Greta Gerwig’s Barbie came out of its record-breaking opening weekend with even more impressive stats, breaking The Dark Knight’s Monday box office record for Warner Bros. With widespread acclaim oozing from the majority of those who actually watched the film in theaters — take CinemaBlend’s own review of the Margot Robbie comedy, for instance — one might think it has earned universal goodwill to this point. But that’s certainly not the case for a subsection of the population who has been up in arms about the film’s feminist views and the highly satirical take on patriarchal society, and The View moderator Whoopi Goldberg clapped back at such offbase criticisms.
A couple of days after paying respects to The View’s supportive late co-creator Bill Geddie, the women of The View shifted their focus to Barbie fever, showing a montage of hyperbolic criticism in clips from Fox News, Ben Shapiro and more, basically claiming Margot Robbie’s character and all of her Barbieland friends are here to destroy America, all younger generations, male masculinity, etc. Whoopi Goldberg followed up the montage in a bamboozled state, and voiced her disbelief that this is the movie garnering the most hate from overtly politicized crowds. In her words:
It’s a movie! It’s a movie about a doll! I thought y’all would be happy: she has no genitalia, so there’s no sex involved. Ken has no genitalia, so he can’t be… It’s a doll movie. The kids know it’s colorful and it’s Barbie. They haven’t lived through what the adults have lived through. So when they’re seeing this, that’s not how they’re looking at it. The kids are looking at it as a Barbie movie. You guys, I want you all to tell your daughters why you’re not taking them to see the Barbie movie. I want you to explain to them what’s ‘wrong’ with Barbie.
To her point, I can’t tell you the number of highly influential and meaningful movies I saw as a kid where I came out of it with only the most surface-level reading, and only grasped the grander notions when I was a bit older. Sure, some of the more pointed moments involving Ryan Gosling’s extremely insecure Ken will seep into some brainscapes, but by and large, the vibrant colors, constant music and giddy vibes successfully surround the film’s poignant message without bludgeoning viewers over the head with it. (And even if it did, there’s nothing wrong with its messaging.)
Beyond airing out her grievances with the minor backlash against the Warner Bros. hit, Whoopi Goldberg showed off her own doll-infused fashion choice in the form of clear platform heels with Barbie heads inside.
I'm admittedly amused at the thought of how Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie and the rest of her squad would react to seeing someone wearing those shoes. I think even beyond the horror of seeing the disembodied faces, the tiny size of the heads would also spark many sanity-testing nightmares.
Goldberg's co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin also spoke to the idea that Shapiro and similar critiques were getting too much hype, making it seem as if their voices spoke for the many, while claiming that she hasn't seen similar reactions on a personal level. In her words:
Every girlfriend of mine, Republican and Democrat, lined up to see it. There were memes. People were dressing up to go see it. It’s fun, Greta Gerwig’s brilliant.
In reacting to Barbie's monumental success, director and co-writer Greta Gerwig spoke to the backlash, telling the New York Times there's a "lot of passion," and that she thinks the movie invites anyone and everyone into its story without specifically aiming to serve one kind of person or another.
If even Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas can smile approvingly after being the butt of Barbie's kindhearted ribbing, it shouldn't be hard for others to do the same, even if their '90s smash hit wasn't used in the movie.
