I’ve posted a two part review of Barbie on Twitter, and a review of Oppenheimer. As I explain in the Oppenheimer review, it feels wrong to pair them, given the transcendent importance of that film and the silliness of its “rival.” That being said, Rob and I have been thinking about both, and we’re here to entertain you, so we’re discussing them together. My Oppenheimer review nonetheless makes it clear that if you’re going to see one film, it should be that one. Here’s an excerpt.
Aug 1, 2023·edited Aug 1, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
Regarding the skepticism about the portrayal of Kitty Oppenheimer's testimony at the hearing, note that many (maybe most) of her lines were taken almost verbatim from the actual transcript. She wasn't just a housewife: She had a degree from the University of Pennsylvania and was doing graduate work at UCLA when she met Robert Oppenheimer.
The discussion around 40-45min made me think of old 4chan /fit/ memes about high testosterone men preferring more cushion, as you put it. Hanania confirmed high T.
The Barbie movie sounds like nothing new. In the social narrative propagated by progressives, the most valuable thing a person can do is self-identify as a victim. The second most valuable thing is to adopt an identity as an activist on behalf of some victim group (and the more creative the imagined catagory of victimhood the better). It should be noted that victims of circumstance (eg people born with disabilities, etc.) are not very noteworthy. The victims of social attitudes are the holy grail because those victims require there to be oppressors. And the unspoken agenda of the whole movement is hate, blame, division. And they’re firing on all cylinders.
Don't you think that Oppenheimer is anti-woman? The women in it are temptresses, substance abusers, distractions, mentally unstable, and one is a terrible mother. There's only one female scientist and her biggest line is talking about female reproductive organs. that's kind of messed up, right?
The real Oppenheimer had a warped view of women for sure. He was a womaniser, even sleeping with his friends' wives. He had relationships with heavily depressed and unstable people. He and his wife were terrible parents, she suffered terribly from the loneliness of the Manhattan Project and they did end up leaving their child in the care of others. Apparently she wanted a career and felt unfulfilled with being a mother, and she fell into an alcoholic depression. I also would be surprised to hear that female scientists played a large role in the wartime project back in a time before the women's liberation movement. The movie... showed that reality?
Is the way that the time, and Oppenheimer himself, treated women messed up? Yeah. But it's less messed up than the hundreds of thousands dead in Japan. There's a difference between showing injustice and creating it.
I think Barbie was an ok movie. It made me laugh. I enjoyed the spectacle.
I agree that the feminism felt very old, the kind of things people thought me in the 90ies. It didn't spoil much for me since it was so juvenile, which kind of fitted the movie.
I think the movie had too many threads, and too many scenes that were ok individually but didn't harmonize when put together. Biggest sinner was the executives going to Barbieland. What was the point of this plot thread again? The ending didn't connect with the rest of the movie. What was the point of the Kens fighting, but then becoming friends again through the power of friendship and something, leaving us back were we started? All of these felt like great ideas for scenes ("Mattel having a heart-shaped board!", "Deep existential ending!", "Giant Ken beach fight!") that were just woven into the movie without a foundation in the main plot. Kill your darlings would have been more appropriate.
I think the biggest strength of the movie is that it poses some interesting questions:
1. What if there was a society where women did everything important and the men were all unimportant?
2. What if a person was just a side character in someone else's story?
3. What is patriarchy? How was it introduced? How can we end it?
4. How does society function without sex? Without violence? How does a person who doesn't care for sex or relationships find meaning?
5. What is femininity? What is a powerful women?
But then the metaphors are butchered and we get the most boring, vanilla, politically correct aesops:
1. Barbieland declares that there will be equality (eventually)! (But wait: isn’t the point of Barbieland that Barbie is in charge? Isn’t the Kens inferior by design?)
2. Ken should find himself! (But wait: Isn’t the point of Ken to complement Barbie?)
3. Patriarchy just happened by magic, and it’ll stop when women realizes that men are putting conflicting demands on them (the "double bind" suppression technique, so 90ies!). (But wait, haven’t we moved beyond 90ies pop feminism? At least the horse symbolism was nice.)
4. Nah, we’ll just do the setup and then don’t mention it again.
5. A powerful women is just like a man. The only people who are feminine are Kens.
It feels like there's a good movie hiding somewhere in it, if it just had dared to explore it's metaphors a bit more. I'll go watch the Shapiro review now and see if it has some insight. EDIT: I agree with Shapiro's painpoints but I still found the movie largely enjoyable.
