ADespite all the obituaries of the last few years: the cinema is alive. Infections, the Internet and inflation were the nails in the coffin on which feature writers and movie buffs hung their swansongs. Now of all things “Barbie”, a film about a doll for children, is breaking record after record and most recently the glass ceiling of one billion dollars in sales at the box office. Even just under a month after the theatrical release, some cinemas are showing the film three, four or five times a day, and the dominant color in the halls is still bright pink. Did director Greta Gerwig give the lie to the doomsayers with her colorful blockbuster?
The pink idyll didn’t last too long. In 2023, no cultural phenomenon will be able to do without an internet screaming competition. In the social networks, users attested to the film’s hostility towards men. The right-wing US commentator Ben Shapiro even burned a Barbie with her Ken and her convertible in a garbage can after his visit to the cinema. Is the probably most successful film of the year really only for women?
“I found the idea exciting”
In the beginning, it was actually mostly young women who lined up in pink suits, says the cashier at a cinema in Frankfurt. In the meantime, however, many groups of men, friends, fathers with their sons are also coming. The longer the film runs, the more men would. What do they say about the film that seems to attack them?
If you ask men about their “Barbie” visit, the answer is: a lot of good things. “We had fun,” says Nicolai Humphreys, for example. He is standing in front of the Cinestar Metropolis in Frankfurt with his friends Benjamin Hildebrandt and Alexander Siegmund on Monday evening. “I was a bit surprised that we were the only ones who laughed out loud.” The three are in their early to mid-30s and all have children. What made you want to watch a movie about a toy doll? “I found the idea exciting and wanted to see how it was artistically implemented,” says Hildebrandt. “I don’t think this is just a film for women.”
Humphreys even finds the film instructive: “I want my children to see the film.” He didn’t have a Barbie himself as a boy, but his sister did. “I had an Action Man. I remember we let the two fight each other.” It doesn’t seem like the three friends were offended by the film. “The film simply shows how difficult it is to meet the demands of society. For both sexes, sometimes a bit more for women,” says Hildebrandt. “As men in the 21st century, we actually know these things,” Humphreys adds, but it was good “to get a reminder of that.”
For a long time, superhero films guaranteed good results at the box office. Watching muscle men in brightly colored costumes save the world was no problem for women. The fact that men are now flocking to watch a film with such a clearly female connotation without fear of being considered weak or unmanly could be a sign that a standard has shifted. And maybe also one for the fact that the culture wars on the internet have little to do with the real world.
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