August Bonus: WTW DESTROY Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Barbie

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke. All right, folks, this is something that I am glad I thought of starting to do because on not only Where There's Woke, not only this show, but Serious Inquiries Only, the bonus monthly stuff that we're doing is so often like labor intensive, super fun, interesting, two plus hours of content, and that's why I thought of like, oh, I should share, you know, the first maybe half of it, even like a full nice length of a bit, uh, to non-patrons, uh, so that at least even if you can't become a patron, you get, you know, a good chunk of it, uh, and then if you want to become a patron, you get all of it, but I just felt like there was so much good stuff here that I wanted to be on the the main feed.

0:01:26 Thomas: So this is, I think, a little more than half or around half of mine and Lydia's review of Ben Shapiro's review of Barbie. Uh, and it was a lot of fun. This is a movie that we both really liked. And, uh, you know, we get into some, a little bit of personal stuff in this because, uh. The movie was very touching and had some personal implications and stuff. So this is us reviewing Ben Shapiro's review. Uh, hope you enjoy it. If you want to hear the rest of it, the whole thing, go to patreon.com/wherethereswoke. And also I'll add in, we did a bonus episode while we were um, on at our trip because some big news came in, uh, no spoilers, but some big News came in and no, it is not a fourth kid though. That was a very funny joke. It is not, it's not that, uh is show related news.

0:02:11 Thomas: And so patrons got a sneak peek of that too. So all good reasons to go to patreon.com/wherethereswoke plus the ad free shows. If. So here for everybody is a good chunk of our Barbie review of Ben Shapiro. A lot of fun. Hope you enjoy it. Hello and Welcome to Where There's Woke. This Is Episode 7. I'm Thomas Smith and And with me on this one, yet again, my lovely wife, Lydia Smith. How are doing?

0:02:35 Lydia: Pretty good. How are you?

0:02:36 Thomas: Doing well. No, I wasn't playing with my dolls just now. I was ready to go. So today we're gonna take on... We're going to destroy Ben Shapiro destroying the Barbie movie for 43 minutes. And it's because here's the description, which I think makes this very relevant to our program. My producers dragged me. I already, fuck you. I already fuck you, sorry. My producers drag me to see Barbie. We know you're going to do a review of it. What is that for? Is that just like so he can try to pretend like he as a man, an alpha male, was not going to go see Barbie or something?

0:03:12 Thomas: Like, It's okay to just be like, so I watched Barbie in order to review it. Like, that's fine, right? Dragged me to see Barbie, and it was one of the most woke movies I've ever seen. Watch to find out why. So we watched Barbie,

0:03:12 Lydia: Yeah, against his will. Yeah, we did. Yeah, we took the kids.

0:03:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I fucking loved it. Did you feel How about it?

0:03:32 Lydia: I also loved it. It was great. I loved seeing the yellow rollerblades. Brought a lot of nostalgia For me. Um, I felt super 90s. I loved that. Um, and I haven't told you this, but I, you know that sweatshirt that Ryan Gosling wears at the end that says, "I am Knuff um, So Mattel started pre-orders for that, and I definitely bought myself one. Come September, that's what I'll be wearing.

0:03:38 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, nice. I love it. So good. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I really enjoyed it. And also, my um, only experience with Barbies is from my little sister? I think one of the ones we had was rollerblading. I think because that that seemed that familiar to me as well. I think it was like a Barbie and a Ken, maybe, that rollerbladed. I don't know, does that sound familiar?

0:04:00 Lydia: Yeah. Nice, yeah. According to the movie.

0:04:16 Thomas: Oh, I thought that you were saying that was a set you had.

0:04:16 Lydia: No. No. No. I think I had the accessory rollerblades. I don't think I got the Barbie with the rollerblads. I had, um, teacher Barbie, classic. Um, I'm not a teacher, but it fits with like who I was, I think, as a child. Um, and I had gymnast Barbie, that was a big one for me too. I can't remember the rest. I'll have to ask my mom,

0:04:19 Thomas: Hmm. Sure. Oh. I'm pretty sure, like, I just did the classic thing of just taking the clothes off of them, like that was pretty much. I mean, I think every kid does that. I think our kids already do that.

0:04:44 Lydia: Yeah, that's fine. Remember nude blobs. It's fine, yeah.

0:04:48 Thomas: Yeah. Um, we also had, like, a hair, I say we, I think my little sister got a hair growing one, yeah.

0:04:56 Lydia: Really? You had the hair growing one?

0:04:57 Thomas: But it, like, it didn't make sense, or it didn't work. I think she cut it and then it was like ruined instantly. I don't know, no.

0:05:02 Lydia: Oh, yeah, well, I never... Are you sure it was a hair growing ones? Or one that she thought the hair was supposed to grow? Because my sister did that where she thought... She said the commercial showed one of the toys growing its hair, so she cut it, it and it never worked. My mom was really mad.

0:05:10 Thomas: No. It was definitely the hair growing one, and there was a, because I remember, like, kind of seeing, I can kind of envision the, like, hair coming through the head in a way that's supposed to grow, but like we yeah we couldn't really get it to work. And we're just establishing our Barbie credentials here, which I have none, I just, I, do, we're, Barbie's like, like, meaningful to you, like, going into this movie, how did you feel? Was this like, "Oh, you know, I'm gonna go see this movie because I am just, I love Barbie so much," or what? Sure.

0:05:29 Lydia: Kind of disturbing, too.

0:05:47 Lydia: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, it was like I love Greta Gerwig. Right. So I was like, yeah, Greta, Gerwig, Barbie, big fan. For me, I don't think I felt like an intense relationship with Barbie. And I also didn't really have like the, the other side of the coin, right, with like the major conflicted feelings about Barbie and what she meant growing up and some of those body image issues and stuff that I'm sure everybody's very familiar with and how kind of non-inclusive Barbie was for a while. I am sort of that similar demographic, so I didn't really have strong feelings one way or the other, I just thought the movie looked really interesting, really good, love Greta Gerwig's interpretation and spin on things, and, of course, just that 90s nostalgia for me, like the rollerblades, I think, is definitely like a very 90s

0:05:51 Thomas: Greta Gerwig Barbie, yeah, I had that one.

0:06:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:32 Lydia: Thing, isn't it? Or maybe it's like late 80s, but yeah, also just the song "Barbie Girl" and Aqua, and you know, that that played a big part in my life too, so

0:06:37 Thomas: And our kids, I, uh, think, didn't really understand it, they just kind of, Arlo fell asleep eventually. It was super cute, I think I, I think I took a picture of him, I can't remember, I think Phoebe stayed awake yeah Yeah.

0:06:46 Lydia: Arlo fell asleep, yes, Phoebe said she liked it, yeah. No.

0:06:53 Thomas: It's, that's a weird thing about it, it's not really for kids much, you we can talk about it more when we start playing the most annoying sound anyone's ever heard, which is any Ben Shapiro video. Well, let's maybe we should just get into the video. I'm sure that'll allow us to talk about a lot of different things. Oh and by the way I mean I guess spoiler alert I yeah so we're going to discuss Barbie and it's probably a lot of it its complete. I don't know how much we need to go through the entire plot or anything, but yeah.

0:07:01 Lydia: Sure. Get Yeah, it is pretty new. No.

0:07:21 Lydia: I mean, we'll just talk general themes, I think, but

0:07:23 Thomas: But you probably will have wanted to see Barbie unless you don't care, there's not, not really a spoiler heavy movie. I don't think, I don't know. Anyway, right. We Let's hit play on this.

0:07:32 Lydia: Benergy.

0:07:33 Thomas: Yeah. All

0:07:34 Clip: After the theater's seen Barbie, I'm going to tell you which one of these is the best blockbuster of 2023, and which one is maybe the worst. I bet you loved Anne-Marie, right Ken?

0:07:35 Lydia: I

0:07:41 Thomas: Right, man. I can't, I quit. What, what was that supposed to be?

0:07:49 Lydia: Don't know. Like he's, he, throughout the video, I know he does this. He like just kind of layers in, you stuff from other Barbie TV shows, movies or whatever that are for kids and like, but like, edits them in such a weird way that none of it makes sense.

0:08:04 Thomas: It zooms in on Barbie's face and does this voice, and I want to know what the fuck this is, what that him

0:08:15 Lydia: Oh, I see. Okay. So it's Ben Shapiro, I am imagining. Yeah. So, it's him trying to do, like, a Valley Girl sort of accent, right? I bet he loved Armaday, right, Ken?

0:08:18 Thomas: Yeah awful, that's nothing it's so bad, oh

0:08:25 Lydia: Yeah,

0:08:27 Clip: For those of you who can't wait that long, I am going give my review of the Barbie movie in the most Oppenheimer fashion.

0:08:34 Thomas: He throws, throws the Barbie in the trash can and he's lighting it on fire, what is this, what it's not, it's even funny it's

0:08:37 Clip: So

0:08:50 Lydia: Yeah, it is not funny. It is not anything. It's not a critique. Yeah, yeah.

0:08:57 Thomas: Oh, the Barbies are burning, like, what grade level would you say that that humor is. Like, we probably, you know, me and my friends would sometimes try to make funny, like videos back in the day before YouTube. And like, we would have been over this level of humor by certainly 10th grade.

0:09:15 Lydia: Yeah I was going to to say it's probably like pretty young and then a resurgence in middle school for boys. It's my guess.

0:09:22 Thomas: What? Okay, here we go.

0:09:27 Clip: The things I do for my audience, my producers drag me to go see a Barbie movie. Barbie, the movie.

0:09:30 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:09:31 Lydia: He does it because it makes him money.

0:09:33 Clip: And, um, and, um... I have, I have thoughts. The studio is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Let me begin with

0:09:38 Thomas: I gotta cancel my ExpressVPN thing. I think I have that. I got it.

0:09:39 Lydia: So do you really? Oh, God. How

0:09:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:43 Clip: My generalized assessment of the movie, this movie is not just a piece of s***. This movie is a flaming piece of dog s*** piled atop an entire dumpster on fire, piled atop a landfill filled with dog s**t. It is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

0:09:57 Thomas: That's such creative, witty ways.

0:09:59 Lydia: Many times can he say shit? Yeah.

0:10:00 Thomas: Yeah, It's just a lot of the joke there is a lot of shit, that's the joke, like, it wasn't, let me, let me mansplain this to you.

0:10:04 Lydia: Yeah.

0:10:08 Thomas: See, it's not just a little bit of dog shit, hun, this is hilarious because it's like a lot more dog shit than you thought.

0:10:15 Lydia: Right. Then I expected.

0:10:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So brilliant, I think it went over your head, that's probably why you weren't laughing at all, so Maybe I'll play it again for you. Oh my god. I also, I just, he has gotten so many makeovers, I didn't know this. I haven't watched this asshole in a while. Yeah, you can clearly see that like zillions of dollars have been put into his appearance now.

0:10:16 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Yeah? How dare you?

0:10:37 Lydia: Yeah.

0:10:37 Thomas: And he's got the fucking beard, the five o'clock shadow-ish beard that, don't somebody apparently told conservatives that that, you know, they caught on to the beard thing, you 10 years later than everybody else, but now they all have caught on that, that universally beards look, let's face it. They look good. I like beards.

0:10:46 Lydia: Yeah, they

0:10:56 Thomas: And so fucking Ted Cruz figured out that was the best way to cover as much of his disgusting face as he could.

0:10:56 Lydia: Do. I agree. Yeah.