The problem is that the person directing it is a vapid scatterbrained millennial woman who got given basically carte blanche by Mattel, and from reading her interviews they kind of just winged it during the production on a scene by scene basis. It reminded me very much of interviews with Taika Waititi making the last Thor movie but with (even more) feminism. "Let's just do whatever we find funny or makes us cry in the moment." Maybe that's a particularly female way of making movies. More about feelings and intuition than any kind of logic or consistency. I guess that's not neccesarily bad but might be worth noting.
1. Women weren't really 'side characters', they did the important labor of maintaining the house (now obviated by postwar labor-saving devices, probably not a coincidence feminism arose soon after) and raising kids. I won't see the movie, but from what I hear we don't see the Kens raising kids, do we?
2. Pretty common for spinoffs.
3. Generally a system where men hold most of the important positions and authority, from what I can gather. Well, the introduction is lost in the mists of time, but probably due to differences in mean strength and reproductive investment, since it evolved in just about every state society we're aware of. As for ending it--why should we? And if it's gone, let's bring it back. Looks like someone's going to rule, might as well be us ;)
4. Without sex, it dies off eventually. Without violence--well, maybe someday we'll find out. Find meaning without sex or relationships--most premodern state societies had some kind of priesthood or monastic role, this one's been around for a while. Not sure about tribes, bands, or chiefdoms--did shamans often marry?
5. You can argue this one to death. Christians and feminists will give you completely different answers.
I am a Gen z woman whose friend group is almost entirely made up of women who have been brainwashed into this nonsensical iteration of feminism. My friends that saw Barbieland (I haven’t) said they were disappointed with it, but couldn’t articulate why. It’s interesting to witness people be let down by their own reductive worldview, yet unable to conclude that it might be because such worldview is wrong. I guess that’s the power of ideology. It would be entertaining if this belief system wasn’t so destructive.
I saw it with my daughter. There were about 300 others there, mostly young females. I was the one who laughed the most and sometimes I was the only one doing so in the theatre.
I can’t imagine a potential sequence being a success because it seems like the film did not appeal to the kids.
Some of the feminist stuff must have been tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecating unless American feminists are on another planet. One of the moralizing speeches included a line something like “we should not have to pretend to be bad at sports just to please men” 😂
It seemed like only the patriarchs knew how to have fun. I wish there were 10x more montages of the bros boring it up.
Anyways, I’m often annoyed by ham-fisted political messages in films, but nothing in the Barbie movie irked me really. The speech by that Latina mother was so self-pitying and pathetic it was accidentally based (like the rest of the film, really).
Barbie could be heavy-handed at times, especially when it leaned into an outdated feminism (I couldn't help but feel that the all-male Mattel board was something of a parody of the melodramatic pretenses of contemporary feminism, but maybe I'm being generous), yet the film was robustly entertaining. It was funny throughout and sincere.
I seem to recall that you once wrote that some anti-abortion religious conservatives seem to hate women. I don’t know if protecting children (that’s how they see it) means they hate women, but try talking with some feminists about the stark difference in workplace fatalities between men and women. I’m sure some care but I’ll bet many are indifferent because they think women are somehow worse off overall. It’s kind of like they hate men.
Seems pretty obvious to me they do. I used to believe in equality and all that and tried to be a Nice Feminist Guy back in my teens, but after a while I realized they just hated me. They demand consent and then change the rules to make it impossible to determine (and retroactively changeable), they drive women into men's jobs but leave women's alone, they've ripped away everything that benefited men in the law but left the draft intact, they decided in the last few years they were going to believe all accusations because how could you traumatize a survivor by questioning her story?
Thirty years ago my dad said they were angry straight women (who will always exist, given the vicissisitudes of love) or lesbians (for whom men are useless and actively dangerous--a lot have some kind of abuse history). I rolled my eyes at him. You were right, Dad. (Hey, you forgot bi, but I think they go with the straights here.)
It's kind of why I think we need a specific MRA movement (and I know Richard disagrees with me on manliness grounds); most men are not the achievers and winners, by definition. "Work on yourself and get money and muscles" is good advice individually (I am not denying this, and exercise is healthy) but it doesn't scale. Most men are average and by definition will always be average; what about them?
