While the Barbie movie caused me to think way more than I anticipated, I certainly didn’t think I’d be filling your Inbox with it this week!
Since seeing "Barbie" with the family last Friday night, we’ve discussed it quite a bit. What appeared to be a feel-good, pink-filled, bubblegum summer party was an exercise in multi-layered philosophical questions about gender power, equity, and the most significant questions about what it means to be human.
If you haven't seen it, I'm not joking. Fair warning, some light spoilers are ahead.
Surprisingly (or maybe not), since quitting Twitter, I missed out on the anti-woke Barbie backlash brewing over the past few weeks. Apparently, conservative talking heads were losing their minds because ‘the patriarchy’ was repeatedly mentioned, and men were cast in a negative light. I stumbled across the pushback when thinking about Barbie’s success and how The Flash, Elementals, and many other movies that didn’t do well this year were presciently labeled ‘woke,’ as if the concept itself is so vile that it can push a brand into oblivion. In reality, talking heads can proactively call any effort woke; if it fails, they appear correct and run that point into the ground, and if it succeeds, they move on quickly and roll the dice with the next prediction.
You can pick virtually any movie or brand and search its title or name alongside ‘woke’ to find articles and outrage. Reflecting on my Twitter absence and lack of ‘any real people I know’ being concerned about woke movies, I encourage you to ignore any anti-woke brand calls for what it has turned out to be - meaningless noise augmented by uninspired journalists.
With “Barbie” currently running towards $1B in its first few weeks, it is closing in on Super Mario Bros, which grossed $1.35B and is in the lead for 2023. The drive-in was pretty busy when we saw it Friday night, its second week. I heard it sold out on the opening weekend, similar to another woke movie from this year, The Little Mermaid, which cast its lead as a black actress. We were there for its release on the opening weekend, and it was so busy that the cars lined up along the exit to watch. You could also clearly hear people singing along throughout. Whether woke or not, audiences will pay for what they want to see. A good case in point is how Oppenheimer, mired in little to no woke controversy, is doing quite well, too.
But here’s the thing: While Barbie was a pretty woke movie, why brands succeed or fail is more complex.
Some might tell you that Barbie is a simple 2-hour product advertisement and that if we see something more, we’re ascribing what we want to see in the movie as if I was writing a LinkedIn article titled, What Barbie can teach us about ESG (aka. my original title for this piece, just kidding). Unlike The Little Mermaid, I find it hard to believe anyone would see this movie, and their first takeaway would be nostalgia and the need to purchase products, but to be fair, there is a lot of merchandise around the film. Nostalgia might get you in the seat for Barbie, and you might enjoy some of the nods to previous products and laugh along the way, but I suspect nostalgia and commercialism aren’t what you’ll leave with. By comparison, I would find that relatable if you saw Super Mario Bros and felt the need to dig out your old Nintendo.
While I'm not here to tell you this is an ESG movie, I do believe this movie is most certainly woke, but not because of some anti-men message. The film opens with a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey's "Dawn of Man" scene in which the apes 'wake up' with tools. In Barbie, the little girls 'wake up' from baby dolls to Barbie. In the middle of the movie, Barbie approaches a table of ‘woke’ high school girls who rail against her for enforcing unrealistic body images, ultimately calling her a fascist. Towards the end, America Ferrera spends about 10 minutes quite literally waking up Barbies through the painful dichotomies of a woman's existence.
When it seems like the movie is slapping you over the head with its messages, it is actually doing something else entirely. At one point, a boardroom full of men tries to coax Barbie back into the box. She enters the box and then runs out at the last minute. In such moments, the world is symbolically reflected as it actually is, not how we hope it is. In that way, the movie isn’t that woke because it reflects reality.
I kept leaning forward in my seat to consider what I saw or how Mattel’s Governance principles had allowed it. The bold way that the movie presents the fundamental problems with Barbie and our shared fantasy world, then bafflingly takes accountability for some of it, is something I didn’t expect a brand to allow, but here we are. From a Governance perspective, the movie felt like Mattel was resetting and reinventing the Barbie brand for our now very overcomplicated world, which it may have had a hand in creating (cue back to “The Dawn of Man” scene).
Regardless of whether the movie was woke or not, I refuse to believe that movies or brands are successful or not solely on their level of wokeness. Different audiences, like stakeholders, want different things. Understanding your audience and aligning with them at different levels, like understanding your stakeholders, determines success. However, regarding the movie industry, the discussion of woke misdirects to systemic problems. Wouldn’t the increase in direct releases to streaming services during COVID have spoiled people’s expectations and theater experiences for convenience? Isn’t it possible that people are finding new adventures outside of theaters now that the world has opened back up? These questions might be missed in the shadow of ‘woke or not.’
It makes me wonder if the decline of shopping malls or Blockbuster’s death would have been blamed on wokeness had this been an idea years ago. I can hear the “VHS is woke” chants. Now I’m wondering if Betamax was woke.
Whittling down complex business issues to the black-and-white (and irrelevant) woke or not-woke narrative does a massive disservice to just how complicated our modern world of globalization and interconnected risks has become. This narrative can potentially cause management teams to examine material issues properly and misstep.
My advice to management teams is this:
This is no time to let fear take over. You have a business to run. Run it, but run it responsibly and thoughtfully. These topics are complex.
Don’t lead with woke, and you won’t die by it. Lead with materiality, purpose, and your company’s intersection with systemic issues. ← this is ESG
For example, Mattel’s published mission statement is this:
We empower the next generation to explore the wonder of childhood
and reach their full potential.
One could easily argue that the movie hits these points.
In my last newsletter, I wrote about the artificial thumb pressing down anti-woke sentiment and fake outrage on the scales of the free markets. I'm pleasantly surprised that the pushback here is simply no match, disproving the woke narrative and bringing us back to reality if we pause to look closer. Perhaps outside of states’ anti-ESG efforts and now Nigel Farage, the anti-woke and anti-ESG pushes are just fanciful works of fiction like those we see on the screen. I worry that as the Barbie movie continues to succeed, it is a short-lived success until we hear about the next woke thing and its subsequent failure, which will only perpetuate the fiction.
Resources
“How to Effectively — and Legally — Use Racial Data for DEI” by Lily Zheng is a broadly applicable article to understand this advice better.
If you want to learn more about the Barbie movie, check out this interview with director Greta Gerwig about the movie’s final line and how she tried to make everything work on two levels.