0:11:04 Thomas: And fucking that other guy from Florida, right? Didn't he grow one? Oh, Donald Trump jr. Yeah. Matt Gates. Did he grow on now?

0:11:07 Lydia: Matt Gaetz? I don't know if

0:11:12 Thomas: Maybe not Matt Gates that, I don't know if he can grow on, but But

0:11:12 Lydia: He did. He needs to look like a child for all of them.

0:11:15 Thomas: Donald Trump Jr.'s got his disgusting, hair plug beard. Yeah, Matt Walsh. They all figured it out and I hate it. But he's got very, very immaculately done eyebrows. This Ben Shapiro. Did you notice that? Like, I want, has anyone ever pointed that out? Like, yeah, man, you're, you for pretending you aren't into, the you left or woke Hollywood or ain't like you sure are very L.A. like you sure he's got a jean jacket on, yeah, he's like, you know, he's put a lot of effort into his gender affirming care, he's allen yeah all

0:11:19 Lydia: Matt Walsh, right? Yeah. Yeah. Manscaping. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Beta. Beta. Hon, he's an Alan.

0:11:50 Clip: At every possible level, it is a horrific movie. The only thing that can be said for this film is production design. The production design is really nice. The costumes are really nice, but it's really hard to screw that up. It's really hard because you literally have this to model after. All you have to do is this.

0:12:04 Lydia: No, I

0:12:03 Thomas: Right when he says this it's a Barbie house that he, I guess, has, I don't know, yeah

0:12:08 Lydia: Yeah, it was gorgeous to look at. I 100% agree with that. And I think it's little insulting to the people who worked really, really hard to make that vision come to reality that he would go there.

0:12:16 Thomas: Yeah it actually doesn't just make itself, like a lot of, a lot thought was put into that I'm

0:12:19 Lydia: Yeah. God, also costuming, like not even just the design, but just the work to build the costumes. It was a pretty big cast, too. So that's a lot of work. What a jerk.

0:12:22 Thomas: Sure, yeah

0:12:33 Clip: Not tough, but put aside all of the beautiful costumes, which is there for the ladies, and all of these production designs,

0:12:39 Lydia: Of course.

0:12:40 Thomas: Well didn't he just say he enjoyed it like, like, what?

0:12:41 Lydia: Yes. Yeah. I don't know.

0:12:45 Thomas: Can, Ben, it's okay, man. Like, you could just say like, yeah, I enjoyed the costume. I enjoyed the, I don't know shit about fashion or anything personally, but like, yeah,I mean, I like when it's good costuming versus bad. I can kind of tell, I dunno. I'm a man. I enjoy it. What, why is that for the late one? Fucking idiot.

0:12:50 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. I feel like that looks cool.

0:13:00 Thomas: I to me, it's just so funny how fragile the masculinity is. And it's always fun to point it out when it's these people who think they're so masculine and just are not objectively

0:13:00 Lydia: That that looks Nice. Yeah.

0:13:09 Clip: And the Barbie universe and all that. Every joke that happens in this film happens basically within the first 45 seconds of the film. So, for example, Barbie turns on the water, and there's no water.

0:13:17 Thomas: Not true.

0:13:18 Clip: Ooh, because, you know, like in Barbie House, there's not actual water. Do you get it? And then, she drinks, but there's actual liquid in the actual cup. Oh my God, because she's a Barbie doll. Oh, I get it. Okay, that's all the jokes. There are no more jokes to the rest of the film. It's

0:13:18 Lydia: No.

0:13:30 Lydia: Oh.

0:13:30 Thomas: That's just not true, I don't know what to say. What was the thing, there was a lot of things later on that I, oh, yeah the, the end, well, you know, yeah, not to skip ahead, but the sequence of the Barbies manipulating the Kens at the the end is like the funniest thing in the whole thing, yeah.

0:13:43 Lydia: Yeah. But Yeah. When they're all on the beach and playing guitar, I loved that bit, that was so good, also

0:13:46 Thomas: Yeah. It's so good. It's so funny. Just like objectively speaking, that's not true, that that's all the joke. I think even he will admit that's not all the jokes, like he will bring up another joke.

0:13:57 Lydia: The Duolingo jokes do I like laughed out loud. He had like three lines and they were all perfect. Yeah.

0:14:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. No. That was really, really good. It's also, I love him mocking the the like, "Oh, there's no water, do you get it?" And it's like, well, so wait, are you saying you disagree with that creative choice? You know, yeah.

0:14:17 Lydia: Right. We shouldn't have to set the tone in the Barbie movie. Like, why? Why can't we take five seconds to setthe tone inthe Barbie movie?

0:14:23 Thomas: It's Like does he think there should have been water? Because the way he's saying it, it's like, "Oh, no water, get it?" It's like, yeah, they're just setting up the unit, you already acknowledge that you can't go wrong with the design because it's all the Barbie world and you have that that to work off of, and then when they're they're like, okay, as part of that there wouldn't be any water, there's no water in the thing, now you're mocking that as like this feeble attempt at humor that that didn't land. What, it's fucking stupid, man.

0:14:38 Lydia: Right.

0:14:51 Clip: A show. Okay, so, conceptually, the movie is a show, I want to ask this. Who's the intended audience for the film? Who's intended audience in the film, so I'll tell you who the intended audience for this film is, and I can tell it two ways. One, the previews on the film and two, the people in the audience. So, the intended audience for this film is moms and their eight-year-old daughters. That's the intended audiences for

0:15:09 Lydia: Disagree. I strongly disagree. First of all, I mean, he gets into this. It's rated PG-13. Right. So even if you're looking at the rating, It's not for eight year olds, according to the motion picture.

0:15:16 Thomas: Yeah. That's Uh, that's in the, that's in the name there with the PG-13. I think you would say that's, ah

0:15:23 Lydia: Right, right, exactly. But then also, my feeling was, if you watched any of the trailers for Barbie, you kind of feel like, okay, this is not really like, this ist not a kids movie. This is not Barbie on, you the streaming services and stuff, right? Right? The TV shows that have existed that are terribly animated. No offense to all the animators out there. I just don't think they're very good. But I think for me, it could have been for people like moms, right? And maybe the trailers at the beginning are, oh, that looks good. I take my kids to that, you know?

0:15:55 Thomas: That, that makes sense.

0:15:56 Lydia: Yeah, because like when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle trailer came on, we were both like, oh that looks great. The kids would probably love that we're gonna go back and see that movie with them.

0:16:02 Thomas: Yeah I was like Oh, they finally made one that's not disturbing like a, a Cronenberg nightmare. God, those, I never watched them just because the previews were so disturbing. Who made those fucking things? Was that Michael Bay?

0:16:05 Lydia: Yeah. Michael Bay, maybe.

0:16:15 Thomas: Um, was it? Yeah, I think that's what, that's what came to my mind. Anyway, no, you make a great point. I was going to have a different answer, but I think yours is, or maybe, or mine is still valid. I don't know. But my answer was going to be, okay, this is what Ben Shapiro loves to do. He loves to take one, like, minor logical point that is based on a shaky premise and then use that to say that everything that disagrees with it is wrong. So like, I don't, I know if that, put that in the best way, but so he takes for example, this point, oh, who is this for? Well, what are the previews? The preview's are kids' movies, therefore it's for kids. Fucking ipso facto, you can't argue with, you know, like, well,

0:16:16 Lydia: I don't know. I'm gonna find out. Yeah, yeah feelings

0:16:51 Thomas: Okay, but there's a lot of ambiguity in that, man. You can't just, that's what all his destroys are based on. It's taking one little feeble argument that like maybe kind of holds a little, but not, and there's plenty of room for disagreement, and then just takes that as like those are facts and everything else is just a bunch of, you know, feelings. It's like my answer was going to be, okay, first off, yeah, PG-13. Secondly, secondly, enjoyed I the movie, so I could be part of the audience and I know and and I looked up, just for fun, I was kind of poking around for for research, and someone posted in the Reddit slash Ask Men, and they said, like, hey men, did you, if you saw Barbie, what did you think of it?

And I was actually really surprised, I was like, oh great, what's this going to be, every top voted comment, like, I went through at least, like, I don't know, 10, 15 of the top voted to comments, they were all positive. I think this movie is just a success. Like can you try to make it out to be, oh, it's cause it's woke, blah, blah. But it's like, yeah, I mean, there may be some some, wokeness, some, also and there maybe some like corporate feminism that I would disagree with a little bit in it. But like, you can't argue with the fact that people just like this fucking movie, dude. Like, sorry, you're just wrong. Like a lot of people really like this movie. In fact, just for fun, we can, I can make this point now. I checked the Rotten Tomatoes. And

0:17:12 Lydia: Yeah, right yeah yeah

0:18:07 Thomas: It's, it's 88% critic and 84% audience. That's just consensus a good movie. Yeah. And consider that the audience is likely composed of a bunch of fucking Ben Shapiro fans who go and harass movies down to the, you know, zero, which I think they have some protections for now, but I think that's still gonna be in effect, basically for any movie that's perceived as like a woman's movie or a woke movie or a progressive movie. There's there's way more often an army of angry fucking incels that goes and downvotes stuff versus Ben Shapiro's theory, which we'll get to later on, is, oh, if you just make a movie that has anything woke in it, you're guaranteed a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is just so fucking delusional. What I was going to say is the previews before the movie, I mean, that's just like your opinion, man, and as I, that's just a corporation's opinion of what people might want

0:18:07 Lydia: Pretty yeah that's consistent between Between the two. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:19:02 Thomas: To also see. They might be wrong. Like literally they might just be wrong about the audience of the movie. I think your point is better. Your point is, oh yeah, it's one way or the other. It's likely going to be a lot of parents at this movie and maybe some kids. And so these kid movies will be good ones to do previews for. I think that's a better point. But my point is, even if that were wrong or something, you can't just say because production companies, or however they buy the previews, however that transaction works, because they made a judgment that this would be a good movie to advertise their movies on, therefore that's the fucking gospel, God's truth of who the audience is. That's just what some people perceive the audience to be. They could be right or wrong. Like, it's, and you, it's just a microcosm of like, he just uses that method so much of just like a very shaky point that could be true, but also could easily not be true, and takes that as like any disagreement with that is fucking stupid. That's, that's his whole shtick.

0:19:59 Clip: The film. I know because the previews for the films were all kids' movies. I'm talking like G or PG rated kids' films. I'm not talking like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Trolls 4 or whatever it is. Those were all the preview's, right? All the preview're actually directed at what the audience is supposed to be for this film. And if you're giving the audience, it's a bunch of moms, moms, middle-aged moms, with their like six, seven, eight-year-old girls. That's entire crew, movie is not made for any of those people. In fact, this movie is made for no one. This is a

0:20:17 Thomas: Sure Oh, but, okay, so now he's arguing with himself, by the way. So now he's saying that the trailers are a better indication of who the movie's made for than the fucking movie. Wouldn't you think the movie would be a better way to judge who the movie's made for? Like, if some, like, you know, yeah, the trailers, okay, maybe the film studio decides what trailers go there, and maybe that's an okay, but then just watch the movie, and then you can see who it's made, and that would be better indication. And, uh, by the way, if, um, there's a big mismatch there.

For example, if the movie was made in a way that was like, oh, fuck, I thought I was seeing one movie, but I was actually seeing, you know, Saw 5 and whatever. I think we could expect that Rotten Tomatoes reviews would probably reflect that. It would be like, what the fuck? I was sold a bill of goods, as they say. I took my child to see this. And while you do see a few crying fundamentalist Christians on YouTube saying that, pretty universally positive reviews everywhere else. So, Ben, I think the movie was made for exactly who fucking saw it, is what I would say.