I should also point out that although Richard refers contemptuously to “loser men”, he wants more loser men in the multi-millions via non-white immigration. It seems that his non-judgmental Darwinian mode only applies to non-whites (good genes are just good luck). In addition, on this issue, he’s happy to align with effeminate woke cosmopolitans who want to turn America brown as part of their guilt-ridden, anti-racist agenda (or, in some cases, as part of an ethnic agenda to diminish white power). In essence, effeminate males have won the day (for now).
Yes, female privilege must be ended. Richard is a rare bird himself: a combination of manliness and high intelligence. But these traits don’t coalesce very often. He prizes the cosmopolitan elite (minus the woke part) but it is heavily loaded with effete males, who support female privilege. He wants to straddle both camps but the manly camp is not the cosmopolitan camp. He dumps on both when they are wrong but seems to overlook the extent of female privilege. We now have a collective action problem imposed on men: if a few protest female privilege, their heads are quickly chopped off (metaphorically speaking) by the feminized cosmopolitan elite. Such is the insanity of Wokeism.
There are plenty of very bright manly men; they found companies and are the few who still rise to positions of power. They just don't expend a huge amount of effort looking smart, and aren't eager to rock the boat because they're doing too well from the current system. I'd argue *intellectualism* is unmasculine--not necessarily bad, you need scientists and artists, but they are different personality types. To some degree feminists executed the old divide-and-conquer.
Richard's an odd combination of traits, it's part of what makes him so interesting to read. The conservative side really does have a huge intellectual capital problem. I'm not sure what can be done about it, if anything. I suspect the rural nature of the conservative part of the USA (due to the size of the country), where writing really isn't that useful, probably contributed to it, as did the newness of the country, and once the left took the universities and media not much could be done about conservative anti-intellectualism. But...that may be a problem for the next generation, Zero HP Lovecraft and Precambrian Ped...er, BAP and their buddies.
I think the answer to the collective action problem is to keep pushing at the margins, not give up, raise objections where you can in public, convince men in private, and eventually try to push things in the appropriate direction.
Regarding the skepticism about the portrayal of Kitty Oppenheimer's testimony at the hearing, note that many (maybe most) of her lines were taken almost verbatim from the actual transcript. She wasn't just a housewife: She had a degree from the University of Pennsylvania and was doing graduate work at UCLA when she met Robert Oppenheimer.
See the beginning of this document, especially pages 18-23 here: https://www.osti.gov/includes/opennet/includes/Oppenheimer%20hearings/Vol%20XI%20Oppenheimer.pdf
From another session of the hearing, page 27-28: https://www.osti.gov/includes/opennet/includes/Oppenheimer%20hearings/Vol%20XVII%20Oppenheimer.pdf
That’s good info, thanks.
The discussion around 40-45min made me think of old 4chan /fit/ memes about high testosterone men preferring more cushion, as you put it. Hanania confirmed high T.
The Barbie movie sounds like nothing new. In the social narrative propagated by progressives, the most valuable thing a person can do is self-identify as a victim. The second most valuable thing is to adopt an identity as an activist on behalf of some victim group (and the more creative the imagined catagory of victimhood the better). It should be noted that victims of circumstance (eg people born with disabilities, etc.) are not very noteworthy. The victims of social attitudes are the holy grail because those victims require there to be oppressors. And the unspoken agenda of the whole movement is hate, blame, division. And they’re firing on all cylinders.
Don't you think that Oppenheimer is anti-woman? The women in it are temptresses, substance abusers, distractions, mentally unstable, and one is a terrible mother. There's only one female scientist and her biggest line is talking about female reproductive organs. that's kind of messed up, right?
The real Oppenheimer had a warped view of women for sure. He was a womaniser, even sleeping with his friends' wives. He had relationships with heavily depressed and unstable people. He and his wife were terrible parents, she suffered terribly from the loneliness of the Manhattan Project and they did end up leaving their child in the care of others. Apparently she wanted a career and felt unfulfilled with being a mother, and she fell into an alcoholic depression. I also would be surprised to hear that female scientists played a large role in the wartime project back in a time before the women's liberation movement. The movie... showed that reality?
Is the way that the time, and Oppenheimer himself, treated women messed up? Yeah. But it's less messed up than the hundreds of thousands dead in Japan. There's a difference between showing injustice and creating it.
I think Barbie was an ok movie. It made me laugh. I enjoyed the spectacle.
