Go past the shocking opening of the Barbie Movie, which has a laughing Barbie towering like a Greek goddess over a bunch of drab five year old girls smashing their baby dolls. (The scene is a reprise of 2001, a Space Odyssey, which might be a bit confusing.)
Travel past to zoom in on Barbies house. And her clothes, her hair, and her career. Focus in on her claim that girls can achieve everything, and that every day is the best day. It’s not a promising opening for finding the truth of life. But look closely. The clues are there. Time Magazine questions the very idea of “The narrative … that (says Director) Gerwig has somehow pulled off a coup, by taking Mattel’s money but using it to create real art.” But that is just what has been done.
Clue #1: Power and Achieving Doesn’t Lead to Happiness
Focus in on the Bollywood-style dancing routine. All the Barbies and all the Kens are executing precision moves on the lighted dance floor. Who knew Ryan Gosling could dance? And watch Barbie suddenly stop and shut her eyes as she has an unbidden thought … of death. “Do you guys ever think about dying?” she asks the other Barbies. Music stops. (Moment is at 2:42 in the clip below)
This is the program of the Barbie movie. It starts with the death of the baby dolls and ends with the death of the sex goddess.
Clue 2: Barbie Doesn’t Need a Boyfriend
The rest of the movie will explore themes of political control, personal autonomy, power and happiness.
Barbie Land is a totally feminized world. Barbie tells Ken in the first ten minutes that she doesn’t need a boyfriend. It’s girls night and when Ken points out that every night is girl’s night, she shrugs. She is completely happy and powerful. I realized when I heard that, that filmmaker Greta Gerwin had zoomed in very accurately on the Barbie promise. Barbie is beautiful, Barbie is rich, Barbie is powerful and thus Barbie is happy.
During the film Gerwin will circle around, but not expose, the folly of this idea.
My son Victor, aged 30, watched this movie and was disturbed by the treatment of the non-necessary Ken dolls. Ken’s job, BTW, is described as “Beach.” Victor also felt that the emergence of patriarchy as “Ken’s Revenge” was gratuitous.
Actually I’ve heard that not a few men were discomfited by all this.
Clue 3: The Patriarchy is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels
Ken goes to the library and discovers patriarchy.
For me, it is the send-up of patriarchy that hits most jarringly in the movie. The emergency of patriarchy in the movie is like the emergency of patriarchy in society: it’s just where you least expect it. (Ken later tells Barbie the only real draw in patriarchy was the horses. You have to watch the movie to understand.) To continue the feminist narrative, men exist in the Barbie movie as a problem. Though perhaps Director Gerwin would explain that men barely exist for Barbie at all.
The question arises whether men exist for women in the real world. Answer: Overwhelmingly so. Another question: whether our world or the Barbie world is a deeper abstraction. Perhaps having Ken be a handbag-type accessory is a fantasy of un-worry. The fantasy of not having to carry that crushing concern for the men. Or man.
Of course, looked at that way, you can see Barbie from another angle. She is forever frozen in that late teen and early 20 realm of life where perfect fashion is the essence of what it is to be a girl. Responsibilities do not exist. She needs a boyfriend, of course, thus, Ken. But we adult women realize that a boyfriend is not actually a *man.* A boyfriend is like a trial size bottle of shampoo. You can get the job done with it for a few days, but in actually, it’s not the real deal.
Clue 4: Ken Stages a Men’s Revolution?
There is plenty of cleverness in the movie. When Barbie comes back to Barbie Land she discovers that Ken, after reading about patriarchy, has nearly staged a coup. Already he’s put the male dolls into “power.” All the Barbies are now working as cocktail waitresses. One of the other dolls tells Barbie that the Barbies of Barbie World have no natural defenses against patriarchy.
This is clever, invoking the smallpox devastation of Native Americans. But fact is real women do have defenses against patriarchy. In fact, the Barbie’s convoluted and disturbing manipulation of the Kens to regain control shows this. Some have argued that patriarchy actually was started by women who needed help with the kids. “Just take care of me while I raise your children … and I’ll let you be really important and be the boss.” There is no mechanism for achieving material wealth without some work. Barbie’s main ambition is taking a shower, getting dressed, and getting in the car. And she certainly isn’t the one who built the Barbie Dream House either.
It was the Wife of Bath, a character of the medieval storyteller Chaucer, who said that what women wanted, really, was not money but power. And perhaps in the Barbie fantasy of the perfect girl’s life, it is inevitable that they must have all power in addition to all wealth.
Clue 5: A Perfect Life is Not Doable, Except in Barbie Land
Gerwig cleverly allows the characters in the movie to show this: the Barbie dream is not really doable in the real world. Everyday women work and struggle and have to pick the kids up from school on time… No one in the movie asks whether playing with Barbies is really an appropriate preparation for American Life. But Sasha, the daughter of Barbie’s human person, says to Barbie: “You! You set feminism back 50 years!” It is a strange comment, that. Because I always considered Barbie a representative of feminist thinking. But maybe I, too, was confused.
