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Bethany Black

I can understand why some men got so angry at the Barbie movie, she undermines their whole worldview when she tells Ken “you are not the car that you drive, you are not the contents of your wallet” nope, that was Tyler Durden in Fight Club. No she says “you are not your girlfriend, you are not your house”. Both movies have the same message about toxic masculinity

Most people who love that feminist classic Fight Club seem to have forgotten the second hour of the film, where all the lost men replace their life as a mindless automaton in a system designed to repress them, with life as a mindless automaton in a system designed to repress them by a charismatic leader, where the main character literally has to kill the toxic man that he has become.
Both Fight Club and Barbie make the point that patriarchy is terrible for men.

@BethanyBlack genuine 10/10 take, it is as correct as it is going to *incense* the people who deserve to be incensed by it

@stavvers been thinking about it a lot and there are so many parallels, Project Mayhem is pretty much the same as the Barbies’ plan. I’m prepared to say if you liked Fight Club and didn’t like Barbie then you didn’t understand Fight Club

@BethanyBlack @stavvers I would really like to see those as a double feature. Barbie Fight Club! 100% serious.

@mjibrower @BethanyBlack @stavvers Except no one would ever be able to tell anyone about it...

@BethanyBlack
I know far too many men that unironically idolize Tyler and completely missed the point of that movie.
@stavvers

@GrayGooGirl @BethanyBlack @stavvers A Tyler Durden pfp is a red flag that can be seen from space.

@GrayGooGirl @BethanyBlack @stavvers right wingers media literacy competency challenge (impossible)

@GrayGooGirl This. Precisely. And they are not able to do that with Barbie, I assume.

@BethanyBlack @stavvers

@feministmom @BethanyBlack @stavvers I'd bet anything there was a meeting where some film execs actually tried to pitch a Ken sequel.

@BethanyBlack @stavvers you’ve convinced me to that I must check out the barbie movie, which I was planning to ignore because something something capitalism.

@AlexanderMars the reason you were going to avoid it is a big thing they address in the movie

@BethanyBlack okay now I’m really curious, I guess it’s going to be interesting at what level my friends comprehend the subtext. The comparison to fight club hits very close to home, I have too many friends who took up MMA after watching it, and that’s not remotely what that movie/book was about. Don’t get me started on that one friend who still wants to start a soap company, I don’t have the bandwidth to unpack that.

@BethanyBlack sorry for this ridiculous deep cut reply, but I finally got to watch the Barbie movie(my daughter gives zero fucks about anything that’s not dinosaur related) and wanted to say I’m so glad for your recommendation to watch. A far better film than than what you’d expect Hollywood to deliver, particularly about a doll.

@BethanyBlack Fight Club is my second favorite movie ever. Now I’m even more stoked to see Barbie.

@LalaKron @BethanyBlack Barbie: Fight Club for Girls

Nothing against "Barbenheimer", but I would love to see this become the takeaway. 😸

@BethanyBlack@mastodon.social @stavvers@masto.ai I haven’t seen Barbie yet but I know I’ll love it – if it has messages like “Blerks, you’re not your sporting achievements, you are not your educational accomplishments, and most of all – you are not what you fucking know, so stop trying to shoehorn what you know into the surrounding world thinking it’ll validate your and everyone will worship you”

…Ahem
We were talking about technology weren’t we? I’ve lost track

@BethanyBlack @stavvers I still think about my friend in college who quite sincerely explained to me that the message of Fight Club was that men really did need to go punch each other a lot to get back in touch with their natural masculine urges, and also maybe do some terrorism.

@fade @BethanyBlack @stavvers I saw about 3/4 of it and could never figure out why the camera was following any of these people.

Then again I usually feel the same way about football...

@stavvers @BethanyBlack

Yes, but, but, but - have you considered that, I, as a Male Person, I can acksually become Tyler Durden, by merely changing my lifestyle significantly, not caring what people think about me (including my family) despite huge societal pushback, ignoring their comments on my completely unrealistic and unsustainable diet, and taking significant amounts of body-altering drugs to achieve the ideal figur...

oh.

@BethanyBlack I saw that movie when I was 11 and what immediately stuck with me was that Edward Norton's character was perfectly happy and functional going to a support group to just cry. It's everything that comes after that that makes him go off the rails.

I don't think many of my compatriots took that message, however.

@Zeb_Larson

He wasn't perfectly happy. Tyler was also at the support groups.

@Ambigramart @Zeb_Larson No, Tyler only showed up when Norton could no longer cry. Then his insomnia came back & Tyler showed up.

