Barbie: A Confused Postmodern Masterpiece

It has been a curious and exciting thing to watch Greta Gerwig’s Barbie turn into one of the largest and most discussed films of the past decade. In just a month, the film has grossed over $1 billion in the global box office and has turned Gerwig into the most successful female director in history while simultaneously accruing glowing reviews from critics. In a year when most prospective blockbusters films are proving to be historic failures, Barbie is on track to be the biggest box office success of the year.

At the same time, the movie has touched off a mild culture war battle over feminism and wokeness in media as Gerwig’s story is overtly told from a modern feminist perspective. The most visceral and shallow response came from Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro where he burns Barbie dolls on camera and complains about the movie’s writing for 43 minutes, trashing the film as awful and terrible propaganda. Ben may know the art of theatrics well, but his intellectual consideration of the film is narrow-minded and narrow-sighted.

Many other conservative reactions to the movie, by contrast, have been relatively positive. Major Republican politicians have bragged on social media about taking their daughters to see the movie and pundits like Michael Knowles and Shoe0nHead have spoken positively about Barbie. So even as feminists and progressives praise the film for its explicit, even if clumsy, feminism, conservatives and traditionalists have embraced the film too—albeit not for the same reasons that progressives have (more on that in a bit).

At the heart of Barbie is a very curious three-way dialogue between the problems of female identity, male identity, and the ways that the overriding force of corporate consumerism hangs over these problems—with a layer of Sheryl Sandberg-style corporate feminism baked in for good measure.

As the film depicts it, “Barbieland” is a functionally perfect matriarchy where women have total power and autonomy while Kens (men) exist to adore Barbies and find meaning in receiving attention from them. Upon closer look, though, this seemingly perfect matriarchy is no utopia—it just has the stereotypical appearance of one. When Barbie enters the real world to find the girl playing with her who is grappling with thoughts of mortality and depression, she realizes the real world is a patriarchy—which Ken loves and immediately exports back to Barbieland, turning it into Kenland, which leads to the climatic showdown between Barbie and Ken.

The divide between Barbieland versus Realworld ends up being surprisingly nuanced. The film doesn’t resort to just depicting Barbieland as a perfect paradise while the real world is wholly bad. The divide is split along multiple separate and intersecting dualities—matriarchy vs. patriarchy, consumerism vs. meaning, sisterhood vs. motherhood, shallowness vs. authenticity. The shadow of existentialism looms over the film for the educated viewer.

All of these ideas coexist together because the film understands that this is the very real debate about what Barbie dolls represent in our own world and how the dolls represent very real debates and issues between human beings. There is no single answer to what is good or what is bad about Barbie. There is just the reality that Barbie fits into a very complicated world where, as one character puts it, “Women hate women, men hate women, and that is the only thing we all agree upon.” Barbie dolls are both a negative reflection of female self-identity and a fun toy that millions of girls love to play with.

The film benefits from Gerwig’s propensity towards existential postmodernism—rejecting narratives of good and evil and turning to the nature of the power dynamics at play between the sexes and how men and women act and live in the world they inhabit.

Barbie’s opening offers one of its most contentious images—depicting a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey where young girls smash their baby dolls in the shadow of a towering Barbie, symbolizing the liberation of women from domesticity and their transition under modern corporate feminism. But the movie then offers a deconstruction of this idea. It is very clear that sexism and misogyny are real forces in the world, but Barbie wants to deconstruct and interrogate a larger picture of what it means to be a woman in light of those pressures.

The movie embodies both the positive and negative aspects to the idea of Barbie in the characters of Gloria and Sasha—a mother and daughter with inverse opinions and a bitter estranged relationship. The mother is a put-upon middle-aged woman working as a secretary at Mattel who likes to play with her old Barbie dolls to blow off steam while the daughter is an aggressively hostile high school girl who considers Barbie a tool to promote fascist gender stereotypes and capitalist excess. Fascinatingly, the movie doesn’t actually take a side in this conflict but instead depicts the tension of these two ideas as a representation of the intense internal struggle that comes with being a woman and the opposing desires and pressures that creates. The movie holds up both motherhood and sisterhood as virtues, giving Gloria a massive soliloquy about how being a woman means you’re never enough to please anyone because you’re always failing to live up to the expectations of either virtue.

That isn’t to say all of the film’s ideas work. Much of the plastic matriarchal vision of Barbieland is very clearly pandering to kneejerk progressive sensibilities. One scene involves a lawyer arguing before the all-female Supreme Court that corporations aren’t people and the entire room applauds uproariously. There are many such cases in this film which rightfully elicit eyerolls from more nuanced viewers; there is an undeniable element of political kitsch to the film.