0:20:41 Lydia: Yeah right no

0:21:32 Clip: Bunch of money week one because the marketing effort has been extraordinary. I mean, brothers the marketing team over at War Brothers is doing an amazing job. Week one, this thing is going to clean up the domestic box office. My prediction is, going to just absolutely fall off cliff after that. The repeat business on this movie is going non-existent because it was written by two people who are so smug and self-satisfied and want to go away and no bond.

0:21:35 Thomas: Oh, we can fact check this.

0:21:51 Clip: They have no audience who thought it's a great idea. Let's bring on the people who wrote Lady Bird and Marriage Story to make a movie about a plastic doll that is generally played with by 5 to 9 year old young girls. So

0:21:44 Lydia: It didn't no

0:22:03 Thomas: That's a very easy claim to fact check. And of I the highlights, one of the hallmarks of conservative bullshit, anti-woke content, is making predictions or claims about the future and then never fucking checking back on them. The pizza ovens are going to be gone. The world's ending all the time. Men don't even have penises anymore. And then nobody just checks. Like, wait, did that happen? So let's talk about it. Okay, so he predicts a second weekend drop off that's going to to be just massive. Biggest of all time. I think he said, didn't he say it would be that So I think, checking averages. It seems as though a typical movie has a drop off of something like 40 to 60% is the normal range. Cause I didn't know it was that much. That's actually pretty surprising, but I guess that makes sense. People really, really, Really want to see it. For a while, so it's still going to make a bunch of money.

Still going to be people seeing it, but I guess all the people who really, really wanted to see it, see it first. And that's enough to make a drop off of 40 to 60%. Um, thought one that would be a good comparison. Like I could read you a bunchof historical movies and we could, you know... I thought I found a good one that I think would bea really good, way to compare for most people. And that is MCU films. Uh, so somebody on Reddit kind of collected a list, at least as of, I don't know, 2022 of the MCU film second weekend drop-offs.

0:22:17 Lydia: Yeah yeah non-existent

0:23:21 Thomas: And I was like, oh, that'd be good, cause we all, like, kind of know what those are. We're going to, you know, that's going to tell us. And it's like, it's a similar ish kind of movie, you know, it's not like a prestige drama or cartoon, a or whatever, it's, it's kind of similar yeah excited fan base. So the lowest seems to be Black Panther, wow, which was 44.7. So if you see there, like, these are unambiguously successful movies, like, I, you know, even though I'm, haven't been the biggest fan, I'm not gonna argue, they're definitely successful movies, and they have a drop off, the lowest of which is 44%, the highest of which is Black Widow, 67%. Yeah, and Thor Love and Thunder actually made, like, not much. Boy, I didn't realize Black Panther was so successful. Wow. That

0:23:29 Lydia: Like an excited fan base yeah oh wow, yeah right

0:24:05 Thomas: Was third highest grossing one, and from this, anyway, I don't know if these numbers have changed over time or anything, if they include all that crap, like in the long-term financials or anything, but infinity war is what I would have guessed or end game. Those two were massive and they had a drop off of 55% and 57%. And I mean, part of that calculation is also the more dedicated to the movie people are, the more they're probably going to see it at midnight fucking showing. And a lot of people, you know, some people see, go back to the theater and see it again, but like not I've got to guess, not too many, like even my favorite movies ever, However, I think only the Lord of the Rings movie when I was in high school, did I see a second time in theaters? I don't think there's any other time I've ever done that.

0:24:45 Lydia: I saw the village twice, but it's because, it's because I saw it once with like friends and then a boy I liked wanted to go see so then I went again. Yeah,

0:24:46 Thomas: Uh, of course. Yeah. Yeah, and that, that one, that is the best. I couldn't have written a better joke, because yeah, it's like, once you've seen the ending, it'S, I mean, it'S kind of interesting to watch again when you know the ending. I'm gonna go ahead and say it, The Village, underrated film. I don'T, I, I liked it. I fucking liked that movie.

0:25:14 Thomas: I thought it was pretty good. It's hard to have any opinion positive about an M. Night Shyamalan movie because he's so bad now. But I like that movie, but I haven't watched it in a thousand years and I'm not going to so that I can keep having that opinion. Anyway, point is, even really good movies, there's also a weird trade-off. Like I said, the more people want to see a movie, you might have a bigger drop-off because more people will see it right away and won't come back and see it. So 40, 60% seems to be pretty average, but even good movies, even like objectively money-making movies, like Spider-Man No Way Home, $84 million, had a drop-off of 67.5%. So that's some context. So what did you find when you looked up this claim on Barbie?

0:25:07 Lydia: I've come around yeah right all Right, so Barbie, in in its first weekend, made $162 million. Yeah. Really, really, really big blockbuster. And then in its second weekend, came in with $93 million.

0:25:59 Thomas: Oh, wow. That's a lot. Holy shit.

0:26:08 Lydia: Yeah. So 42% drop off is what it's looking like.

0:26:11 Thomas: Wow so that's a not only is that a shitload of money that seems very successful it didn't drop off very much So, all. I think we just DESTROYED Ben Shapiro on that point. Facts don't care about your feelings, Ben. I know you felt like maybe the movie sucked and shouldn't- wouldn't be successful in the second week. Hey, guess you were fucking wrong. Can't wait to see the apology video.

0:26:24 Lydia: Oh

0:26:31 Clip: So the basic idea of film, they really have no basic idea. They don't know whether they hate Barbie or they were supposed to kind of like Barbie. It seems they kind of despise Barbie as a fascist emblem. The basic premise of the movie, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides and they hate each other. And literally the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women.

0:26:48 Thomas: We could do two hours on just that last couple sentences because it so completely misses the point. I want to know how you felt about this, hon. But I felt like the feminists and women and everybody really have mixed feelings about Barbie,

0:27:09 Lydia: My god. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I think, you know, the intention of Barbie and some of the criticisms criticisms of Barbie at the beginning, it was, I don't know. Mean, the movie talks about it, right? That the way that you played with dolls eons ago was it was always in this caretaker, caregiver role, right? It was always a baby doll. And so the girl was always in the role of the mother for those things. And Barbie was the opportunity to play with a doll that not was a baby. It was, you know, a teen or an adult or whatever. Whatever. But it also brought along, you know, these societal expectations with it, know, that were really big in the country anyway, in terms of beauty ideals, body image and all of those things. And it was, you Know, like Barbie was a fun doll to play with. But then, you she was she was just a woman as a doll.

0:27:54 Lydia: And then they started stepping into, I think, the astronaut Barbie as an astronaut doll. Came out in 1962. So pretty soon they started thinking of Barbie as, the chance you to show girls that like, yes, you're playing with a doll and this doll can be anything, right? Still had those body image things, inclusivity issues on other respects, too, and then stepped into incorporating more of what people actually look like there. I think one of the interesting things, too, in the movie was, I don't know if this doll exists out in the world. I haven't walked down the Barbie aisle in a while, surprisingly, even with Phoebe. But had, you know, a fat Barbie in Barbie Land 2. And the it way that the character was, is that that she was just a Barbie, right? She was a Barbie like every other Barbie. She wasn't, know, changed into Chelsea or Skipper or whatever, right, like the little sidekicks or the little sister.

0:28:44 Thomas: Which is kind of how they used to handle anyone else for A while. Yeah.

0:28:48 Lydia: Yeah, anyone, exactly, exactly. Like know—anyone the, who looked different than your stereotypical Barbie Didn't get to have the Barbie name. And this was a chance to see that Barbie, like, in Barbie land really could be anybody, because that's the ideal, right. Like, like, that's what we hope is that for women in society and little girls growing up is that they can understand, like, that they can pick a career that means something to them. And just because they're a girl doesn't mean that it's not going to be an opportunity for them.

That just because the way they look doesn't means that they're going to get a They're from these things that they really love and mean something to them and give them purpose and give them excitement in the world. Is that's the contrast we're looking at is in Barbie land where that's true and what you have to give up in order to achieve that kind of thing versus reality. I don't remember what they call the real world where, it's much a more complicated.

But then what you also get from that, too. So, yeah, it's a complicated thing that neither neither world is perfect. You have to pick, you know, the Birkenstock or the high heel. Right.

0:28:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:48 Thomas: Well, Yeah.

0:29:49 Lydia: Which which one is going to bring you value and purpose in your life. And yeah, no spoilers. Spoilers.

0:29:55 Thomas: By the way, astronaut, uh, Barbie, 1965, I was like 62 that'd be before, like, they even, yeah, so a little early on that, but yeah, still, that was before we landed on the moon. It was definitely before there were any female astronauts at all, so that's interesting.

0:29:57 Lydia: Oh, 1965. Gotcha. I know. Yep.

0:30:10 Thomas: And then, also, to your point, I just pulled up, like, the Barbie timeline to have handy here, um, they introduced a, a Black bar, uh, well, they introduced Christy, who was Black, in 1968, but, as you say, very kind notably not Barbie, um, which is interesting, you make a great point. And also, I think maybe people might not have thought about how difficult a movie this would be to make, like, when I thought about just how many different constraints they had to try to make, make to, by the way, even if you wanted to make a woke Barbie movie, like if that was your express purpose, that would be fucking difficult. Cause keep in mind, this is still like Mattel. This is still Mattel's intellectual property.

0:30:14 Lydia: Yeah. Right. Right, yeah. Mm

0:30:47 Thomas: Don't, you don't just get, get to make whatever movie you want about Barbie and make one where you hate Barbies because they, you know, give you negative body images and you you can do whatever wokeness you want and totally shit on the toy No, you make a movie that Mattel is okay with, and also that people who are nostalgic on Barbie are okay with. And also, you a broad audience as possible are okay With.

0:30:55 Lydia: Hmm. Right?

0:31:12 Thomas: And, you don't want make some, you feminist points, some amount of, we'll say, woke points.

0:31:13 Lydia: Well, like staying true to your values, right? Like, like, I imagine Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are not going to be writing something that, feels like they're propping up something dangerous or something that like really makes them feel vile. So

0:31:19 Thomas: Yeah, right. Right. Just to be able to do all of those things and and have it not be a piece of shit is actually really hard. That's, I was amazed the whole time, I was wondering, like, how are they going to end this thing? Because this, is I was very nervous about how they were going to in the movie, because it just seems so difficult to do so in a way that wouldn't be too preachy. But wouldn't you know but also well

0:31:29 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:49 Lydia: Like not betray the work that they did all the way up to that too.

0:31:51 Thomas: And and because you're doing such gender politics stuff and there's such, like, clear representations of different ideologies there. Like, you had be very careful how things ended up because of what that would say, you know? Like that's just a very, I'm just really impressed they pulled that off. And so I just love his point of, like, why would you pick them, person who made, Ladybird and the person. It's like, well. Well, it sounds like that was who could make it. This idea that, like, he has decided that what Barbie ought to have been as a movie is like a cartoon for little girls and anything different than that is bad because he says it is.

But the studio was, took a more, like, again, I don't love corporate America by any means, but the studio and Mattel and whoever was involved in making this took a more a sophisticated view, which is, well, we can't just make like a corporate worshiping, like propaganda Barbie. No one's going to like that. It's going to suck. To, they're going to hate us. How do we do this? Well, I think, maybe we find a way to hire people, who will pitch us on, like, can we make a Barbie that works in 2023 that, does all the things I just said. And, um, I don't know, maybe those two people were the perfect people to do that. Uh, it seems like to me, it's really funny how often he just decides his view of the world is what things are or and then anyone who deviated from that was like an idiot even though they made a hugely financially successful thing that

0:32:05 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Right.

