Conservatives Are Getting Barbie Wrong

A confession, upfront: I probably would never have seen Barbie had it not come out the same weekend as Oppenheimer, thereby allowing me to do the full “Barbenheimer” last Thursday night. My review of Oppenheimer has already appeared. Of the Barbehneimer experience itself, I will say little more other than that it was exhausting.

But exhaustion is not why it has taken a few days for me to assess Barbie fully. It is, rather, that Barbie is far less straightforward than Oppenheimer, with multiple interpretive and thematic layers. Oppenheimer is not an uncomplicated film, but Barbie is itself a highly sophisticated one — and one that many conservatives are almost certainly getting wrong.