Sometimes dumb and fun is all something has to be. Such is the case with the Barbie movie. That conservative media, from our own Armond White’s review to that of Ben Shapiro and the Critical Drinker, has found the movie objectionable on grounds of wokeness is understandable, and each makes an entertaining case. But in their rush to defend potential viewers from criminal cinema, they forget that Barbie is less a movie and more of a cultural event — sophistry, I know, but please allow it for a moment.

Barbie is an undisciplined, goofy film for women (primarily) to gather for in posses, dress up, and revel in spectacle and recollection. It’s two hours of beautiful people wearing gorgeous outfits that observers can recall owning and playing with on linoleum or shag carpeting. Like Saturday-morning cartoons, the movie is a pallet of marketing that just so happens to be good, and, as such, it is palatable consumerism in motion.

While the writing could be tighter and the references less esoteric, the movie masterfully reproduces the visuals of Barbie. The set for Barbieland is electric and gay — items like handbags and cutlery that I remember helping my sister pick up from the basement floor are unmistakably scaled up and present. The direction deserves credit for material accuracy, as well as fidelity of motion. How the actors move and interact assumes the dolls to be something other than human, wafting about supported by an invisible hand only tangentially related to Adam Smith’s. The movie looks right — the Barbies are beautiful humanoids that fit the clothes and items made for them within the bounds of their biology and the limitations of pre-adolescent imagination.

The politics of the movie are similarly inhuman and absurd — this is the rendering of a world supposed by children, with all the logical errancy that kids produce when all they know of life is from patching together mental woodcuts from whatever Mom and Dad divulge. That Barbie‘s Ken thinks men run the world by telling everyone what to do is correct — it is precisely what a little girl would imagine employment must be like after observing her mom coming home and routinely grousing about her jerk boss Kent.

Barbie doesn’t have to be more than bubble gum, but its introduction and conclusion — an especially pro-woman conclusion at that — are enough to recommend giving it a watch. Grab some lifelong friends and delight in a juggernaut of capitalism . . . not everything has to be a battleground. Leave that to Sarge and his platoon of green men.