0:33:15 Lydia: Huge.

0:33:15 Thomas: Everybody universally likes but no, they didn't get with his thing, like, I just love how often facts in the feelings thing, because he always says facts don't care about your feelings and how consistently he fucking breaks that every single other sentence, you know, like he feels like Barbie should have been a certain way. Well, I don't know, look at the facts, you idiot, it was incredibly successful. Hmm.

0:33:16 Lydia: Yeah. Well And I think also when you look at the Barbie timeline, right, every time Mattel is willing to evolve, evolve Barbie and kind of push limits a little bit and step into like the next phase is when they see those spikes in success, right? Because it's reaching more and more and more people. They see themselves in Barbie now. It's not reserved for the people who look like stereotypical Barbie.

0:33:51 Thomas: That's a good point uh I got bad news, hun, we're, we're three minutes into this movie review, so, so.

0:34:03 Lydia: Oh boy. Way.

0:34:04 Thomas: Alright.

0:34:05 Clip: The to separate this into problems with plot and problems with character and problems with the politics of the film, but they're all intertwined because the thing is just a mess. It doesn't make any sense. Plot-wise, it makes no sense. Character-wise it makes no sense, so let's just go through it from the beginning. There's gonna be lots of spoilers, but believe you me, I'm about to save you so much time because this movie is two hours. It feels like is longer than the Wagnerian Ring Cycle. It does not end.

0:34:18 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:34:22 Lydia: I just, I

0:34:27 Thomas: That's the smart reference because he's smart, he's really smart. Oh, that's a long thing, but it's a smart reference that I I don't know, because I'm not smart.

0:34:37 Clip: Every scene is It's least two minutes too long. Every single scene, every beat is two minutes too long, it is a bad film. Put aside the politics, like really, I was sitting there with

0:34:46 Lydia: Right? It's all too long. And the only way we can get through listening to him talk is at least one and a half speed because it's impossible to listen to him. Like he's too long. His beats are too long, God.

0:34:59 Thomas: He's doing a 43 minute review of this movie

0:35:02 Lydia: Right.

0:35:02 Clip: A bunch of my producers, I'm a little bit more political than my producers. My producers were watching this, putting the politics aside, it's a bad movie. So why is getting 91% on Rotten Tomatoes? Because the way that it works for the reviewers is if you have the right politics, and those politics are sufficiently slyly inserted, then it will get a 91% Rotten Tomatoes, even if the thing is just dreck and I mean, boy, is this track, this is a, this is a Death Star sized piece of dreck. It is like, that's no moon, that's dreck station. That is, that, that this movie, okay, so let's

0:35:13 Thomas: This is great oh Oh, it is.

0:35:34 Thomas: I'm sorry. I can't resist. So he even like shows the Star Wars clip and doesn't that doesn't make any sense. Like the way he's doing the reference. Lydia's I seen Star Wars one or two times. I don't know if you know Wars. The

0:35:45 Lydia: No, I not, not to this level. Here we go.

0:35:46 Thomas: Not okay so what he's using that to mean like, oh, it's not just a little bit of what is he saying? Drek? I don't even. Another super smart guy word that. Don't. I haven't come across that word much, actually. But anyway, he's saying it's. Not just a lit. Little bit of it. It's a space station. And then he like he's referencing the that's no moon. It's. A space station, but like the point of that scene in Star Wars is not.

Oh, that's not a small thing, it's a big thing, the point is no like the Death Star is so huge that he thinks it's moon he's Like yeah, It's by that that moon and he's like that's a fucking space station like that that's insane that that thing that big is a space station so do you see how that makes no sense like it's not it's not like oh it's not a moon-sized thing. It's a space station. No, the moon is bigger, actually. Like, a moon typically is a way bigger object than a space station, but it's just that the Death Star is so huge, he thinks it's moon. And he's like, you know

0:35:54 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah

0:36:43 Thomas: What I mean? Like, he's using it wrong.

0:36:44 Lydia: I see what you're saying. Yeah

0:36:45 Thomas: Like, I can't resist because it's so fucking annoying. He thinks he's so smart. Anyway,

0:36:50 Lydia: Drek

0:36:50 Clip: Jump into it. I have, like, pages and pages of notes on this horrific piece of

0:36:55 Thomas: I don't never emphasize enough how universally acclaimed this movie is. Now, obviously you're finding the counter, the naysayers of the culture are going to come in and say why they don't like it. But like, we already talked about the reviews, the audience score, the tomato score. Apparently the tomato meter dropped 3% since he recorded this. Cause it's 88 now, but 88% audience score 84. by the way, just crossed a billion dollars worldwide.

0:37:17 Thomas: Like he's just wrong. He's saying every single moment of it is bad. Everything's long, over. It's like, I don't know, man. I think you're just wrong, wrong.

0:37:03 Lydia: Yeah yep right

0:37:27 Clip: Mean, my goodness, okay, so let's start right at the beginning. So it's from the beginning, you know what this movie is going to be, and it's going to be a very cynical take on what Barbie is, which is so weird. I don't know why Mattel would turn over its IP to filmmakers who clearly hate the IP.

0:37:41 Lydia: Not cynical. I don't see it as a cynical view of Barbie at all. I think it's the juxtaposition of the two worlds and what happens if you're Barbie and you feel like there's something missing and the complexities of humanity and stuff. Right? It's not a cynical look at Barbie. There's plenty of people in Barbie land that don't have those same existential crises that Margot Robbie has.

0:38:06 Thomas: Mean, he's a conservative, he's all about the market, he's all about capitalism, he's all about that, and he's got a corporation that decided to okay this version of their intellectual property. He's got the people paying zillion, now a billion dollars worldwide to see it, and every single indication is telling the world. Like, if you're just a cold-hearted capitalist, you could be like, well, fuck, this thing is amazing. Like, this is great.

0:38:16 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:38:28 Lydia: Just Lean into that.

0:38:31 Thomas: Yeah, it made a billion dollars. And this guy's like, don't that it sucks. I don'T why Mattel...

0:38:31 Lydia: The Beats Were too long.

0:38:37 Thomas: Yeah, I DON'T know WHY Mattel WOULD HAVE AUTHORIZED THIS BILLION-DOLLAR MOVIE SUCCESS.

0:38:41 Lydia: Yeah, no.

0:38:43 Thomas: Anyway,

0:38:43 Clip: It's as though going you to make Toy Story, except that toys are all evil. They're all bad, and you're supposed to hate them, and you should burn them. Because that's kind of the message of the film, is that the Barbies are bad for the world. Okay, so it begins by trying to uphold the original vision of Barbie. What was the original magical vision of Barbie? We have Helen Mirren here to tell us, in the form of a narrator, apparently played by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who's speaking from heaven. And we get a 2001 A Space Odyssey flashback.

0:38:52 Thomas: That's not at all... Okay.

0:39:04 Thomas: What?

0:39:07 Clip: But again, who is the audience for this?

0:39:05 Lydia: I Don't know Yeah

0:39:07 Thomas: Okay. Okay. OK, to I I meant to signpost this early on. There are several ways in this review that Ben Shapiro just reveals that he doesn't think women are people. And keep on the lookout for that.

0:39:19 Clip: It references variously Marcel Proust. Robert Evans and the cinematography of The Godfather. It references 2001, A Space Odyssey. This is a movie made for moms and their seven-year-old girls.

0:39:30 Thomas: Yeah, you just said it. It's so moms are not a thing. They're not like moms aren't human a like they don't get to enjoy. Like how revealing is that? Are all these smart references in here for? It's just for moms, like, yeah, dude, you're just telling on yourself. Maybe moms would like that.

0:39:47 Lydia: Well, And I think he's also kind of countering his, you opinion before that this is a movie made for kids when he's saying, well, listen to all these references that's not for kids. Yeah, maybe it's not a movie for kids, you're right. Yeah.

0:39:54 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's

0:39:59 Clip: Two hours around my deathbed, I will wish that I had not spent that time doing, makes me viscerally angry. But I'm going to talk to you about something that makes me much happier. And that is our trusted privacy partner and premier sponsor of this show, ExpressVPN.

0:40:03 Thomas: I really got I gotta

0:40:10 Clip: What if there was someone out there who kept a log of every single thing

0:40:10 Thomas: Cancel my Express VPN fuck I

0:40:07 Lydia: Really want to know You know, he said on his deathbed, like, he will be, you regretting that he wasted two hours, like viscerally regretting. And I don't know if Twitter will exist or whatever it'll be when that happens, but I expect an update from him. And if he doesn't produce an update while on his deathbed, I think everyone should hound him for one.

0:40:29 Thomas: I think he'll be proven to be a dishonest interlocutor at that point, we got him. I

0:40:37 Clip: It starts with Helen Mirren explaining that back in the day, girls would only play with dolls, dolls that look like babies. And then she says that this could be fun, at least for a while. Anyway, ask your mother, because your mother actually hates you and doesn't like being a mom, you see. So that's so if you ask your mom, she wants to play at not being a mom sometimes. Okay, so the basic premise is

0:40:52 Thomas: What holy crap, like, well,

0:40:57 Lydia: I can't even track all of that. It's just insane. Okay. So first of all, it's not that played with baby dolls. That was the only kind of doll that existed. So if a kid wanted to play with a doll, it was a baby. Literally. That would that was the only option. And I'm a mom and and I would say, yeah, I need a I need a break every now and then.

0:40:58 Thomas: Yeah, well, well, Also, by his logic, I guess boys should always be playing with little baby dolls as well, otherwise we We don't like being a father, right? It is so obvious how misogynistic his worldview is. Mothers aren't people. And also if, if women don't exclusively only like playing with literal baby dolls, their whole childhoods, then that means they hate you.

0:41:26 Lydia: Right, right.

0:41:42 Thomas: If you're, If they if they have kids, they hate their kids. It's like, Jesus, what a bleak picture that paints of what he thinks things should be like.

0:41:42 Lydia: If they have kids. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. You he's proving America Ferrara's monologue at the end, right? Honestly.

0:41:55 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, can't wait to hear him talk about how that's not right, even though he's literally proving it.

0:41:57 Lydia: Yeah.

0:41:59 Clip: Barbie is supposed to be the independent woman who liberates all womanhood, but she fails, and she fails for two reasons: one, she's actually a tool of the patriarchal capitalist system, and two, the real world has rejected the message of Barbie, which is that women should run everything. Okay, so this is all not implicit.

0:42:11 Thomas: Did they say that? No, no, no.

0:42:13 Lydia: No.

0:42:16 Clip: This is explicitly said. At the beginning, the monologue, you have Helen Mirren saying, because Barbie can be anything, women can be everything. At least that's what the Barbies think. See, in the real World, women cannot be anything. And that's one of the messages of the film. In the real-world, men run pretty much everything. Which is weird. Who greenlit this piece of s***? I mean, Greta Gerwig is a lady. She's making a good living off of this. Margot Robbie is playing the lead. In fact, the entire cast, aside from basically Ryan Gosling, is women. So it seems like women are doing okay.

0:42:42 Lydia: There's a lot of Kens in the movie to

0:42:45 Clip: But again, put aside the meta logic of it.

