Politico: Republicans Have “Declared War On Barbie”

July 7, 2023 Idiocracy, Republicans

Politico reports:

In a Barbie world, who controls the South China Sea? That’s the question a handful of Republican lawmakers — not to mention much of Southeast Asia — is asking thanks to a background detail in the upcoming “Barbie” movie due out later this month. The detail in question is a dashed line drawn on a map off the coast of Asia that critics have identified as the nine-dash line, a contested maritime boundary that Beijing draws more than a thousand miles off its own coast.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who leads a select House panel aimed at countering the influence of China, said the map “illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please CCP censors.” Among the first U.S. lawmakers to lodge geopolitical complaints about “Barbie” were Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). A spokesperson for Cruz told the Daily Mail on Tuesday that the film’s trying to “appease the Chinese Communist Party.”

Variety reports: 



“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group told Variety. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”

But how does the map function in the movie itself? Keeping spoilers at a minimum, Barbie is facing an existential crisis inside the walls of her pink dream world.  Weird Barbie encourages her to go on a journey of self-discovery and provides her with a map to “the Real World,” one made with whimsy by a fellow doll.

What some have taken to represent the “nine dash line” is what one source described as “journey lines,” the serial dashes often used in family animation and kid’s drawings to represent where a character has traveled to or from.

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