This past week I watched the Barbie movie on Max. Rather than get on my soapbox about the feminist ideology oozing out of perfectly pink Barbie, what’s more important are the millions of people (largely women and girls) who got excited about the hype with this movie. A bit of a craze started as girls and grown women began dressing in pink and heading to movie theaters this past summer to watch Barbie. I didn’t wear pink to watch the movie this past week, but I felt like I might be reaching for a bottle of pink Pepto Bismal, as I tried not to gag on so much stomach-churning feminist claptrap in that script.
The movie presents the history of Barbie with little girls literally smashing their baby dolls heads in, as they were liberated from playing only the role of mothers. Along came Barbie to give them the world… A “girl power” movie wouldn’t be replete without an evil patriarchy challenge, which was led by Ken. The big winner though was Mattel: “Mattel on Wednesday said Barbie sales jumped 16% in the third quarter, riding the wave of the blockbuster movie. The “Barbie” film, released in July, is largely responsible for the bump, Mattel said. It is the highest-grossing film this year, clearing more than $1.4 billion worldwide.”
It’s always interesting to me how so many Americans will rush to don t-shirts, hats, etc. all to snap photos and videos to post on social media to become part of a craze. The left doesn’t have a monopoly on this, because there are loads of people on the right who rushed to wear red MAGA hats too and for many of them posting photos on social media was part of that craze too. Millions of people, I think, long to be part of something larger than themselves and many seek that sense of belonging on social media.
To compound my misery, I watched the Netflix apocalyptic movie, Leave the World Behind this past week too. I felt very out of touch with Hollywood. This movie was filled with all sorts of racial and political overtones, plus social commentary and no wonder since the Obamas were executive producers.
I’m going to describe the characters by race, since the political racial overtones in this movie smack you in the face. The plot is about a white couple with two teenage children, who rent a gorgeous vacation home away from the city. Their electronic devices stop working and all sorts of strange events begin to happen. Without spoiling the entire plot, the black home-owner and his daughter return to their home, due to concerns about a reported blackout in the city.
So, the black home-owner is the guy with all the geopolitical/military/technical knowledge, who begins to piece together the big picture of what’s happening. As for the vacationing couple, the white woman is obnoxious, self-absorbed and patronizing, while her husband – the white guy – is the most useless person imaginable. He doesn’t know how to do anything, figure out anything and he awaits other people (usually his wife) to tell him what to do. There’s also a stereotypical “bad” white guy – one of those President Obama labeled bitter clingers years ago when he was president – the clinging to their guns and religion type white guy- he’s labeled a “survivalist” in this movie. Actually, that character was the only person in the movie whose actions and behavior seemed logical to survive a catastrophe, but he was portrayed negatively. And to top it all off – the movie shows that survivalist with an American flag flying in front of his house.
I kid you not, there’s an actual line by the spineless husband, played by Ethan Hawke: HAWKE: (As Clay Sandford) I have no idea what I am supposed to do right now. I can barely do anything without my cell phone and my GPS. I am a useless man.”
Sometimes characters grow on me in movies, but I went from being indifferent to the characters in the beginning of the movie to actively disliking the main adult characters by the end. Even the teenage children were unappealing, with the white couple’s kids being a young teen girl, who I thought was weird and the teen boy who was just a stereotype of a sex-obsessed teen male. The black home-owner’s daughter was worried about her mother who was supposed to be flying home to the city, but she kept making racial political statements about white people and considering the Obamas were executive producers, fanning the flames of racial grievance wasn’t surprising. The characters, even the kids, seemed more like caricatures than fully developed characters, but all of them, except for the “survivalist” were displaying an alarming amount of normalcy bias:
A September Vanity Fair piece, Leave the World Behind: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke Face the End-Times: Barack and Michelle Obama executive produced this unsettling apocalypse thriller. offers this take on the plot:
“If society actually did begin to completely break down, you probably would never know exactly how or why. You’d be aware that something was wrong, but the specifics would get cloudy once phones stopped working, the internet was severed, and media networks turned to dead air. Ominous late-night electronic shrieks from the sky; explosions in the distance; planes and boats plowing into the ground, and animals flocking in eerie patterns would only hint at the chaos. A whisper network of survivors might convey contradictory rumors, but how would you know if any of it was true? That’s the unsettling premise of Leave the World Behind, the new Netflix thriller that compounds its terror through uncertainty.”
One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve tried to learn more about emergency preparedness is many of the online prepper content creators who delve into the geopolitics and big picture stuff rush to give blanket advice based on totally unverified information and they parrot alarmist hot takes that stoke fear and encourage rash decisions. This type of content generates a lot of clicks. You’ll see the same predictions of the same life-altering catastrophes, with recommended drastic measures you need to take now, year after year after year.
While you can overreact, this movie did cast into stark relief a glaring reality – how these characters were struggling to make sense of their world as a life-altering catastrophe is unfolding around them and all the security of normalcy is being ripped out from under them is probably how most of us would react too. So, no matter how much I disliked the way the characters were scripted in this movie, I think most of us would be struggling if we were cut off from technology and information that are part of our everyday life and even people who do invest time, energy and resources into prepping would not be immune from all the emotions and reactions that make us human. We would all be struggling to make sense of the world if things started to fall apart in a massive catastrophe and chaos replaced our normal everyday routines.
None of us can escape being mere mortals – that’s the big takeaway.
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