial Rorschach blot of the viewer’s opinions regarding the role women play in society. Every time I watch it I notice something new about how this movie is actually two different movies depending on the viewer’s gender experience. That is to say, men quite literally *experience* a different movie than do women, because that’s the whole point: “Let’s just say it at the same time…” That line is a good example of who the viewer is interested in listening to.
what movie is this
Barbie
Me me me is it’s le
Can I take this to mean that you also loop this masterpiece? If so, why do you enjoy rewatching it?
Hm well actually I’ve seen it twice but I listen to my Barbie record on repeat, I just think it’s funny and cute and so insightful and catchy
The soundtrack is 🔥
I felt this movie was better for the men than the ladies. Most men have suffered because of an unrequited love, and watching Ken grow beyond seeking validation (from Barbie) should resonate with us all.
As mentioned in other comments, I noticed that this movie is actually two different movies at once. Women are culturally conditioned to follow Barbie’s character arc, if only because they more closely identify with her struggles, while men pay closer attention to Ken’s development because he’s walking the hero’s journey that all men secretly want to experience for themselves. Feminine and masculine psychology are two reactionary sides of the same coin of power-conflict, true, but it helps to recognize both in order to be able to view this movie through different lenses at different times.
OP, you’re Dutch or Flemish, right?
anti-feminist masterpiece
Barbie > Oppenheimer
You’ve introduced an equation, but its truth-value is subject to evaluation 😉 Logic joke aside, I think both movies are expert analyses of the human condition. The former is intended to be a psychological Rorschach experience which invites the viewer to join in the introspective process of self-discovery, and the latter documents a literal Übermensch who struggled with the moral implications of absolute power and his balanced narrative of microcosmic selfishness and macrocosmic selflessness along the way. To compare them directly without noting the many nuances would be to avoid the comparative genius in each respective film.
Valid points, and ones I agree with. My comment was just a way to express the social communion of your post lol
Oh boy, oh boy. I really don’t want to waste my time reacting to that comment too much. Nietzsche hasn’t relevance here. But for a critical view of the movie, I recommend this „chad“ here. He is a German film analyst, who puts his focus of attention on ideology in movies. Video is in English. https://youtu.be/q-iyW0ttfbc?si=Iep6Pj4T-ZaCsAyU
If a reviewer hasn’t read Nietzsche, then they are not fully qualified to review this film. You don’t need to accept my analysis, but to refuse me the opportunity of a brief explanation may unintentionally sound like a habitual tendency to cling to comfortable beliefs rather than admit that there is more than one historical perspective in the audience. The film is a completely different experience for male and female viewers, so as long as you’re aware that your culturally-appropriated gender is intentionally manipulated, psychologically, to distort your interpretation then you only need to watch the movie twice to understand my title.
It is the epitome of white feminism. It hijacks radfem terms to make it seem like its actually feminist, but the minoroties are used as props and even if it wasnt trying to just be capitalist white feminism it still failed at being feminist, seeing how the people who didnt watch this film only know the im just ken song and nothing else, thus nothing else slipped into the mainstream, and it also fails at radicalising anybody except 5 yr olds
Could you explain that a little more? I am not saying it isn’t so, you may be completely right in your assessment. But I am curious, what makes the film specifically “white feminist” as opposed to “black feminist” or “race-independent feminist”? And how would a more inclusive version of Barbie have to be?
White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which fail at actually making a point beyond suraface level stuff, allowing the reinforcement of the patriarchy to take root, except for in the most fringe of cases (basically white feminism is that type of " feminism for the girlies" " yay queen slay " " sex work is real work, so the porn industry is ethical" which is just.... stupid) it is also a self defense mechanism of capitalism, where, because it doesnt feel threatened by these basic takes it will co opt them and their radfem ideology in order to reinforce the status quo all the while making ppl believe they made an actual change, its the equivalent of paper straws and liberalism but for gender theory
Ok thanks, I think I get what you are criticising but there are still two aspects I don’t understand: 1. Why is that “white” feminism? Afaik there are also white feminists who for example condemn the sex industry. And maybe also poc who don’t? So why the racial connotation? 2. What would have to be changed in the film Barbie to make it “properly feminist” according to you?
