Enter the Barbie Longhouse
Gynocracy Comes for the Dolls
Spoiler alert: Lots of spoilers abound in this review. Beware!
I walked out of the Barbie movie stunned and in disbelief. Hollywood darling Greta Gerwig, the scowling girlboss writer-director of this guaranteed smash-hit, has somehow made the first movie explicitly set inside the Longhouse.
And she did it totally by accident.
What a time to be alive!
The Longhouse Dreamhouse
If you are still confused about what the “longhouse” is, the Barbie movie is here to set you straight.
To Greta Gerwig and her heavily longhoused life partner and cowriter Noah Baumbach, the feminist Longhouse is good, actually. It’s the only thing keeping men—and Ken—in their place. Greta and her doll-alter-ego are still, always, forever, fighting the mythological patriarchy from the privilege and safety of their Dreamhouses.
She seems totally oblivious of the fact that in modern-day Hollywood, just like in Barbieland, girls rule. Men, and Kens, are firmly in the backseat. Ms. Gerwig and her girlboss sis…
