Barbie stole my fucking joke.
Howie “Genocide Joke” Echo-Hawk responds.
Listen.
Barbie is fucking funny.
It’s fucking hilarious actually.
So many parts of it work, the jokes land so quickly and so unexpectedly– it was wholly unexpected on my part.
In fact I went in expecting to not like it at all and instead me and my partner and my family were talking at length about our favorite quips and jest.
As far as it’s feminism, it was mostly drivel that never really goes there like how you would like– but hey, thats Hollywood baby. Thats just how they do progressive storytelling. I’m sure people are already telling the world about how it basically just makes the Kens and the other men into cartoon jokey jokesters, which never really alludes to the absolute terror that men and the patriarchy have spread, and continue to spread, throughout the world. IFYKYK, right?
But anyways, let’s get to the thanksgiving turkey of it all.
The “I” in the “BIPOC” of it all.
The “I” in the “DEI.”
The“I” in the genocide.
And so on.
When Ken comes home and just explains how horses and men rule the world (god, it is funny to say that tho), and that patriarchy is good, the Barbies just tip over and fucking accept this new wave of rulership, and all the sudden are brainwashed, finding they actually do prefer being subservient to their new masters.
After Barbie and pals come back, the real world mom says, “Its like the Indigenous people and smallpox, they have no immunity to it!,” or some fucked shit like that, which is uesed as some sort of smug, liberal metaphor for explaining why a president Barbie, nobel prize winning scientist and a writer Barbies (respectively) and everyone else would just bend over and take the plastic mound of non genitals from the Ken Ken Kens (see what I did there?)
I assume that when this line was written, the writers room was silent as from the back of the room Will Ferrel (dressed in the same outfit he wore in the SNL Thanksgiving skit) walked stood and walked slowly to a white (lol) board where “BIPOC” was written in big Barbie block lettering, and as Fred Armisen sang an honor song, he checked off the “I” with a big, sacred red Expo marker, and the room erupted with cheers and applause, confetti fell from the sky, they all screamed “ WE DID IT EVERYONE, WE DID A DIVERSITY!”
Now, listen. I wanna take a quick step back for a second. As a Native person watching this movie, and thus as the speaker and voice for every native you’ve never met, I entered this movie patiently waiting and expecting them to show a Native Barbie, and then I would laugh at how racist it was, or if they updated the image and got a real Native to play her, probably would still laugh.
And as the hilarious owner of a Native American Barbie, I was really looking forward to making some funny pics and vids about that shit. And I assure you that many Native people have a similar experience as my sisters and I do of receiving that as a gift from our Native dad, so that we may have something that we can play with that may look at least somewhat more authentic to us.
(I actually didn’t get one of those, because I was a “boy,” ugh, but I own one now, DAD.) Because as Native people, we have been starved for content related to us, and when anything, and I mean anything, would come out in the mainstream that even slightly resembled us, you would be sure to find it on a powwow shirt, someone’s beadwork, and in our homes. Why? Because we are fucking hilarious, and we will wear a Redskins hat with a racist image on it, because we like doing that shit.
Do we owe you an explanation as to why? No, and also fuck you :)
If there had been a Native Barbie in the movie, there would be so much fucking hilarious memes being made in NDN country right now, and I would have been able to do a special episode of my podcast “Every Native Episode” about it. I probably would have gotten the actor to join!
I COULDVE MADE MONEY OFF OF IT!
WHY WONT YOU LET ME MAKE MONEY, MATTEL!
(Yes there will be more episodes one day, get off my ass, I’m busy twerking.)
But there were no Natives in Barbieland. Just the mention of the real world genocide. And not even the actual genocide. Just the disease those filthy immigrants (see: colonizers are nasty) brought to our shores. No mention of the rape, the pillaging, the murdering of all the buffalo, the intentional destruction of culture, the poisoning of the land, the water, the years and years of laws created to destroy us, none of that mentioned.
Why?
As I am writing this, it really begs the question: What are they hiding?
