Warner Bros. Japan apologizes after the U.S. Twitter account for the movie promotes posts that appear to make light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is one of the reasons it’s so weird and toxic to have brands posting on social media as if they were just “fellow users”.
If a random user posts some Barbenheimer content, I can grant that person the dignity of being a full human who probably has complex, conflicting feelings about the Manhattan Project, and some kind of ironic detachment yet fascination with the existence of the Barbie movie.
If WB posts (or comments on) it, there’s really no room for nuance. They want engagement, they want money. If there is (or was) irony or self-criticism embedded in the content, that fact is only incidental.
So then WB gets rightfully scorned for casually dismissing war crimes to get more attention to their properties.
But where does that leave the rest of us?
Cuz the implication is that individuals shouldn’t be posting Barbenheimer stuff, either… but that doesn’t feel right.
There’s something culturally meaningful to this meme, that we probably shouldn’t quash — but it also shouldn’t be crudely leveraged for profit.
Some of the backlash cited in the article seems out of touch, this in particular:
User @akishmz tweeted: “Summer to remember that to the Barbie film team and to Hollywood more than 200,000 death by the end of 1945 (and half a million so far) by two atrocious bombs are something they feel comfortable joking about to promote their precious summer blockbuster.”
I must have missed the part where these memes are making jokes about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I give them permission to make one 9/11 joke.
My apology on this matter is scheduled for the same press conference where Japan apologizes for what Imperial Japan did.
They’re in it too deep now. It’d be weird to suddenly apologize for events that happened 80 years ago, even though they should.
Didn’t the Dutch royal family recently apologize for the horrible shit they did in Africa?
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They’d have to also apologize for denying it for 80 years at this point
To be fair, I feel like the United States is frequently in the same position on many issues.
We have acknowledged big ones like slavery, but for all of those there are many others.
Apparently they already did; the article doesn’t include an image but in my imagination it’s hilarious.
Twitter user @mankodaisuki58 replied to the apology with a picture of Barbie sitting on the shoulders of Osama Bin Laden in front of burning buildings in the same style as one of the original posts. It is captioned “visiting the places from movie scenes” in Japanese and “It’s going to be a summer to remember” in English.
It’s … peculiar to me that Japan doesn’t think they need to teach the history of or ackowledge the war crimes they enacted on the Chinese, Koreans, etc.
But how dare Americans make a movie about the doom of nuclear war.
The massacre on Nanking was a dire read
One wrong doesn’t make the other right.
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The nukes were a mass genocide.
Uhhh no? They were a targeted show of force in order to end the war because Japan was never going to surrender otherwise. “Genocide” implies America was trying to erase the Japanese people entirely.
I kinda felt the same way, I went to see it with some friends and as a joke they wore some beachwear. It felt tasteless but I didn’t want to sour the mood by commenting on it
They’re just sore losers.
I am not japanese BUT I am pissed off by this such shitty, forced fun joke that you have to follow to show you are IN. A TheVerge level joke from weak, white guys and gals.
“OK Boomer” “Ice bucket challenge” and so many dumb, silly trend.
Understandable really.
I do miss the time we could joke about something in a faraway land, and by the time it reached them many months later by word of mouth it would have mutated into something more culturally acceptable. We should never have invented the printing press.
Are you immortal?
punching down is never funny
Punching down? It was intended to be a relatively tame joke about the world have been small for quite a while, and pre-emptively make light of those who would think this “being too easily offended” is a relatively new thing. Im sorry if I failed to communicate this correctly.
Bunch of pussies
