Greta Gerwig responds to right-wing backlash over Barbie: 'There's a lot of passion'

Greta Gerwig didn't anticipate the right-wing backlash to her summer blockbuster Barbie, but she maintains that the movie is for everyone.

"Certainly, there's a lot of passion," the filmmaker told The New York Times when asked about some conservatives bashing the movie as "woke" and burning their Mattel dolls in protest. "My hope for the movie is that it's an invitation for everybody to be part of the party and let go of the things that aren't necessarily serving us as either women or men."

Gerwig added, "I hope that in all of that passion, if they see it or engage with it, it can give them some of the relief that it gave other people."

A candy-colored comedy starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and slew of other big names, Barbie took the box office by storm this past weekend, earning $162 million in the U.S. and Canada. The movie follows Robbie's titular doll as she malfunctions and experiences a very human existential crisis, while her beau Ken (Gosling) is briefly corrupted by the patriarchy of the real world.

Some conservative commentators have interpreted the film's feminist themes as an assault. Ben Shapiro blasted Barbie in a lengthy YouTube video clip that featured him setting Barbies ablaze. "The basic sort of premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides and they hate each other," he said. "And literally, the only way you can have a happy world is if the women ignore the men and the men ignore the women." Shapiro also predicted that the movie would "fall off a cliff" at the box office.

Elsewhere, Piers Morgan wrote, "If I made a movie mocking women as useless dunderheads, constantly attacking the matriarchy, and depicting all things feminist as toxic bullsh--, I wouldn't just be canceled, I'd be executed. He added, "[Barbie] achieves exactly what it wanted to achieve and that is to establish the matriarchy as the perfect antidote to the patriarchy when in fact it's just the same concept that they asked us all to detest in the first place."

Ginger Gaetz, wife of Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, called for a boycott after criticizing Gosling's "beta energy," while Matt Walsh called the movie "aggressively anti-man" and "feminist propaganda."

Film critics and audiences, however, have given the movie a warm welcome. It's rated 90% "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes and received an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls. Of the film's success, Gerwig told the NYT, "I wanted to make something anarchic and wild and funny and cathartic, and the idea that it's actually being received that way, it's sort of extraordinary."

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