0:42:48 Thomas: No, I'm not allowing you to say that. Put aside the logical part. No, dude, you can't point to one thing that has women and be like, Like, guess women are doing fine. Look at that woman over there. She's got an ice cream cone. Fucking, oh, and you're going to tell me that women aren't just living the dream? It's like, what? Yeah, that's one thing. You're pointing at one. How about you look at actual statistics about anything or any data, any real knowledge about planet fucking Earth, about how long it's taken. And by the way, this is a movie where a lot of it is sort of like a historical narrative. If it's about Barbie over the years, it's about, you know, like, yeah, it is also critiquing now, but even if, somehow a month ago we solved gender inequality and everything was a hundred percent fine, it would still be totally fine to make a movie that's sort of like about the history of Barbie and

0:42:58 Lydia: Age yeah right

0:43:38 Thomas: How things weren't always great for like, there's no level on which his point stands. Fucking asshole. God, I hate him so much.

0:43:42 Lydia: Well and I think if he took two seconds he wouldn't do this because it would counter his point. But, Greta Gerwig, I mean, with this movie, it's, breaking records regarding, um, projects helmed by a female director. That, not what we're seeing with Barbie is proof that things have been very unbalanced for a long time in Hollywood, too, in terms of, you know, men versus women and their projects. Greta Gerwig is finally like breaking some of those barriers. Finally, it's 2023 and we're seeing like this stuff for the the first time ever.

0:43:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh yeah, a woman is vice president. So we're, it's like oh, you mean the first female vice president ever?

0:44:22 Lydia: Yeah. So we're good. We're done. Yeah, no.

0:44:26 Thomas: Yeah, so that's enough.

0:44:28 Clip: I'm going to go through a lot of beats here. So, it starts off with the idea that mommy dolls are bad and insufficient. But then they criticize Mattel for discontinuing a mommy doll named Midge. Midge is the pregnant doll and was discontinued. They're like, that's bad. But hold on, said just that dolls about motherhood are bad. But, then this one, don't look for any sort of logical coherence.

0:44:38 Thomas: Oh, We can look for the logical coming. We can help you.

0:44:48 Lydia: No one was saying baby dolls were bad. It was just you know be nice to have some variety and not just play with dolls in that very strict role. Right. And then Midge they didn't they didn'T stop producing Midge because motherhood is bad. They stopped producing Midge because kids were like, I don't know how to play with this pregnant doll. And, you know, like, that's reasonable. It was, you Know, a money decision. They weren't selling.

0:45:18 Lydia: So yeah, I mean, they just discontinued it because it just that was not a doll that was selling.

0:45:17 Thomas: Oh, was it? Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I probably doesn't make that much sense to a little kid. You know is a fun thing to play with. Yeah, it's two different things. Like, wasn't okay, get rid of baby dolls because motherhood is bad. It was no, you shouldn't have the only toy available be a baby, and then this one is also notably, this isn't a baby doll, this is a pregnant woman doll, which is a different, that's just a different thing. Like, regardless of what your point is, that's two different things. You do like, you could have one stance toward one and another stance toward the other. It's not logically incoherent. He's just an idiot. Like, it's just no.

0:45:27 Lydia: Yeah. Right. Right?

0:46:01 Lydia: And, and honestly, Honestly, like if I could imagine right now, if there was a pregnant doll, I feel like the right would probably not be OK with that, marketed towards young kids. Don't you think?

0:46:13 Thomas: I don't, it just, whatever, who the fuck knows what they will or won't be. It's, if they, if Q tells them to be against something, they'll be again. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's like, it'll have to be, well, is there like a wedding ring carved into the doll to make sure it's a, it's not an unwed mother. Like, if it is, then, you know,

0:46:16 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah,

0:46:29 Clip: There is a Citizens United reference. They say all of the members of the Barbie Supreme Court are women. And then they are speaking out about Citizens United, that corporations are not people. It's literally a Citizens united reference. Who is the seven-year-old girl who's like, yes, I too have a very informed perspective on the Citizens United decision. And

0:46:46 Thomas: Already said it was mothers and their seven-year-old daughters is his version of the audience. So, hun, have you heard of Citizens United, is that a thing that maybe you would understand in a movie, would that would your fragile female brain be able to like, it's, it's so infuriating that he just like tells on himself so hard, and either doesn't care or it's like intentional, I don't know. Like, I'm not, either way it's bad. Like, the idea that again, he's 10 levels of wrong. Like, it's obviously the audience isn't just mothers and their children, but even if it were, mothers was a key word in that, and those are, you adult humans.

You that means if you're a mother, you're likely somebody who is gonna probably appreciate, at least on average, that reference. And it's also just critical to the story they're building, the world the their building is like, Barbie Land is this sort of like, at first appearance, this utopia, and one of the ways they did that was by not allowing, like, corporate, whatever. So it's not, like that's just part of the world building, man. It doesn't, does he think everything needs to be in like tiny three or four-letter words so that, you know, female brains can understand? Like, shut

0:46:54 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Right.

0:47:48 Thomas: Up, dude.

0:47:48 Lydia: Well, no. So here's the thing. The political references were for the seven year olds. Right? And then all the sexual innuendo, that's the only thing that the moms are interested in, probably. Just that.

0:47:58 Thomas: Well, we'll see, I'm sure we'll get to that. That's

0:47:58 Lydia: Yeah.

0:47:59 Clip: They say that logic and feeling at the same time, it doesn't diminish us. It proves that we are more than, right? It's all propagandistic. And then it sets up the dichotomy. The dichotony is that men and women are in complete and utter contradistinction in terms of their roles. So women only exist if they are completely free of men. And men only exist if they're completely free from women. And the problem for Ken, the problem that's set up for Ken is that Ken is dependent on Barbie, right? Because Ken is kind of secondary. And we also set up at the very beginning that Barbie doesn't like Ken. She finds Ken annoying. She finds Kent ridiculous, which, again, is

0:48:21 Lydia: That's not what it's.

0:48:34 Thomas: Also not

0:48:32 Lydia: No. Okay. I got to say something. Yeah, so for me, and I imagine this is how a lot of people interpret it because it's more reasonable, doesn't have identity without Barbie at the beginning. Right. Like he sees himself as am Ken. Right. I do beach and I'm your boyfriend. Right?

0:48:34 Thomas: True, yeah. Go ahead.

0:48:45 Thomas: So Good. Exactly.

0:48:53 Lydia: So his his sense of identity is tied up in Barbie, whereas Barbie's sense of identify is not dependent on Ken. And that's the distinction there. It's not that Barbie hates him. It's that she is just, you fully developed, self-aware, you doll. She doesn't have the human capacity or anything like that. But her identity is within herself already. And that's where Ken's struggle is, for my opinion.

0:49:22 Thomas: Here's the thing that Ben Shapiro, and I watched a few, I watched like just for fun, like Shoe on Head, that fucking asshole idiot YouTuber, has one, and to be fair, she's like a little more positive on the movie, but she also has these absolutely stupid takes on it. Everybody reviewing this movie seems to have forgotten, or maybe never even comprehended, maybe I should help out Ben Shapiro, the references might have gone over his head or whatever, um, I, Barbie land is not meant to be how things are supposed to be.

0:49:48 Lydia: Right.

0:49:48 Thomas: That Is not. It's actually, this is gonna blow your mind, Ben, it's actually designed to reverse roles and show the the shortcomings of our current situation by role reversal. So every time he takes like, oh, this movie hates men because Ken doesn't even get an identity. Yeah, man, that's the point. It's reversed.

0:49:49 Lydia: Mm-hmm. Mm‑hmm. And Raking.

0:50:10 Thomas: It's supposed to be a reverse world. And by the way, by the end of the movie, spoilers, the end of the movie isn't, oh no, the way Barbieland was is perfect. That's how everything should be. That's not what it is. The way it ends is actually, mentioned I earlier, I was worried for how it was going to come in for a landing. You know, wasn't sure. I love how it ended. And I some think of the lines at the end were so crucial to pulling it off, having to it be like a pretty good message all around, in my opinion, and completely answer every one of Ben Shapiro's stupid idiot points that he's too dumb to see or he just doesn't want to because he just wants to critique a movie that, you know, is around Barbie.

0:50:46 Lydia: The money, yeah.

0:50:47 Thomas: Yeah, it's, but like, this is supposed to be a smart guy. Yeah, he's completely missed the fact that it's it's role reversal to prove a point.

0:50:54 Clip: Sort of against the concept of Ken and Barbie. But the basic idea is that Barbie is an independent woman and Ken is completely superfluous. We then go to the beach, and there is a scene on the beach where the Kens are supposed to be the lifeguards and the ladies are playing on the beach, and we get a series of gay masturbation jokes. Again, it's an audience for children. They're talking about beaching each other off.

0:51:16 Clip: There's a line where Ken says to another one of the Kens, I'm going to beat you off, get it, get it, you get it, because it's like, like, beat you off, but beach you off, and then they repeat that no less than four or five times in the span of 45 seconds. If I Wasn't Severely injured.

0:51:28 Thomas: It's lot more than that.

0:51:29 Clip: I Would beat you up For right Now Ken I'll beat you with you any day, Ken, anyone who wants to beat him up has to beat me off first. I will beat both of you off at the same time. Nobody's gonna beat anyone off, bazinga, because it just such a great gay masturbation joke, you got to go for it. I mean, what else will the seven-year-old girls in the the audience. Think if you don't go for the gay masturbation joke on the beach, clearly, clearly.

0:51:29 Lydia: I Was Gonna Say it Was Way More Than that.

0:51:53 Thomas: Again, did the seven year old girls drive themselves to the movie? I guess it's just them like he's not familiar with the concept of more adult jokes being subtly put into children's things anyway. By the way, of we don't have to keep repeating it. But just in case he's wrong about the fucking audience, it's PG-13. So, yeah, but again, going with him, that's what we love about like when Lydia and I watch stuff with the kids. Don't I don'T really need any like adult sex jokes in there, but I love like some of the adult references or adult jokes in that'S when I know it'S good kids thing. That'S like, all right, thank you for tossing us some crumbs, you KNOW, to enjoy while we'RE stuck there.

0:52:11 Lydia: Yeah. Right.

0:52:28 Lydia: You Know We're sitting here

0:52:30 Thomas: Yeah, if IT'S bluey or if IT's another thing where IT'S like yeah, no, THAT'S really funny. And then Phoebe, of course, always wants to know why we laugh. Like she has to know every explanation. So I don't think she asked for the movie theater. She doesn't really talk. So that's good. We've raised her right. I'll be honest here. I didn't really find the beach people off that funny. Like I didn'T really think, yeah.

0:52:30 Lydia: Too Yeah Like Yeah I don't Know, I did Well

0:52:48 Thomas: Like it was okay. I'm not saying it was bad. Like I'm fine with it, but it didn'T, I felt like you needed to justify it a little more. It didn'T DON'T. Make, They just went right into it, BUT I DIDN'T, unless I missed it, Did they set up, like, why that would even make sense? Is that a thing in the world that...

0:53:01 Lydia: I Mean, like what I said, you know, Ken, he knows beach, right? Like That, that's what he says. It's like, like, it's not even that he's a lifeguard, he just does beach, that's All he does, and I think that was set up right before that scene. You Know But It is Like a Line, and then, yeah, and then they're gonna compete at who's better At beach.

0:53:05 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know, but that still doesn't really... It's Fine. Yeah, like I said, I mean, whatever. It's neither here nor there. I'm just saying, like... I don't love every single component of this movie because I'm a hopeless, woke, you know, only going to fucking go to bat for anything woke. Like, I don't know. That joke was fine. I was like, meh, okay. I get it? And you, it was funny, but like, I just have to point out too, not it's a gay masturbation joke if You beat someone else off, they're not Masturbating Like I don't, am I crazy? Am I taking crazy pills? Okay.