I agree that the feminism felt very old, the kind of things people thought me in the 90ies. It didn't spoil much for me since it was so juvenile, which kind of fitted the movie.
I think the movie had too many threads, and too many scenes that were ok individually but didn't harmonize when put together. Biggest sinner was the executives going to Barbieland. What was the point of this plot thread again? The ending didn't connect with the rest of the movie. What was the point of the Kens fighting, but then becoming friends again through the power of friendship and something, leaving us back were we started? All of these felt like great ideas for scenes ("Mattel having a heart-shaped board!", "Deep existential ending!", "Giant Ken beach fight!") that were just woven into the movie without a foundation in the main plot. Kill your darlings would have been more appropriate.
I think the biggest strength of the movie is that it poses some interesting questions:
1. What if there was a society where women did everything important and the men were all unimportant?
2. What if a person was just a side character in someone else's story?
3. What is patriarchy? How was it introduced? How can we end it?
4. How does society function without sex? Without violence? How does a person who doesn't care for sex or relationships find meaning?
5. What is femininity? What is a powerful women?
But then the metaphors are butchered and we get the most boring, vanilla, politically correct aesops:
1. Barbieland declares that there will be equality (eventually)! (But wait: isn’t the point of Barbieland that Barbie is in charge? Isn’t the Kens inferior by design?)
2. Ken should find himself! (But wait: Isn’t the point of Ken to complement Barbie?)
3. Patriarchy just happened by magic, and it’ll stop when women realizes that men are putting conflicting demands on them (the "double bind" suppression technique, so 90ies!). (But wait, haven’t we moved beyond 90ies pop feminism? At least the horse symbolism was nice.)
4. Nah, we’ll just do the setup and then don’t mention it again.
5. A powerful women is just like a man. The only people who are feminine are Kens.
It feels like there's a good movie hiding somewhere in it, if it just had dared to explore it's metaphors a bit more. I'll go watch the Shapiro review now and see if it has some insight. EDIT: I agree with Shapiro's painpoints but I still found the movie largely enjoyable.
The problem is that the person directing it is a vapid scatterbrained millennial woman who got given basically carte blanche by Mattel, and from reading her interviews they kind of just winged it during the production on a scene by scene basis. It reminded me very much of interviews with Taika Waititi making the last Thor movie but with (even more) feminism. "Let's just do whatever we find funny or makes us cry in the moment." Maybe that's a particularly female way of making movies. More about feelings and intuition than any kind of logic or consistency. I guess that's not neccesarily bad but might be worth noting.
>they kind of just winged it during the production on a scene by scene basis.
That makes perfect sense.
1. Women weren't really 'side characters', they did the important labor of maintaining the house (now obviated by postwar labor-saving devices, probably not a coincidence feminism arose soon after) and raising kids. I won't see the movie, but from what I hear we don't see the Kens raising kids, do we?
2. Pretty common for spinoffs.
3. Generally a system where men hold most of the important positions and authority, from what I can gather. Well, the introduction is lost in the mists of time, but probably due to differences in mean strength and reproductive investment, since it evolved in just about every state society we're aware of. As for ending it--why should we? And if it's gone, let's bring it back. Looks like someone's going to rule, might as well be us ;)
4. Without sex, it dies off eventually. Without violence--well, maybe someday we'll find out. Find meaning without sex or relationships--most premodern state societies had some kind of priesthood or monastic role, this one's been around for a while. Not sure about tribes, bands, or chiefdoms--did shamans often marry?
5. You can argue this one to death. Christians and feminists will give you completely different answers.
Your answers are about as boring as the ones given by the movie. But I'd give that you likely didn't have a $100 million budget.
Sure, but you didn't pay 15 bucks for them. ;)
I am a Gen z woman whose friend group is almost entirely made up of women who have been brainwashed into this nonsensical iteration of feminism. My friends that saw Barbieland (I haven’t) said they were disappointed with it, but couldn’t articulate why. It’s interesting to witness people be let down by their own reductive worldview, yet unable to conclude that it might be because such worldview is wrong. I guess that’s the power of ideology. It would be entertaining if this belief system wasn’t so destructive.
And except for the Barbie with the suspiciously large Adam’s apple, trans ideology wasn’t part of the film. That was refreshing.
I saw it with my daughter. There were about 300 others there, mostly young females. I was the one who laughed the most and sometimes I was the only one doing so in the theatre.
