The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said that the most tragic thing about masculinity was that it had a symbol.
He didn’t have He-Man in mind when he made this comment. He died in 1981, two years before the original cartoon’s debut. But he might as well have. (He was talking about the phallus, if you’re wondering).
It is difficult to think of a more quintessentially Freudian creation than Mattel’s hyperbolically muscular hero: a man who, in the words of his evil nemesis Skeletor in this new remake, draws his power from that “strong, powerful thing hanging between your legs”.
The central conceit of this take on Masters of the Universe is to make, in effect, a male Barbie movie.
Taking a similarly gendered toy product as its prompt, the film tasks itself with answering the question of what He-Man means to audiences in 2026. I suspect phrases like “fresh take”, “modern sensibility” and “toxic masculinity” were used with considerable earnestness at various pitch meetings in the film’s pre-production process.
