If one properly deciphers its layers of irony and satire, it is hardly a feminist screed.
If one properly deciphers its layers of irony and satire, it is hardly a feminist screed.
A confession, upfront: I probably would never have seen Barbie had it not come out the same weekend as Oppenheimer, thereby allowing me to do the full “Barbenheimer” last Thursday night. My review of Oppenheimer has already appeared. Of the Barbehneimer experience itself, I will say little more other than that it was exhausting.
But exhaustion is not why it has taken a few days for me to assess Barbie fully. It is, rather, that Barbie is far less straightforward than Oppenheimer, with multiple interpretive and thematic layers. Oppenheimer is not an uncomplicated film, but Barbie is itself a highly sophisticated one — and one that many conservatives are almost certainly getting wrong.
The story of Barbie is deceptively simple. A Barbie (Margot Robbie, as “Stereotypical Barbie”), suddenly finds her idyllic life in Barbieland, the separate realm in which the Barbie dolls real-world people play with are represented anthropomorphically, disrupted by thoughts of death and other deviations from perfect Barbiedom. A visit to Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), thus labeled because she has been marred by being played with a little too hard, sends her on a journey to our world to find the owner at the root of her discontent. And a Ken (Ryan Gosling), in a ploy for Barbie’s attention (without which he can barely function), ends up a stowaway. While there, Barbie and Ken experience a reversal of sorts. Barbie discovers that she has not, in fact, empowered the world, and Ken appears to discover the glories of the “patriarchy” that dominates our reality. Shenanigans and further trips back and forth between Barbieland and our world ensue.
The emerging conservative take on Barbie seems to be that it is a shallow, man-hating, and repulsive screed, an assessment that probably owes a great deal to the fact that Barbieland is an ostensible feminist utopia in which all Kens are subservient to all Barbies. In the Wall Street Journal, former National Review critic Kyle Smith wrote that, “As bubbly as the film appears, its script is like a grumpier-than-average women’s studies seminar.” Upon leaving the movie, Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire tweeted that “all you need to know” about it is that “it unironically uses the word ‘patriarchy’ more than 10 times.” With some time to collect his thoughts, Shapiro then took to YouTube with a video titled: “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes.” And the Critical Drinker, a right-leaning and perspicacious YouTube film critic, savaged Barbie, calling it “the greatest lie ever told.”
Before rebutting the substance of these cases, it’s important to describe some of the technical, non-thematic things Barbie excels at. In the hands of writer-director Greta Gerwig (with her husband Noah Baumbach co-writing), Barbie has an utterly consistent and relentless aesthetic vision. All that pink paint (so much that it may have affected the global supply) went to good use in creating Barbieland. It is a remarkably silly place, where houses have no walls, water isn’t real, and characters fake eating, drinking, surfing, doctoring, and other activities. It’s so silly that I found it overwhelming, even revolting, initially. But eventually it won me over.
At the center of Barbieland is Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie. The notion of portraying a live-action doll is not wholly without precedent in film history, but it is fairly absurd. Yet Robbie sells it totally. Even better is Gosling’s Ken. His commitment to this earnest, goofy, desperate, and vain character is scene-stealing, and might have stolen the movie itself were it not up to something more complex than it appears.
If Barbie were simply the feminist screed some of its critics are taking it for, it would be a failure — an interesting, pretty failure, to be sure, but a failure all the same. If this assessment were correct, then the fact that Ken, upon returning to Barbieland, makes it into a patriarchy to which all of its Barbies instantly submit would represent an inadvertently more compelling and potent satire than the vision Barbie appears to offer in its stead. A kind of shallow Yas-Queening comes to reign again in Barbieland by the movie’s conclusion, with the Kens only slightly better off, and the Barbies still in charge after Robbie’s Barbie, with the help of some real-life humans, breaks their patriarchal false consciousness.
But this interpretation fails to account for so much that it is surely mistaken. For one, the real world is not represented as quite the patriarchy Ken, with his superficial Barbieland brain, makes it out to be. After an initial montage (mantage?) that marks his realization of the patriarchy, Ken is rebuffed in all of his attempts to join the male hierarchy that purportedly dominates the world. He must return to Barbieland to institute it; what he institutes there is so shallow that it collapses almost as quickly as it is set up. Meanwhile, though Robbie’s Barbie restores female dominance in Barbieland, she chooses not to stay there, electing instead to become fully human. What it all appears to suggest is that Barbieland is not merely a superficial construct but an entirely satirical one: a kind of post-feminist satire of what feminists imagine a perfect world looking like and of what they imagine male dominance is like. Plato had a city in speech; Gerwig has given us a city in plastic.
The scenes in reality, and involving humans, are of much greater import than those set in Barbieland. It is two humans, mother Gloria (America Ferrera) and daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who anchor the film. This is familiar territory for Gerwig, whose Ladybird has a similarly complicated mother–daughter relationship. It is Gloria’s revelation of, and reveling in, the complications of real life that help to bring her daughter away from the crass cynicism in which she had been mired. And it is this embrace of reality, in all of its complications, transcending facile theorizing, that the film endorses. One sees this in Gloria’s late-movie monologue, and in the realization by Mattel’s corporate board that a “reality Barbie” would sell like hotcakes. It is especially evident in Stereotypical Barbie’s decision to become human (a clever bookend to the 2001: A Space Odyssey reference that opens the film), with all its concomitant messiness.
This is a bold claim. And one not without problems of its own. One male human character in our world might seem to counter the idea that Barbie means to complicate our appraisal of reality with his assertion that a patriarchy still exists, but we’ve just gotten better at hiding it. It also requires accepting entire portions of the movie — Helen Mirren’s arch narration, almost everything that happens in Barbieland — as satirical. And it places upon the slender, plastic shoulders of a toy doll many layers of irony and complexity, perhaps more than they can reasonably bear. But detractors have a harder case to make. They must ignore, among other things, what happens to Robbie’s Barbie and what the human world actually looks like. And perhaps most daunting, they must ignore the past work of Gerwig, who showed in Ladybird especially that she is far from some kind of straightforwardly vanguard feminist figure.
I had to overcome my own hesitation to arrive at this view. Masculine pride makes it far easier for me to recommend Oppenheimer than to esoterically interpret Barbie positively. It is, to be clear, not really a movie about men. But it does not hate them. It is something far different, and far more interesting, than that. Conservatives who think otherwise might not be thinking big enough.