Clue 5: “I Am Kenough”
The part about the movie that upset Victor so much was its treatment of Ken. At the end Ken is sitting around with his friends wearing a shirt that says “I am Kenough” (I am enough). He is trying to make sense of a world in which he is not critical for Barbie. A world in which he has to be himself. He can not get his self esteem from being “with,” “working for”, “belonging to,” etc. someone else anymore.
The script doesn’t tell you this. But the discerning viewer sees that Ken is in the same position as women were in at the worst of the 50s Father Knows Best era. Because the Barbie Land world was entirely cooked up out of women’s fantasies, Ken has been relegated to a supporting role. He has not developed as an individual; he does not even know who he is. When Barbie tells him she “loves him as a friend,” it should be a crushing realization for him. But it serves as a possible springboard. He can now actually become fully, well you can’t say “fully human,” so perhaps “fully doll?”
Meanwhile the movie’s answer for Ken is a non-answer. Ken is emotionally stranded and marginalized by the Barbies’ power hungry antics. The viewer can only hope he figures it out. And stops wearing kitschy self-affirmation t-shirts.
Clue 6: Admitting that Genderism is bad for Everyone Just Wouldn’t be Politically Correct. But
If you read between the lines of the Barbie movie you will have come to that conclusion. Barbie is told by the narrator to “find the things that make you, you.” Somehow … despite having everything she wants, she is not happy. Or is that only because she’s seen the Real World?
I found myself wondering is this deep or is this psychobabble?
Clue 7: Our Mothers, Our Barbies
The narrator tells Barbie that she created Barbie and her world, initially, for her daughter. Named Barbie after her daughter, in fact. “Mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.” She says. This is deeply ironic for someone like me, whose mother did the opposite. I believe this is perhaps the deepest deviation from reality in the Barbie Land ethos. All the women are friends in the Barbie movie, all the women are beautiful, all the women (and even the men) are good dancers. But in real life, only some of the women are beautiful, and only some of the women can be truly privileged, and other women are often our biggest enemies.
Jealousy drives all kinds of ugliness between women. Perhaps Barbie’s world can only be perfectly beautiful because the Barbies don’t do this to each other. Along with their perfect beauty is their perfectly kind temperament.
Clue 8: Weird Barbie is the Visible Face of Female Cruelties
The only time the script acknowledges this trait of women being mean is when at the end of the story the Barbies apologize to “Weird Barbie” the shaman woman who lives on the hill. Weird Barbie’s human girl (in the real world) cut off Weird Barbie’s hair and drew on her face. Weird Barbie’s existence acknowledges what most women already know. Girls and women can be cruel. In my post on what it takes to be a successful woman I mentioned that women who don’t want to be mothers but become mothers anyway sometimes do the greatest damage to humans. When we are a little children we have a great need for our mother’s love and when this is denied we spend our lives waiting for that love to finally arrive. Sometimes, because our mothers don’t really love us, it never does.
The most unhealthy variety of Barbie fantasy happens when we think that even though our mothers didn’t love us we can become a perfect woman and thus get the love we were denied. But because the love was not denied because we are flawed, it was denied because our mothers were flawed, this doesn’t work. It can become generational woman to woman cruelty. Ever worse, if you possess obvious and positive female characteristics, you can expect a lot of ugliness from other women. Much of the triteness of girl group’s comments to each other is an effort to fend off the competitive, belittling behavior of women who feel less than.
Clue 9: A Life Made of Dreams … Is Not Dreamy?
In the end the problem with Barbie the movie is the same as the problem with Barbie the doll. A life made all of dreams and fun cannot really be meaningful. But when we introduce deeper meanings we endanger or destroy the fantasy. When Barbie goes to the human world it opens up a rip in the space time continuum and she has to go back or the real world will malfunction catastrophically.
At the end of the movie Barbie, like the Little Mermaid, must decide whether she wants to continue living as an immortal doll or go to the human world and face death.
This is probably one of the things that makes the movie so meaningful and I won’t spoil it by telling you her conclusion. The fact is that engaging in wish fulfilling fantasy is not a valid life strategy. If you look carefully for that message in the Barbie movie, it’s definitely there. And the humor is so real too. The plastic waves on the beach that Ken hits and bounces off, the way everyone lives in a house with no walls, Ryan Gosling’s bleached, white blond hair — the visuals of the movie are incredibly artistic. And part of the rhetoric.
Solution: Impossible Woman of Dreams … Leads us To Seize our Possible Dreams?
Barbie, goddess, playmate, friend — impossible woman of dreams. You and me? Real people who can benefit and learn from her sojourns between worlds real and ideal, and find actual happiness in pursuing the retreating horizon of our own tangible world and dreams.
And that’s my conclusion to the meaning of life, according to Barbie, the movie.