I can’t imagine a potential sequence being a success because it seems like the film did not appeal to the kids.
Some of the feminist stuff must have been tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecating unless American feminists are on another planet. One of the moralizing speeches included a line something like “we should not have to pretend to be bad at sports just to please men” 😂
It seemed like only the patriarchs knew how to have fun. I wish there were 10x more montages of the bros boring it up.
Spellcheck: the bros broing it up.
Anyways, I’m often annoyed by ham-fisted political messages in films, but nothing in the Barbie movie irked me really. The speech by that Latina mother was so self-pitying and pathetic it was accidentally based (like the rest of the film, really).
Barbie could be heavy-handed at times, especially when it leaned into an outdated feminism (I couldn't help but feel that the all-male Mattel board was something of a parody of the melodramatic pretenses of contemporary feminism, but maybe I'm being generous), yet the film was robustly entertaining. It was funny throughout and sincere.
Please just give up your written opinion of the movies and or your opinion about Henderson’s opinion. Don’t make up listen to a conversation..
I seem to recall that you once wrote that some anti-abortion religious conservatives seem to hate women. I don’t know if protecting children (that’s how they see it) means they hate women, but try talking with some feminists about the stark difference in workplace fatalities between men and women. I’m sure some care but I’ll bet many are indifferent because they think women are somehow worse off overall. It’s kind of like they hate men.
Seems pretty obvious to me they do. I used to believe in equality and all that and tried to be a Nice Feminist Guy back in my teens, but after a while I realized they just hated me. They demand consent and then change the rules to make it impossible to determine (and retroactively changeable), they drive women into men's jobs but leave women's alone, they've ripped away everything that benefited men in the law but left the draft intact, they decided in the last few years they were going to believe all accusations because how could you traumatize a survivor by questioning her story?
Thirty years ago my dad said they were angry straight women (who will always exist, given the vicissisitudes of love) or lesbians (for whom men are useless and actively dangerous--a lot have some kind of abuse history). I rolled my eyes at him. You were right, Dad. (Hey, you forgot bi, but I think they go with the straights here.)
It's kind of why I think we need a specific MRA movement (and I know Richard disagrees with me on manliness grounds); most men are not the achievers and winners, by definition. "Work on yourself and get money and muscles" is good advice individually (I am not denying this, and exercise is healthy) but it doesn't scale. Most men are average and by definition will always be average; what about them?
I should also point out that although Richard refers contemptuously to “loser men”, he wants more loser men in the multi-millions via non-white immigration. It seems that his non-judgmental Darwinian mode only applies to non-whites (good genes are just good luck). In addition, on this issue, he’s happy to align with effeminate woke cosmopolitans who want to turn America brown as part of their guilt-ridden, anti-racist agenda (or, in some cases, as part of an ethnic agenda to diminish white power). In essence, effeminate males have won the day (for now).
Yes, female privilege must be ended. Richard is a rare bird himself: a combination of manliness and high intelligence. But these traits don’t coalesce very often. He prizes the cosmopolitan elite (minus the woke part) but it is heavily loaded with effete males, who support female privilege. He wants to straddle both camps but the manly camp is not the cosmopolitan camp. He dumps on both when they are wrong but seems to overlook the extent of female privilege. We now have a collective action problem imposed on men: if a few protest female privilege, their heads are quickly chopped off (metaphorically speaking) by the feminized cosmopolitan elite. Such is the insanity of Wokeism.
There are plenty of very bright manly men; they found companies and are the few who still rise to positions of power. They just don't expend a huge amount of effort looking smart, and aren't eager to rock the boat because they're doing too well from the current system. I'd argue *intellectualism* is unmasculine--not necessarily bad, you need scientists and artists, but they are different personality types. To some degree feminists executed the old divide-and-conquer.
Richard's an odd combination of traits, it's part of what makes him so interesting to read. The conservative side really does have a huge intellectual capital problem. I'm not sure what can be done about it, if anything. I suspect the rural nature of the conservative part of the USA (due to the size of the country), where writing really isn't that useful, probably contributed to it, as did the newness of the country, and once the left took the universities and media not much could be done about conservative anti-intellectualism. But...that may be a problem for the next generation, Zero HP Lovecraft and Precambrian Ped...er, BAP and their buddies.
I think the answer to the collective action problem is to keep pushing at the margins, not give up, raise objections where you can in public, convince men in private, and eventually try to push things in the appropriate direction.