Is it possible that they were intentionally leaving things out, just as they do in the really world?
Could this mean that there were the Indigenous inhabitants in Barbieland?
In the world of the movie, it is a real imaginary place, inhabited by real imaginary people, and in many ways, it is a twisted mirror reflection of America.
And in the real, real world, there were actual Native American Barbies made. Why did Mattel and the Barbie Movie leave them out? Why did they copy how Native people are talked about in the real world? The casual mention of smallpox to explain away the missing “I?”
No. It has to be deeper than that. We must then assume that there were once Indigenous Barbies Living in the so called “Barbieland.”
It all makes sense! The land of Barbie Land is broken, the ocean is so polluted with plastics that you can now no longer even swim in it, the landscape has no real greenery or natural features at all, the lawns are plastic, the trees are plastic, everything is wrong!
Even the journey out of BarbieLand to the real world is essentially a guided tour through a curated landscape, but it is simply a veneer hiding a rotting and wretched landscape of a wasteland that was once the “pristine and untouched” landscape outside of BarbieLand!
OH.
MY.
GOD.
THEY EVEN HAD THEIR FUCKING BARBIE MOUNT RUSHMORE, REPLICATING THE REAL MOUNT RUSHMORE THAT WAS CARVED INTO THE REAL SACRED BLACK HILLS!
ITS ALL RIGHT THERE, ITS LIKE THEY ARENT EVEN HIDING IT!
WAIT!
WEIRD BARBIE WAS NATIVE!
JESUS FUCK!
WEIRD BARBIE WAS NATIVE AMERICAN BARBIE! LISTEN TO ME! STOP TRYING TO RUN AWAY AND LISTEN TO ME!
“Weird” Barbie had a “weird” haircut and “weird” clothes and “weird” facepaint and “weird” ways of sitting! MOHAWKS, REGALIA, WARPAINT, AND SITTING INDIAN STYLE! FUCK! AND THEN WEIRD NATIVE BARBIE EVEN HELPED THIS FUCKING WHITE SAVIOR BARBIE FIND HER WAY THROUGH THE WILDERNESS, LIKE SOME GODDAMN SACAGAWEA ASS FUCKING LEWIS AND CLARK ASS CALLBACK! Was Stereotypical Barbie hiding some sort of Native Ancestry as well? Her feet, they became flat, just like me! FUCK!
The mountains are clearly cardboard cutouts, hiding what you ask? Perhaps the Barbie Dreamland reservations, where the land is irradiated via the nuclear testing from — oh my god. Its Oppenheimer.
BARBENHEIMER IS REAL!
BENEATH THE SHINY PLASTIC EXTERIOR OF BARBIELAND IS THE STORY OF THE FIRST BARBIES, THE INDIGENOUS INHABITANTS WHO MUST HAVE CONTRACTED SOME SORT OF BARBIE SMALLPOX, WERE SENT TO BARBIE DREAM RESERVATIONS, HAD THEIR CHILDREN SENT TO SOME SORT OF BARBIE DREAM BOARDING SCHOOLS AND ANY OF THEIR DESCENDENTS ARE EITHER ON THE BARBIE DREAM REZ OR ARE IGNORED AND PUSHED TO THE FRINGES OF THE SOCIETY WHERE THE COLONIZER BARBIES ONLY DEIGN TO TALK TO THEM IF THEIR BARBIE COLONIZER SOCIETY IS FALLING APART SO THAT THEY CAN RECEIVE SOME WISDOM TO REPAIR THEIR PLASTIC COLONIZER DREAM UTOPIA!
and we dont even get to know what they called themselves before it all…
and they stole my fucking joke. wtf am i gonna talk about now?
im not like john mulaney, i dont have a secret addict asshole backstory with rich friends that i can exploit for profit.
anyways.
5 stars. a movie the you can take the whole family to.
And if anything, the Kens are the most Indigenous people there, invisible, homeless and derided upon. They just loved horses, and wanted to live in cool houses. Fuck.
I’m so sad.
