In 2023 alone, right-wingers have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince their viewers that everything from beer to Hershey’s candy bars are disastrous harbingers of “wokeness.” Their latest target is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, which has the audacity to include queer and trans cast members, and to make the wild observation that the patriarchy isn’t great, actually.
The latest conservative commentator to stoke panic about literal Barbie dolls? None other than wannabe screenwriter Ben Shapiro, who attempted to “destroy” the Barbie movie in a 43-minute review posted to his YouTube channel.
On Friday, Shapiro took to Twitter to announce that his producers had “dragged” him to see Barbie, which he described as a “flaming garbage heap of a film” and “one of the most woke movies I have ever seen.” He also shared a photo of himself standing in front of the poster in a fitted black T-shirt and pants, which happens to be the exact outfit that Ryan Gosling’s Ken wears during the musical number “I’m Just Ken.” Even haters like to cosplay, I guess.
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His actual review doesn’t get off to a much stronger start. In an attempt to cash in on the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Shapiro opens the video by holding a toy bomb and a Barbie doll. He tosses the Barbie over his shoulder at a trash can and, after seemingly missing his shot, jump cuts to the Barbie in the trash can as he prepares to light a match.
For a someone who once had aspirations of screenwriting, and who now produces right-wing films, it’s ironic how many inaccuracies there are in Shapiro’s Barbie meltdown. He repeatedly claims that the movie’s target audience is exclusively moms and their “eight-year-old” daughters, even though film is rated PG-13 for “suggestive references and brief language.”
He also goes on to claim that “all the Kens are gay,” which sadly isn’t true, although the recalled Earring Magic Ken and “Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken dolls — who are popularly regarded as queer-coded — do show up in brief cameos. He even gets Gosling’s Ken’s job wrong, claiming that he’s a lifeguard when he clearly states in the movie that his job is “just beach.”
But hey, maybe Shapiro was too busy freaking out about trans actress Hari Nef’s role as Doctor Barbie to notice. He attempts to mock Nef by claiming that her voice is deeper than his — which, by the way, is true of many cis and trans women — and that Ken is “victimized” by briefly flirting with her.
He also complains about the “unrealistic notion” that a Black Barbie (played by Insecure creator Issa Rae) is president at the same time the United States’ real-life vice president is a Black woman, the assertion that the real world is patriarchal, and that the Supreme Court in Barbie Land is entirely comprised of women.
Most damningly, Shapiro sets himself up by unintentionally echoing the Barbie movie’s own satire about gender roles and our culture’s deeply ingrained misogyny. At one point, he whines that a lot of men “are husbands and fathers, many of us have daughters,” which sounds a whole lot like Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO character defensively calling himself “the son of a mother and the nephew of a female aunt.” He also expresses doubts that moms taking their daughters to Barbie could understand its references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Godfather, when the movie itself jokes about how men often mansplain these classic films to women (not to mention, Barbie was made by a woman who also happens to be a mom).
Shapiro can complain about Barbie all he wants, but if you’re a 39-year-old man lighting Barbies on fire for views, we clearly have fundamentally different world views. To paraphrase the movie’s poster, he’s just Ben!
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