Hello friends,
Apologies for the delay. Shortly after sending Tuesday’s email my friends and I received some upsetting news that made yesterday a write-off. It’s pushed the new schedule off a bit and means the Thailand update will come Monday instead, which is okay since there’s so much to wade through!
Like most nerds, I’ve got big Barbie thoughts. (Am also slogging through American Prometheus, the biography of Oppenheimer, ahead of that release and it’s just about the best book I’ve read in years.) So I’ve left that outside of the paywall today. If you’d like to join us for the rest sign up here:
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🇻🇳 Does Barbie hate UNCLOS?
Barbie will not be hitting the screens in Vietnam. You’d have been hard-pressed missing this one, but just as a primer: the film includes a depiction of China’s 9-Dash Line. The use of “the illegal image of the ‘cow’s tongue line’ in the film,” as Vi Kien Thanh, the head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, put it, makes it unfit for screens. Incredible term for the line. The film was set to open in Vietnam July 21, but references to it on cinema websites have been removed.
“China’s position on the South China Sea issue is clear and consistent. We believe that the countries concerned should not link the South China Sea issue with normal cultural and people-to-people exchanges,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Tuesday, as reported by the Associated Press.
What gets me here the most is — why? Why has this come up in a film about dolls? As others have pointed out, the screenshot above shows not just the line but also the Great Wall and what looks to be Taiwan. All of this on a block of land identified only as ‘Asia.’
The whole thing reminded me of a story I read in Hollywood Reporter a couple of years back that looked at how US-made films had, pre-pandemic, done very well in China. It began sputtering during the pandemic and this piece looks at how studios were hoping to rebuild a relationship. Obviously, this is written Pre-Barbie Era, but it’s such a good piece and stayed with me!
There’s been a few flare-ups in the past, like the infamous Taiwan flag and the Top Gun jacket, but this feels different. Maybe because I’m a Southeast Asia nerd — but the pushback from Vietnam and, increasingly, the Philippines is marked. Neither country is willing to pander to China’s foreign policy on stakes this high.
Filipino cartoonist Kevin Eric Raymundo shows us why:
Half of me thinks, well, my sisters and our friends will go see the movie in Canberra and love it and not even notice. But that is just naivety. It’s not targeted at Millennial white girls who see anything Greta Gerwig directs or Margot Robbie stars in. It’s targeted at Chinese audiences in the hopes they’ll shell out in droves for tickets. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that big business is willing to indulge geo-political beefing to make big money.
Not that Hollywood studios need to parrot the US line — God knows that’s worked out poorly in the past — but this really, genuinely, worries me.
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