After watching The Golden Globes, it’s very clear that there are people who missed the point of Barbie entirely. It is one thing to not enjoy the Greta Gerwig film. That’s fine, but it is an entirely different thing to reduce the film down to making jokes about what Barbie looks like. Which is what Jo Koy did.
Making comparisons between Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is inevitable because of the Barbenheimer craze that swept many filmgoers up this summer. What I don’t want out of a season of award shows where (hopefully) both movies are honored is more of the precedent set by Globes host Jo Koy.
Koy had a ton of terrible jokes flop during the Golden Globes and his Barbenheimer joke was one of the worst. In comparing the two, he commented that Oppenheimer is “based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies.”
While there have been many who objected to the joke (the cast of Barbie among them) what hurts me most is knowing that this is probably not going to be the worst of it. Or at least, it wouldn’t be if people found that joke to be funny. If that audience had laughed at Koy’s attempt to minimize Barbie, we would surely have ended up with everyone trying to capture that same laughter. Maybe his bombing is going to send a message and make things a little less exhausting moving forward.
Still, reducing Barbie by comparing its origins to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer isn’t helping anyone, especially not people who enjoy both movies on their merits. But even more than that, making jokes like this shows a lack of understanding about what Barbie was all about.
It’s a movie about accepting womanhood.
There are a lot of things to say about Barbie as a doll. A lot of it, the movie itself addresses. While many (myself included) have their feelings about Barbie as an idea and what she represents, the film Barbie does a lot to explore multifaceted womanhood. Reducing the film to being about a doll with “big boobies” makes everything that Barbie represents feel like a joke.
There is such beauty in the scene where Barbie (Margot Robbie) decides to be a woman and take on the challenges that come with that as Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For” plays. It is one of my favorite moments in film in 2023. But I also loved Oppenheimer and it is probably my favorite movie of the year. Both those thoughts can exist together and we don’t have to destroy one movie with a sexist joke just to uplift the other.
I hope the outcry after Jo Koy’s joke stops a future of this with the coming award season. I don’t think I can handle listening to people continue to shame the film over and over again because it was based on the doll.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
