Ted Cruz Doesn't Like the Barbie Movie and You'll Never Guess Why

As soon as you hear "Ted Cruz" and "Barbie" in the same sentence, you know your eyes are gonna roll so hard that they may just snap your retinas. We're just warning you to be prepared.

The eagerly anticipated Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig opened this weekend to a huge audience and a big box office draw of $155 million. The buzz that's been steadily growing around the movie since the first teaser trailer landed is also partly due to its release at the same time as Christopher Nolan's eagerly anticipated drama Oppenheimer, which seems destined to win all the Oscars next year.

We've seen all sorts of live action war movies based on classic toys that tend to skew toward boys and men who remember playing with them: Transformers, G.I. Joe and even the board game Battleship (don't even bother with that last one). The closest we've come to Gerwig's Barbie is the American Girl doll straight-to-DVD movies you didn't even know existed.

The Barbie movie has been in the works for a long time. According to Vanity Fair, the toy maker Mattel has been trying to get one going since 2009 with Universal Studios commissioning early drafts from Sex and the City and The Greatest Showmen writer Jenny Bicks and Oscar-winning Diablo Cody and comedian Amy Schumer, who helped write a draft with her writing partner Kim Caramele with Schumer in the title role. At one point, after some re-casting, Anne Hathaway was going to be the next Barbie until Sony's option expired and Mattel took back its rights.

Then Gerwig became attached to the project along with co-writer Noah Baumbach when her name became Hollywood royalty thanks to her 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which earned six Oscar nominations including for Best Picture. When Robbie's involvement was confirmed, the interest shot up 1,000%, and here we are.

Now here comes the part that involves our esteemed Sen. Ted Cruz. The man who wears a beard the way people wear a T-shirt on laundry day appeared on Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime last Friday to discuss the movie, among other issues. Unsurprisingly, he has beef with the movie just as he does with kid-based entertainment. But unlike other conservatives blasting Barbie as "anti-man," Cruz's problem is over something so minute that you'll need the zoom feature on your browser to see it.

Cruz starts by admitting, "I have not seen the movie," but he has seen one very specific part of it: Barbie's map.

There's a scene in the movie where Barbie draws a map of the world as she prepares to go on her trip to the real world, and Cruz noticed an odd little feature next to a large clump of scribbled Crayon called "Asia." It's a curved, dotted line.

"What those lines indicate is the Communist Party of China puts out official maps with those nine dashes and they're asserting sovereignty over the entire South China sea," Cruz said. "They're saying all of that is China's and, by the way all of their neighbors disagree." 
The "nine dashes" Cruz is referring to the "nine-dash line" maritime map drafted by the People's Republic of China, which claims its borders extend to the South China Sea situated between Vietnam and the Philippines. The dispute has led to attacks from Chinese forces and claims of ownership over land and oil rights even after The Hague's international court ruled against 90% of China's claims to the region in 2016, according to Time.

Cruz isn't alone in thinking the eight-dash line on Barbie's map (we counted them) is Hollywood's attempt to appease China's censors, an accusation that's followed the U.S. film industry since China became the world's largest film market in 2020, according to NPR.

For instance, Vietnam banned screenings of Barbie over this one scene. The moderately liberal NowThis News calls the Barbie prop "problematic" comparing it to the Taiwanese flag that originally appeared on Tom Cruise's flight jacket in the first Top Gun movie, which disappeared when he returned in Top Gun Maverick.

Warner Bros. Studios insists the drawing does not refer to the nine-dash line but are instead "journey lines" representing Barbie's journey from Barbie Land to the real world, according to Variety. So if Cruz is right, does that mean when Billy in the Family Circus comic strip goes on one of his dotted line adventures that he's just mapping out more space for China to occupy?

Cruz also told Watters, "To anyone who's not really focused on geopolitics, those lines don't really mean anything" and he doesn't say in the clip or other recent interviews that the dashed lines are brainwashing young children. He only insists they're there to make China's censors happy. Of course, that hasn't stopped him in the past from calling out popular culture for warping young minds, like when he called out Sesame Street for allowing Elmo to "aggressively advocate for vaccinating children UNDER 5" and accused the Grammys of promoting "evil" with Sam Smith and Kim Petras' performance of "Unholy."

Wouldn't it be nice of Cruz paid closer attention to things that are more pressing than Barbie's cartography skills?