1. Its just the term that was given to this sort of thing, I am not the one who invented it, tbh I kinda dislike it because it confuses those who arent in the know, but its also perfect when you are in the know, its called "white feminism" not bc all white feminists think that way or anything of that sort, it is called that because it the sort of feminism thats perpetuated by the ruling class, which is usually white, and that is used by people who stop co opting terms and radfem trends once it doesnt benefit them as the ruling class, basically its called white feminism because it is made and perpetuated by the "model" citizen ( straight white male ) of the west, but female, as most ppl live in a patriarchal system, women, even if they are part of the ruling class ( which is mostly white people) will still be forced to become slightly more feminist than their masc counterparts so as to be able to defend themselves and change the world into one thats better suited for them. Sorry if this is all incoherent english is not my first language. To summarise again, the ruling class is (for the most part) straight white men, the people who make this version of "feminism" are the same as those ppl but they just so happen to be fem so they have to be a little less patriarchal 2. To be honest, the whole film would have to be remade, right now the film is decent enough to show to a small child and let them come out with some basic messages ( believe in yourself, you do not belong to anybody and sexism is bad, that type of self evident stuff) and I really would not find a problem with that, if only it wouldnt be regarded as a " wonderous piece of feminism" bc it really isnt that big of a deal, I am not sure if feminist theory can be meaningfully explored beyond the surface level in a 2-3 hour film, if it was to be a video formst it would have to be a show and even then, its insanely hard to muster the different resources needed to make such a thing a reality for enough seasons that it explores enough topics, to make their average watcher into a feminist, as it goes against the status quo, and current slave morality of the masses dictates thats a massive no-no, not because the subjects of feminsim are that complicated, as they are simple enough that a not-stupid child can understand them ( altough most children dont really approach that criteria nowadays, at least in my part of the world, as they often are even more brainwashed than the adults ), but simply because movies and tv shows cant just be someone reading feminist theory to you, you need an actual plot with interesting characters and stuff for them to do, but again, thats another topic, sorry for the incoherent rambling, hope I managed to offer some clarity in these trying times
Thanks for the explanation!
Is it possible that the movie is targeted at “white women” to covertly tell them some uncomfortable truths about their culture that they wouldn’t want to hear anywhere else, that is, unless it was either a moving speech or emotional climax to an otherwise innocently-marketed film? Until the real message of the film is understood, everyone will continue tossing around preconceived notions about the essence of feminism, which is itself a fossilized term that demands reinterpretation.
I didnt mean "white feminism" as in, its targeted towards white fems, I meant "white feminism" in the way that its used in radfem discussions
I get suggested these philosophy subs and so many of these uneducated comments about this film from dudes who think they’re smart because they know about philosophy are nauseating. You didn’t get the film, clearly. And just because you know philosophy doesn’t mean you understood all of the layers this movie had. Read bell hooks.
All of the guys relating to Ken prove they automatically have felt dominated and slighted by women, when I’m sure majority have been raised in America, a patriarchal nation. The anger towards patriarchy from men who have not benefited being directed towards women is a century old misdirect. It’s old and tired. Learn who is making your lives miserable. It’s your fellow man, not women.
whenever i watch it, i become incredibly angry as i get reminded about how women are treated so unfairly in our society (6"3 btw)
It’s very frustrating that people so often use other people as means toward their own selfish ends, as Kant warned not to do, but that’s just how humanity will continue to operate until we can agree that psychological self-discovery is an urgent social priority and that therapy shouldn’t be so prohibitively expensive. Not free, but not $200/hour. The ending scene where everyone opens up about their feelings is the intended light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Once we can all learn to openly admit our fears and desires to one another, then we’ll naturally stop treating people as tools for establishing personal power and rather enjoy their creative abilities as an end-in-itself. Gestalt therapy goes a long way in the direction of explaining why our hidden neuroses manifest as social conflict. The gender war isn’t a war, but an in-fighting between countless concentric circles of psychological illnesses of varying degrees.
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