0:53:37 Lydia: Right. It's Not masturbating. Yeah.

0:53:47 Clip: Female president Barbie, because this, of course, the greatest of all possible worlds of Kamala Harris. The Barbie version is the president of the United States. And then we get the break. Right. Then we get the actual plot point. Plot point number one. Barbie has irrepressible thoughts of death. So, again, at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, wait a second, isn't this a kid's movie?

0:54:03 Clip: Isn't this supposed to be made for seven year

0:54:03 Thomas: No, You Were The One Who Thought that we were all here being like, yeah, no, I'm enjoying this movie because it has adult themes that you can, yes, you can take a kid to it, Because the beat you off thing is the the most adult thing, and that's fine because they either don't get it or if they're old enough to get it, who fucking cares?

0:54:12 Lydia: Yeah. Right.

0:54:19 Thomas: Doesn't matter.

0:54:19 Clip: Old girls? Roles? Nope. It's about existential angst over mortality.

0:54:24 Lydia: Angst.

0:54:25 Clip: That's what this film is about. Now, again, interlaced through all of this is just more and more and More Politics, right? One of the Barbies is a trans Barbie, and this is treated totally normally, as though this is a female Barbie with a voice, again deeper than my own.

0:54:36 Lydia: Because It is Normal That

0:54:39 Thomas: Sorry. What's the politics in that?

0:54:41 Lydia: Trans people exist.

0:54:42 Thomas: Yeah. No, Ben, explain to me the politics. What is the, what is the just a person? There's also, by the way, there's also an Asian person in the, in the cat. There's, there are black people. Is that, Hey Ben, is that politics? Tell me what the politics of that is.

0:54:42 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. An Asian, can Well, especially in his mind that it's the Kamala Harris Barbie, right? Right, that's the only black woman In Politics.

0:54:59 Thomas: Yeah. Ben, real quick. Tell me the ethics of that. And tell me the for and against, like who, which, what are the sides of that political? Just real quick, just tell me like, just what it is. Like what's of politics, one side is, is it okay that trans people exist, and the other side is what? What is it, it's god, it's unreal.

0:55:15 Lydia: Yeah.

0:55:18 Clip: Thoughts of death, and it comes along with physical symptoms, like, for example, her feet flatten out. Again, this is one of the few cute jokes in the movie, is that Barbie walks around around and just like a

0:55:18 Thomas: Oh. Wait, I thought A second ago he said all the jokes were done after that point, that he said, remember, There were no more jokes, but no, he actually likes this again because it was funny.

0:55:28 Lydia: Yeah.

0:55:33 Clip: Normal Barbie doll. When you take off the shoes, the feet are shaped like the shoe, like the high heel. But now she's turning into like a real world person. And so her feet collapse, right?

0:55:38 Lydia: They're All screaming.

0:55:42 Clip: And so she goes to see Weird Barbie. So Weird Barbie is a Barbie that has been played with too hard and has all the knowledge, not only about Barbie Land, but also about the real world. And apparently there's a connection between people playing with the Barbies and the Barbys. If people playing with Barbies are sad, then the Barbios also get sad. Weird that this has only happened to Barbie because it turns out that lots of people are sad and played with Barbies for a very long time, but that's the plot point, fine.

0:55:34 Thomas: It's Funny Yeah It's Fucking Great It's Amazing Yeah

0:55:49 Lydia: Love It Yeah

0:56:05 Thomas: Man.

0:56:05 Clip: Again.

0:56:05 Thomas: We're also dealing with a world in which Barbies are real, like, yeah, okay, We're gonna suspend some disbelief, and I'm the guy who like, yeah, I like it when movies do their best to try to make the world make sense, like even, even with suspension of disbelief, but like, no, they even reference, I think, in the movie, don't they reference like it's happened before? Yeah. Weird Barbie kind of is that

0:56:25 Lydia: Well, Weird Barbie has To Have Happened Before, right? Like, like The way that she looks is because there is a connection between the real world and Barbie land. And she wasn't sold off of a shelf looking like that.

0:56:28 Thomas: Yeah Yeah Yeah But also, I, I think Will Ferrell maybe talks about like A different time that happened, or Something, yeah, so it's like okay, man, yeah, oh, you got him, it should have already happened before, whatever, oh.

0:56:41 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:56:47 Clip: The concept of, like, a Barbie that was played with too hard is very funny because everybody has seen that before, and They somehow Blow this

0:56:50 Thomas: Oh What's That another joke that was funny after the time you said that all the humor was done after the first minute of the movie.

0:56:56 Clip: Somehow they make this into a not funny thing, so Weird Barbie Is Is Ugly And She has Bad Makeup And all the rest of it, and she informs Barbie she has to go to the real world, and she's to find the person who is playing with her And Just to make that Person feel better, because that will heal the problem that she's having in Barbie land. Okay, so we have our plot, plot point, right? We have the thing that's going to launch us off into the rest of the movie. And then it's just a complete mess from here on in.

At least to this point, it's kind of dumb, but coherent. From here on it, it makes no sense at all. Again, Kate McKinnon sets up the dichotomy that pretty much the makers of the film hate Barbie by suggesting that you can live in fantasy land with Barbie and you can take the Barbie shoe or you can think Birkenstocks, right. You can you can become like a Portland lesbian and you Can learn about reality. That's going to be the choice that you have to make. But not before she makes a joke about Ken and wanting to see the nude blob he is packing under those pants.

0:56:59 Thomas: Okay He Doesn't Think That's funny, it's Really Good Oh Man The rollerblades What

0:57:03 Lydia: Hilarious.

0:57:27 Lydia: No.

0:57:27 Thomas: Hmm Man

0:57:44 Lydia: Also very funny.

0:57:45 Clip: That's so... Somebody said that? Perfect for eight-year-old girls, ladies, mothers. Just be warned.

0:57:48 Lydia: I'm a mom and I loved it. Yeah.

0:57:50 Thomas: It's amazing, the seven-year-old I guess had a birthday in the middle of watching this. Yeah, it's funny, okay, Ben, was the theater just you and the hundred seven-year-old girls, was that what the theater was, or was there maybe other, like, people, like, other human adult people in there, who's, I know you don't want to acknowledge they exist because they're not men, but were they maybe enjoying that joke, like my wife just did?

0:58:13 Lydia: Yeah, I loved it.

0:58:14 Clip: Ken and Barbie head off to the real world to try to find the person who is playing with Barbie. And immediately upon arriving in the real World, Barbie is hit with an overwhelming tsunami of sexism. Like right away, boom. Boom. She walks in and a bunch of men just leer at her and say, give us a smile, Blondie, which is something that no one under the age of 70 has said to a woman in the recent past.

0:58:35 Lydia: You're right. They would say way worse stuff. Yeah, But it's a kid's movie. But yeah, no Margot Robbie. Absolutely. Would experience that unfortunately because people are terrible. Yeah.

0:58:36 Thomas: Yeah, movie. Well, Well, and he leaves out the fact that like they're dressed in the 80s Barbie thing with the rollerblades. Like, that also is why people are ogling them, it's not. He tries to paint it like, I know it's, it's audio medium here, but he does show the scene in his movie and like, anyone with eyes could be like, well, okay, it's not like they're just getting ogled because of sexism. It's also that everyone is looking at their outfits because they're really funny. Yeah.

0:58:50 Lydia: Right. Well, Yeah, I mean, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling both said before the movie came out, they said, you know, filming that scene and being in those costumes was really uncomfortable because they were being stared at. You know, they felt very awkward and weird, you know, skating down the beach, near the beach and stuff in L.A. So I think that was actually a real experience for them, that they did feel uncomfortable in some ways.

0:59:34 Thomas: Um, but, hun, it's not realistic to ever have been like cat called or harassed on the street as a woman, right? There's No, it's never, literally never happened. And, and this is fucking Ryan Gosling and Marco Robbie too.

0:59:39 Lydia: Oh, yeah. No way. That's never happened ever.

0:59:47 Thomas: Like, yeah, no, one's going to not look at them, but like, I'm so glad you just said that. Cause I was going to say, I was gonna make an allowance for like, yeah. No, that line is kind of corny. That's a weird, that isn't what people say. And I'll be honest. I didn't even think of the fact that like, Like, yeah, obviously, because they say we're shit and you don't want to put it in this. Yeah, it's not exclusively for a seven year old, but it is a PG-13 movie. The kinds of stuff that I'm sure has been said to you on the street, hun, isn't stuff that you'd really want to like put in a movie.

0:59:47 Lydia: They're beautiful. Yeah.

1:00:03 Lydia: Yeah, correct.

1:00:17 Lydia: Don't I know that a lot of it would be PG-13. Honestly, I think a lot of it would be pretty intense. And yeah.

1:00:24 Thomas: You know, he would have just complained more. It would be like, oh, no one would ever say that. Like, so now that I think about it, his complaint distills down to, you the cat calling isn't sexist enough. It would be more, you know, gross. And you know what? You're right. You're Right. But it's, you know, some things are allowances movie for magic. You know, like we know it's a movie. And one part of that is they have to tone down the awful sexism that women experience on the street often. But again, it's so funny if it's something for kids like that, where it's toned down for kids. Oh, you idiot, stupid movie. That's unreal. If it's something that's like slightly adult, but by the way, not even like explicitly slightly adult. Oh, I thought this was a fucking kids movie.

1:00:26 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah

1:00:49 Clip: Say, smile, blondie. Seriously. We get Barbie explaining that all of the men who are leering at her, gazing

1:01:10 Thomas: They can't win

1:01:10 Lydia: OK.

1:01:12 Clip: At her. They have an undertone of violence. Everything's, she's threatened. She's physically threatened because this is the real world. The real world is not not like Barbie Land. In the real world, all women are victims. They are deep and abiding victims of the system, as

1:01:24 Lydia: Abiding victims. I'm just sitting here like stewing.

1:01:27 Thomas: My God. You can't show a single instance of something. Otherwise, that means you're apparently claiming that's every single person ever. If we show one instance in a movie of a woman getting harassed, oh, I guess that just means every woman is just like... Dude, are you five? Like, how old are you? How, actually, for real, how old have you been? You look, look like you're, you're 13. so I never know, you're perpetually 13. I know he like drew on a beard on himself to look older, but like, I, yeah, I don't know how old he is. I I

1:01:56 Lydia: Then isn't this an opportunity you kind of spin victimhood, right? Being able to talk about this, to present it, and to kind of call it out in that way, that's that's a woman not allowing herself to be a victim anymore. So then it's also not okay to present that because we're victims, but we're not allowed to not be victims. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

1:02:12 Thomas: Well, It goes to, as you said, it goes through the speech at the end because I only know, because he's showing me the clips, I wouldn't have remembered this, but she just punches a guy that like slaps her butt. Isn't that, isn't actually right?

1:02:25 Lydia: I wish I could do that.

1:02:28 Thomas: That's actually what conservatives think. You can just do. Oh, I, I don't get it. Why don't you, a hundred and fucking 40 pound woman or whatever, punch a full grown man? Like, why don't you just do that? That'll be fine. That'll work out great.

1:02:30 Lydia: Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah I, I don't know If you remember this, but you, um, know one time walking down the the street and someone placed their hands on my chest, like on my breasts. And I just like stared and I didn't know what to do. And then I walked away, I wish I could have punched them.