@madopal @Zeb_Larson

I think the problem was Marla. Although Tyler Durden appears six times before he and Norton's character officially meet.

@Ambigramart @Zeb_Larson Correct. Marla's appearance correlates directly, it exposes Norton's hypocrisy in going to support groups he's faking about. But the original point is still valid:
When Norton could cry it out, he was fine.

@BethanyBlack People are dumb. To this day, there are people that read "You should join the military!" out of Starship Troopers. Which is, like, the complete opposite take.

@ProfezzorDarke yep, oppositional decoding is a well known phenomena in all media

@BethanyBlack @ProfezzorDarke Starship Troopers is really weird to misinterpret. The last minutes are basically the director yelling at the audience "these weren't even real events in the universe of the movie, just a shitty propaganda film for recruiting more cannon fodder".

@cygnathreadbare @BethanyBlack See, this is why text interpretation is so important in school...

@ProfezzorDarke @BethanyBlack The book was a very weird read.

I read it around the same time I read 1984 & Brave New World and it seemed to me to be an exhibit of a similarly profoundly flawed society.

Never saw the movies for any of those.

@BethanyBlack but if I have a nice car & money, girls will like me!

@BethanyBlack I think some dudes were distracted by the punching and the blowing stuff up.

@BethanyBlack Yep, it's why we live shorter lives.

I thought this was the basis of MRA, that patriarchal and toxic systems hurt men. Kinda backdooring men in that mindset into feminism, by showing them the part hurting them.

But then I was set straight, shown not to make assumptions.

But what if we did that thing I thought it was at first yeah?

@BethanyBlack I legit read "Breakfast Club" initially, and I was really confused by your post, haha! Coffee helped 😋

@BethanyBlack

After watching Fight Club for the first time, i watched it again to try to find all of the easter eggs that Durden had placed in the film. :D

After going through it five times, i realised that it was an excel;lent film about demonic possession by a demon who really understood the modern world.

The Exorcist showed a demon that possessed one person, but Fight Club showed a demon who changed the conditions of the society, so that more potential hosts would become available. :D

@BethanyBlack Yep. There's a reason I'm never working in a team without women again.

@BethanyBlack I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about that thing we aren’t supposed to talk about.

@BethanyBlack

I've heard this about fight club, and I'm quite happy to continue giving it a miss. Don't need to fill my head with visions of violence for days. For the same message Barbie was a delight to watch, and just left me with visions of well choreographed musical numbers.

@BethanyBlack the people in fight club fought against the oppressive system, though.

Sure their own system was repressive, but it wasn't meaningless - the movie ended with hundreds of millions of people being freed from the repression that was loans, which was achieved by blowing up all banking institutions in the country. They achieved this without hurting anyone and by convincing each link in the chain merely through word of mouth completely peacefully.

@BethanyBlack Fight Club is pretty strong proof that poor media literacy extends to all forms of Media, and you just can't count of people understanding anything no matter how obvious the message is.

@BethanyBlack Who knew the Barbie Movie would have a parallel with Fight Club? That makes me happy for some reason.

@BethanyBlack spot on!

There’s definitely a kind of Poe’s Law with Fight Club where people will get exactly the wrong message from it if it suits them.

@BethanyBlack
Friend described it as a dytopian flick. He loved it. I may have to, too after reading your post. Thanks!

@DNA It’s stayed with me since I watched it, and it is probably one of my top five films of all time

@BethanyBlack

I know this is off-topic but I believe Ferris in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is Cameron's Tyler Durdon.
Cameron has invented Ferris to cope with life. Ferris isn't real.

@Ambigramart @dtauvdiodr @BethanyBlack The flip side of this is that Fight Club really could have used a Principal Rooney-type character

@BethanyBlack The issue that the movie brought out the values between the sexes. Rather than state the obvious of Mattel selling a doll that in itself showed how females were programmed in life to have material status that evolved to changing roles that at the time little girls only could dream of doing. Toxic males felt threatened then as they showed now.

@BethanyBlack They wouldn't be complaining if Hasbro made a live-action GI Joe movie.

@IveyJanette there are already 3 GI Joe live action movies. I'm not under the impression they're very good.

@rezzyreksya Some studio will inevitably try to make a big-budget one. And it won't even come close to the Barbie movie in success.

While I think the movie is fine, I don't like the misrepresentation of the complaints. The problem is an oversimplification of the end.
(Spoiler)
Barbieland is a single gender dominated society. Ken rebels against that and Barbie restores order, all is well. The message is, "Society dominated by men is bad, society dominated by women is good." That's not at all what the movie is trying to say, but if you're going in ready to find a fault it's real easy to paint a picture.