NO THANKS, I’M STILL SOCIAL DISTANCING: Enter the Barbie Longhouse.

Spoiler alert: Lots of spoilers abound in this review. Beware!

I walked out of the Barbie movie stunned and in disbelief. Hollywood darling Greta Gerwig, the scowling girlboss writer-director of this guaranteed smash-hit, has somehow made the first movie explicitly set inside the Longhouse.

And she did it totally by accident.

What a time to be alive!

The Longhouse Dreamhouse

If you are still confused about what the “longhouse” is, the Barbie movie is here to set you straight.

To Greta Gerwig and her heavily longhoused life partner and cowriter Noah Baumbach, the feminist Longhouse is good, actually. It’s the only thing keeping men—and Ken—in their place. Greta and her doll-alter-ego are still, always, forever, fighting the mythological patriarchy from the privilege and safety of their Dreamhouses.
She seems totally oblivious of the fact that in modern-day Hollywood, just like in Barbieland, girls rule. Men, and Kens, are firmly in the backseat. Ms. Gerwig and her girlboss sisterhood are riding high.

Gerwig is the most in-demand writer of the last decade. And yet—she is also somehow the victim of the patriarchy. This movie is her great Airing of the Grievances.

* * * * * * * *

The last scene is the newly human Barbie, in Santa Monica, wearing Birkenstocks instead of high heels, arriving at a doctor’s office. The receptionist asks her who she’s there to see. Barbie, now calling herself Barbara Handler, says with a gleeful smile, “My gynecologist!”
Cut, roll credits.

Gynocracy, take a bow!

In another accidentally based twist, what makes Barbie a woman is having a vagina—paging Matt Walsh!

In the sequel, Depo-Provera Barbie and her uparmored sterilized innards will be living her best life on Tinder, going to Burning Man, attending Planned Parenthood rallies and abortion marches.

All she’s missing in the end is her Mattel-branded pink pussy hat.

And as Glenn noted yesterday. “In trying to make Barbie a feminist hero, they made Ken a Chad idol…Call it the Gordon Gekko effect, where the villain gets the most memorable lines. Or maybe the Colonel Jessup effect.” I saw Oppenheimer yesterday, and was amused by the number of women — and a few men — dressed in pink on their way to see Barbie. I’ll be curious to see what its next weeks of business are like.

As for Oppenheimer, the scenes set at Los Alamos are riveting, the Trinity explosion spectacular, and spectacularly loud, and the various show trial scenes a bit numbing as they shifted from color to black and white, and ran long after the A-bomb explosion, deliberately making it anti-climactic, a very Kubrickian choice. As Kubrick once told an interviewer, “if you end a story with somebody achieving his aim it always seems to me to have a kind of incompleteness about it, because that almost seems to be the beginning of another story. One of the things I like most about John Ford is the anticlimax endings — anticlimax upon anticlimax and you just get a feeling that you are seeing life and you accept the thing.”