1:02:54 Thomas: I remembered an incident, but I guess I didn't remember it was that Jesus. When was that?

1:02:58 Lydia: Yeah. It was 2013, I want to say. Yeah. Walking to the Safeway by work. Just walking Walking in the middle of day, literally the middle of the day, was touched.

1:03:10 Thomas: The But surely you were wearing something that meant that someone could just do that or something. Yeah, it's so fucking stupid. Yeah. And sure if you would have punched him in the face, it would have been, that would have solved it, right? It would have Been 100% great.

1:03:14 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Slacks and, yeah. No, I'm pretty sure they, I would have been hit back or something, or you. I mean, she also gets arrested. Like, there is a consequence to the choice that she makes there.

1:03:26 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, if anything, that's like the conservative, like, wet dream of how this goes, I think. Actually.

1:03:35 Clip: By the use of the word patriarchy no less than 10 times in this film. She gets arrested like twice for various crimes. Even the police officers are rabid, raging sexists. The police officers aren't hitting on Barbie. They're making observations about her appearance.

1:03:45 Lydia: I believe it. Yep.

1:03:47 Clip: Ken, meanwhile,

1:03:47 Thomas: Look, I don't want to get dark, but like, we know that police officers literally rape women that they have in custody. Like, on a fucking daily basis. Oh, but them making some sexist comments, that's not in my America. That never happens. They're Just fucking idiot, they're just don't know what the world is like, it's, it's, conservatives are the most pampered, babied, they just don't, they haven't ever had to grapple with actual earth, it's so insane.

1:03:54 Lydia: Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:15 Clip: Is getting super happy because Ken, who's been sort of an underling in Barbie Land, now he's realizing he's part of the patriarchy and the patri hierarchy is awesome. Ken is loving the patriarchy. Now, you might imagine at this point that the way the film is going to go is that Ken and Barbie are going to have to some sort of agree about seeing each other as equal human beings. You might imagine that's where it's wrong. That's not where the film is gonna go. You may have thought that what you were going to get was Ken gets treated with respect as a person and Barbie gets treated with a respect as person. And that's better, nope, wrong. In the end, not to skip ahead, Barbie Lynn just gets restored and the men are still subservient.

1:04:43 Lydia: That is where we end up. No,

1:04:47 Clip: That is the best version of the world.

1:04:47 Lydia: That's not what

1:04:44 Thomas: Yeah. It is it is No, That's not what happens It's Not actually what happens, so he just didn't watch the movie, okay?

1:04:48 Lydia: Happens at all. Yeah.

1:04:52 Thomas: That I wasn't sure if he was going to say something that would, that make this relevant again, but just in case he doesn't. You know, earlier he mentioned how, only exists if Barbie notices him and only has, you know... And went we through that. Like, role it's reversal. And I was just reminded, hun, we just did on Serious Inquiries Only for the bonus, and actually the first half was on the main feed, Armageddon. Not too long ago. And by the way, there's still movies that do this every fucking day.

1:04:49 Clip: Okay,

1:05:16 Lydia: Yeah.

1:05:16 Thomas: But, like, Armagedden, absolutely hysterically shitty movie. But that's 25 years ago and the female character just does nothing but be an object for the men at all. That's all she does the whole time to pretend like that's some wildly insane take that like through the role reversal we're showing, by the way, through showing Ken like that in Barbie land, that is saying, I'll help you out, Ben. That suggesting that the reverse is actually true in the real world.

1:05:27 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:45 Thomas: And that's how movies fucking still to this day often work. Like there's still movies that don't pass the Bechdel test all the time. If I remember right, there was a recent year where like a bunch of the best picture nominees, like actually didn't even pass the Beckdell test. Like it's, it's still to this day, a problem. It's way better, but then it's getting better. But like, it's still a huge problem. It's absolutely a valid critique to to bring up.

1:05:53 Lydia: Can

1:06:08 Clip: So Ken is walking around and he's really enjoying the patriarchy and all of this. And he explains that men rule this world and he goes to Mattel and all the members of the board are men. By the way, I'd like to see a corporate breakdown of the Mattel board. I'll bet I can find it. Like the CEO of Mattel for 30 years was a woman. So there's that. They pretend that like Mattel is all run by men. So I just,

1:06:08 Thomas: Sure.

1:06:29 Lydia: I chime in with some history, So right? The CEO for 30 years at the beginning of Mattel, yes, was a woman. It was Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie. And the reason that she was CEO of Mattel was because she and her husband, Elliot Handler, were making furniture and things like that. He was an engineer, an inventor. They paired up with Harold Mattson, Mattel, right? Mattsson and Elliot.

1:06:31 Thomas: I

1:06:56 Lydia: And they couldn't fit Ruth's name in there. And because Elliot Handle was an engineer, he was really like the toy maker. Mattsons died shortly after they created the the company. And so Ruth was CEO. I personally think if Matheson were alive, I don't know if Ruth would have been CEO.

1:06:56 Thomas: Didn't know that.

1:07:15 Lydia: And, and she, she ran the company for for, 30 years and then they had some tax problems and stuff. They stepped down. Then I just kind of looked at, okay, what did the board look like, you know, going backwards? You know, right now it's about split, lit, like he says, 50-50 mostly. But in 2013, 10 years ago, there were 13 board members and three of them were women. If you go back to 2000, there Were 12 board members at that time. There was one woman.

1:07:14 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, but 2000 is a hundred years ago, so that's yeah.

1:07:45 Lydia: Yeah. We've been equal this entire time, right? Yeah.

1:07:46 Thomas: Yep. Let's I want to see if says anything more about this, because I also did some some digging on the some of this history.

1:07:51 Lydia: Oh, cool.

1:07:53 Clip: Now I want to know who's on the board. Okay. CEO is, is Chairman and CEO is a dude. The board includes one, two, three, four, five. It includes five women. So it's six men and five women. Clearly patriarchal domination. Clearly patriarchal nomination. Just wanted to look that up just for the sake of accuracy. Whenever I do these reviews, like, oh, you're taking the movie too seriously. The movie takes itself too seriously, guys. It pretends

1:08:18 Thomas: The opposite of okay, I like, I like, I'll be fair, like there is a lot of preaching in the movie, is it, but it doesn't, you wouldn't say it takes itself seriously, like it finds those moments to make serious points, but it's also very silly, like it doesn's that's not, anyway, fucking all right.

1:08:34 Lydia: Yeah,

1:08:34 Clip: To be a comedy, But it's taking itself super seriously. Fine. So, it's all men at the top of Mattel, and they realize that Barbie

1:08:35 Lydia: Yeah.

1:08:38 Thomas: Okay. So I looked at, instead of looking at Mattel specifically, I looked it kind of just in general, like, okay, is this a valid point to make, by the way, because doesn't like, again, you're allowed to make points about the fucking world old, even historically. And by the way, there's a famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote where someone asked her, like, you when will it be enough women on the court? And she said, well, when there are nine.

1:09:02 Lydia: Yep.

1:09:03 Thomas: And it's like, don't, you know, I'm not sure. I think it's tongue in cheek, I believe somewhat, but it's, I think it's really valuable to point out, especially to people like, like Ben and anyone, by the way, who has that kind of latent sexism or that unexamined feeling, a lot of terms of racial progress, diversity, all that kind of stuff. A lot of that is met with this assumption that the minute that any demographic that's not white men hits like something around the quota, you know, like, all right, we've got up to five women and there's still six men, so they can be outvoted, obviously. But like that's, shut up, stop complaining, it's like no, there should be like tons of companies where it's all women, like for a hundred years, like if we want to really even things out, we should get 150 years of the Supreme Court being nine women yeah.

1:09:31 Lydia: Yeah that's And then we'll be 50-50 after

1:09:50 Thomas: Like at the very, like, if you want to say like okay, that's not the best way forward, okay, yeah, it might not be the best wave, sure. Sure. Like just practically speaking, it might be better to like still maintain some sort of diversity or something to keep people happy. But to suggest that like it's insane to even suggest there's been a problem with diversity because like some of these things have gotten up to maybe something like parody is insane. And so I just want, you know, again, we're talking about the ancient past here, hon. Um, women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, I'm gonna, do we can do a, not little trivia so much as just a guessing

1:09:50 Lydia: That. Yeah, totally.

1:10:26 Lydia: Okay.

1:10:26 Thomas: Game. 1995, what percentage do you think, uh, women CEO's Fortune 500?

1:10:31 Lydia: 1985.

1:10:31 Thomas: Zero percent, so that's not great. And 1995 is, I mean, that's 4,000 years ago, right? There's not, well, that's before Columbus, so fucking no, it's, I remember 1995, um, but don't worry, as we went into the future, the year 2000, what do you think it leapt up to?

1:10:32 Lydia: 2%. Okay. Yeah.

1:10:48 Lydia: 2005%. Five percent.

1:10:50 Thomas: 0.4%. So yeah, no, exactly. So that means, I mean, we can do the math. What does that mean? There was like two, right?

1:10:50 Lydia: I'm being too nice, geez. Yeah.

1:10:59 Thomas: Yeah, that's two. And so 2000 though, again, that is before dinosaurs. So now, let us see, 2005 though, surely, I am not that is, actually to me that is kind of yesterday. This is just going to make us feel old. Yeah. Okay. 2005 though. Surely, you know, we fixed everything, right? Post-history. What was it up to in 2005? What's your guess?

1:11:04 Lydia: You're in college. All right, I'm gonna go back down to two percent. All right.

1:11:19 Thomas: Oh, there you go. 1.8%. Pretty

1:11:21 Lydia: Okay.

1:11:21 Thomas: Close.

1:11:21 Lydia: I figured it out.

1:11:23 Thomas: Yeah. But again, that was, you know, that's like when George Washington was president. So like, but now in 2010, what do you think we're at?

1:11:26 Lydia: Four percent.

1:11:31 Thomas: 3%. You're trying, you're doing a great job of trying to like moderate. You still can't match how pathetic the progress has been. 3%. But again that's 2010, so it's like that's yesterday. Okay, 2050, I'll just finish it out, 2015.

1:11:35 Lydia: Yeah. That's ridiculous and yeah Sure.

1:11:48 Thomas: 2015, we were this close to having a woman president within a year. What do you think it is? Nice, nice job, 4.8, and that's looked at. By the way, we're getting into the point where people are making the argument, like, we don't, it's, there's no sexism like we're done. Yeah, 2020, what the... The last thing where the data is, where do you think we are? 2020.

1:11:49 Lydia: 5.3 percent okay we're good I'm gonna say 4.9 percent can Okay. So, I mean, still not great, but they jumped up higher than I thought they would. I was looking at like no progress, but

1:12:13 Thomas: Well, 7.4%.

1:12:22 Thomas: Yeah, but look at how much your expectations have been reduced. Introduced your

1:12:23 Lydia: Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, exactly. I started off with what I thought was reasonable. And then I was like, okay, never mind. Let me go to like the tiniest change.

1:12:33 Thomas: Starting Guest was almost the all-time high. Now I think actually in '20, like a few more took over. And, and there's, by the way, if you don't know this, there's an interesting, not you, hun, but anybody listening, there's really interesting, um, I can't remember if it was a paper or something, study or something like that, that was done about how also a lot of the female CEOs are just installed when things are gone to shit and they just are there to like be the fucking captain that goes down with the show. That's a great example, yeah, by the way.

1:12:38 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Well, isn't that Twitter? Yeah. Yeah.

1:13:03 Thomas: And, and I haven't heard thing one from whoever the CEO of Twitter is, it's still fucking Elon Musk just tweeting. But yeah, no, it's, it's not only is it a pathetically low percentage, still off, a bunch of those, are they put a woman in when everything's gone to shit, probably ruined by men by the way, and so that they look good. Oh, we're hiring a woman. And then, like, like they expect the woman's basically going to take the fall for the thing being shitty. And then they can be like, well, that didn't work out. See, women can't really even do anything. And then, but what's funny is like a lot of times the women have like the whole shape of the company. Like they've actually pulled through some of the examples.

1:13:21 Lydia: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

1:13:41 Thomas: I got to find what that was. It was whole thing I read. But anyway, yeah, no, this is nothing like. Yeah, OK. Literally, Mattel might be slightly better than average coverage. Um, oh, it also has board members, by the way. I won't I won, it'll be tedious to go through the whole thing, but 1995, 9.6 board members. Now keep in mind, that's going to be higher because this is an important thing, too. A board member seat, a thing that you can throw to a quote-unquote minority that like diversity high, like if you're, you know, the white dude in charge, which, which again, we already at 1995, 100% men in charge of these Fortune 500 companies, 100%, not 90%, not 100%. So it was, uh, very easy, something like a board where it's, you know, 11, 13, whatever it is, however many people you can, for PR purposes, a woman, a person of color or whatever on there. And they functionally have no power. Like they cannot do anything. And so, but it makes you look good. So that's why this will be a little bit higher, I think, because of a lot of that, too.

1:13:52 Lydia: Oh, right. Yeah, right?

1:14:43 Lydia: Well, and I think you'll also see significant growth because there was a push to diversify boards. Right? And so like you're saying, there's no risk. One votes, one vote. So they were like, Okay, yeah, fine. Here you go.

1:14:56 Thomas: Yeah, there's a lot of ways that obviously entrenched power like will try to look like it's making progress without actually handing progress. The curve is a little better on board membership. I still I mean, again, it goes from 99.5, 9.6 percent to 2020 latest data on this particular study. 27 percent. I mean it's still it's better. But like think about what that means. Like you could have, it's almost like gerrymandering. Like you could have not a single board where women could be deciding the deciding vote, whereas literally every single board could be, if the men united and wanted to vote something, they could get it through, which I, you know, that's, that's probably not how like decisions in a fortune 500 company work. It's not, I get that. It'S not like a gender based battle all the time, but I'm the point being as functionally, as far as the power is concerned, earned, that's the relationship of power.

Like, again, you're supposed to just be fine with the fact that like, yeah, you can, what was that fantastic headline? I think it was when Kamala was either elected VP or nominated VP. I can't remember. Dr. Kate Manne, who I love, wrote a book called Down Girl. She has another one either out or coming out. Anyway, wrote, it was an opinion piece in New York Times, and the title was Women Can Have a Little Power as a Treat.

1:15:20 Lydia: Yeah? Yeah.

1:16:10 Thomas: And the subtitle was A Female Vice President Would Be Tasked with Wielding Power in the Service of a More Powerful Man. That's No Challenge to the Patriarchy. And, you know, we don't have to get into that. Reading is more nuanced. It's like, yeah, it's a constant battle of, well, it's good to be happy with some amount of progress, but also when that progress doesn't functionally do anything, it's also like, well, what do you just expect us to always be happy with like a little bit of progress that doesn't actually fucking change anything? Thing so anyway.

1:16:15 Lydia: Yeah.

1:16:37 Lydia: Yeah. Well, and I want to say, I have you an interesting and fortunate position in that my day job is very full of female leadership, lots of women leaders. And that has been very empowering for me as I've been stepping into leadership roles, joining a call and it's woman, woman, women, woman all up to the top of the chain like has just been really, different and helps me feel confident and prepared and like I can actually attain things because I have these leaders I can look up to.

1:17:14 Thomas: Representation makes a huge difference, yeah.

1:17:16 Lydia: Yeah.

1:17:17 Clip: And Ken have escaped, escaped Barbie Land, and this presents some sort of threat. What kind of threat? Because the writers are shitty, they don't bother explaining, they're just like, a threat. And Will Ferrell acts all weird and goofy, like Will Ferrel, and he's funny because it's Will Ferrol acting weird and goofy, but he's not funny because he's just Will Ferral with no actual plot or dialogue to speak of, just being weird, we'll fill that in later. There's so many places in the script where it's basically like the writers just, they left a gap, and they're like, we'll leave a couple asterisks, we'll fill it in later. And then later they got there and they'll like, we're just, we'll just skip right over it. Fine. So they figured they got to track down Barbie and Ken. And meanwhile, Barbie is trying to trackdown the girl who's playing with her. And she mistakenly thinks that it is a teenage girl who is playing with and who is unhappy. And at this point, she receives a lecture from the teenage girl about how Barbie has ruined the world and actually is fascist.

1:18:06 Clip: How Barbie is a sexualized capitalistic emblem. How Barbie has created unattainable feminine ideals. How how Barbie is ruining the planet with rampant consumerism. You get like this full lecture right in the middle of the film. It's truly awful. It's really awful. She's called a fascist. By the way, it only sets up the only good line of the film, truly, in my opinion. There's one good line in the film, and that is where Barbie is trying to contemplate whether she's fascist or not. And she says, I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce. Now, there's only one problem with that line. As with the entire movie, there is no character consistency. Barbie is supposed to be an idiot bubblehead piece of plastic from Barbie land.

1:18:40 Clip: How does she know what a fascists is? How does she know what About the flow of commerce, like, again, just In terms of character consistency Like characters who actually are the characters makes no sense whatsoever, so Ken

1:18:43 Thomas: So. Good. Yeah. But Anyway, I just also want to point out that he loved that line, which is Again, after The first three seconds that he said there wasn't any funny lines, this is interesting because think he's also missed the fact that, like, the speech by the, I guess, Gen Z character, that's also pretty cruel. I like, I like that scene because, yeah, she's saying a lot, a lot of pretty valid things, but she's also being shitty and she's just being shitty to a woman in distress in Margot Robbie. And nuance is not Ben's strong suit. He doesn't understand any of this, but I liked it because it's, exactly not an easy thing. Yeah. It's not a fucking? Aaron Sorkin thing where she makes a speech and then Barbie sits down at the end of it. Cause she's just so defeat. No, it'S not that it's actually, she makes this speech. Yeah, okay. It's, It's a bit of a speech.

I get it. But like, also it's not nice. Um, itS really mean and it has some good points, but the point of the movie, I think, and my, and let me know what you you thought on this moment is not to fully endorse that. It's to set up like, okay, yeah, those are some valid views, but like with the bathwater. Like you don't half to be that shitty about it all. Like, you can still enjoy some things that you liked and you can, still by the way, be compassionate in the moment.

1:18:55 Lydia: My God. Yeah, I do, too. Yeah.

1:20:03 Thomas: I know it's mixing kind of metaphor forward reality. But I think that's, that's intentional. Like, I think we've seen a lot of that just in our community, there's times where people use progressive politics or social justice or whatever, to just be really shitty and be mean to people. And that's not cool. Like it's actually like, I'm not a fan of that. Some people are super big fan of it, I'm not, I think that's shitty, you know, like I think it's often people who just like, to bully people, finding like a socially acceptable way to do that, and sometimes it might be valid, I don't know, but like I liked all that tension in that scene. I think what Do you think, yeah.

1:20:36 Lydia: Well, and for me, I just felt like it was accurate in that Sasha, I think her name is, daughter. The I mean, what, they're eighth grade? You know, theyre like People that are mean in middle school, school. And, you know, she's surrounded by her friends and this woman, this grown woman, like if she doesn't know that that's a Barbie, right, that she is in the real world. And now you just have this woman that is rushing towards you on your campus and you're surrounded by your friends. You probably feel like, you have this pressure to be cool and to kind of approach the situation in a way that you're Not going to get made fun of too.

And so you take this stance with, with, again, like you said, those are some valid criticisms of Barbie and the role that Barbie has had in the world. And it's the first time that Margot Robbie as Barbie is hearing that those are criticisms of her. And I think that's important for her, right, on her journey, her character arc, to hear it from a person in the real world that Barbie is not what she thought She was to humans. And again, it is needlessly cruel. But we're talking about like a 13 year old. So they're just needlessly cool.

1:20:47 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right.

1:21:49 Thomas: That's so great that you point that out because that's their entire shtick is taking what a kid said as like, that has to be representative of the entire progressive left or The woke left or whatever. And you're totally right. That's, that's hilarious because yeah, like maybe a kid doesn't make all the perfect points in the best way because they're a fucking kid.

1:22:07 Thomas: And that's Totally fine that they might do that. Um, also just the thing about the the fascists and the trains. I thought that was funny, that read to me as just like the people in that world, like obviously pointless, and it's just like splitting hairs, but the Barbies in Barbie Land have to know something to function, like they're not just like Blank.

1:21:59 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, well,

1:22:28 Thomas: Whatever's, and I took that as like, oh, they have like it's almost like they have a textbook kind of knowledge from from 1960 something when they were invented, you know, I, yeah, that's how I read it. Oh, that's a good comparison. Yeah. That's kind of how I reddit. Like she just knows like, Oh, what a history textbook would define as fascism. Not what like the real world has done in the last 50 years or whatever. That'S how I read it.

1:22:27 Lydia: Yeah, that chat GPT. Right. Right, and the and the nuance to it too. Right? Because like you see that in Barbie land, it's you have this role. It's well defined. It'S very, you know, obvious, Supreme Court president, you know, you're just kind of going through it. And the real world is a lot messier than that.

1:22:54 Thomas: Right. Hmm. Yeah, good point.

1:23:04 Clip: Is wandering around enjoying the patriarchy more and more, and he keeps asking men about patriarchy, and at one point he asks a dude about the patriarch, and the guy says, "Well, that's not really the way that it works here anymore." He says, "Really?" He says, "No, it still works that way, we just hide it really well."

1:23:10 Thomas: So funny.

1:23:19 Clip: Again, you can't even present the mild other side of the film. And this sort of

1:23:24 Thomas: Sorry, what, what is, what? You can't present the mild other side. What, What, is Sorry, what is this new rule, Ben? In your world, any movie, there can't be a movie that's just for women that says women's stuff. Like, again, in his mind, like that, like, that's beyond the pale. Can't do it. You have to, what about the men though? Like, what about the men? You have to present the man, what, not all men, like, he's not all-manning the Barbie movie. Oh my god, dude, again, there's 18 levels of why he's wrong, but you also could just, you could literally be Ben Shapiro, no, you shouldn't be Ben, you could be someone who agrees with a lot of his shitty takes and just be like, oh, guess that movie's not for me, guess

1:23:27 Lydia: Yeah. What's the other side?

1:23:40 Lydia: Yeah. Right.

1:24:09 Thomas: Someone made a movie that's not, not for me, but nope. That kind of person, nothing is not for them. Everything's for them, yeah, exactly. Literally, it is. All right, I'm cutting us off there, Normies, sorry, but I hope you enjoyed that, that was, wow, almost 80 minutes, so, definitely got, got your money's worth, no, if you'd like to hear the rest, please go to patreon.com/wherethereswoke, there's a lot of good stuff there, plus some, some callbacks that you didn't get to hear yet, so hope you enjoy it, regardless, we'll see you very soon for regular episodes of Where There's Woke.

1:24:15 Lydia: Well, because the patriarchy. Oh,