I would also argue at times that the film’s overriding perspective leaves the male characters a bit underdeveloped and cruelly treated. While Ryan Gosling’s Ken is very much the most well-developed and fully rounded characters in the film, being depicted start to finish with the most complex character motivation of anyone on screen—and learning to find meaning and self-respect outside of his prescribed role in life to worship Barbie—the other male characters are nothing but boring and dull pieces of plastic played by real-life actors who often have poor dialogue in their speaking roles. The many Ken dolls are filled with problems and they are “radicalized” as a result, becoming stereotypes of the dangerous male, once again fitting the stereotypes of political progressive sensibilities.

Unfortunately, the film does not really come up with the best solution for what to do with the radicalized Kens. The female Barbies end up playing on masculine insecurities against each other and using it as a way to take over Barbieland and reestablishing the old status-quo. By the end of the film, the narrator jokes that the Kens would be given the chance to eventually have the same rights that women have in the real world—but as we have seen that doesn’t really mean much. The film includes a subplot about the very real issues of male anxieties and masculine meaning but ends up arguing that “men will literally take over the world rather than go to therapy.” So while Barbie is aware of this important issue, it offers no substantive solution other than an implicit fear of men.

I can only speak as a man on this point; I don’t like that answer to the problems the film is trying to address. Any man can tell you than men process emotions differently than women—usually through being productive in labor, earning success, and improving themselves spiritually and physically. Yes, some men act violently and seek meaning in conquest. But most men throughout history have sought meaning in family life, the spiritual life, the economic life. The ending—effectively beating the oppressive brainwashing Kens back into their “superfluous” roles in society, as Barbie says, doesn’t really offer men an authentic solution beyond just telling them “You’re enough” and the Kens must accept this as all there is.

But most men aren’t enough, and they need to hear that. They need positive male examples to follow while the film mostly negates the traditional role men have historically been told to embrace. There is no amount of therapy in the world that will fix that—and usually it backfires and causes men to seek out hustlers and grifters in the new digital world of social media. Men must become more than they currently are.

Here we can begin to understand one of the reasons why Barbie has, in fact, been embraced by dissident conservatives as a story of men escaping the horrors of suffocating domesticity and obedience to create their best selves. Ken is a “Homeric” character. A lot of modern men feel like they live stuffy oppressive lives and they want the kind of freedom and self-expression—the “Kenergy”—that the movie claims is just a form of patriarchal brainwashing.

Nevertheless, the Kens are ultimately just told to get back in line and stay there. The film recognizes modern male insecurity but ultimately doesn’t do enough to really give them an authentic end stage in the same way it does for Barbie’s story (which is surprisingly wholesome at the film’s conclusion). Barbie does recognize the problems of both sexes in the modern world but only really gives Barbie the path to self-realization, leaving men to be beaten back into their insecure corner of darkness.

Barbie herself doesn’t have much of a character arc so much as she simply has an extended existential crisis, with every one of her ideas and preferences torn away from her, leaving her alienated from her old life—in true hero’s journey fashion. Ultimately, the ending mirrors the beginning’s image of corporate feminism towering over traditional domesticity, giving Barbie a story about coming to terms with the best parts of who she is and learning to live a more authentic and real life on her own terms. In the end, Barbie isn’t a movie with villains or evil doers. Even the nominally bad and mildly antisemitic corporate bad guys just end up being oafish and ineffectual. The fact that this movie is effectively a $145 million toy commercial means the movie can’t have too much of a bite against any of the characters or corporate entities in charge, and so the ending resolves in the release of tensions and every character effectively walking away into the sunset. We know, though, that real life is not like that.

The fact that the movie is being funded by Mattel means the film constantly has to hide the fact that the rampant consumerism driving the entire enterprise is not that bad because the movie’s implicit reason for existence is to be commercialistic. The movie is very clear that feminism and the idea of Barbie dolls is a kind of shared fiction—a mythology that expresses the idea that women can do better even in a world where that does not fully manifest. But it is never going to come within an inch of saying any of the ideas on display are bad or evil (itself reflective of postmodern existentialism’s rejection of the very idea of good and evil). Whatever complicity Mattel has for advancing these problems can’t be addressed.

As a result, the film almost amounts to a series of ignorant misunderstandings—a drama of characters struggling to communicate their most primal and authentic thoughts beneath the harsh societal expectations that hold the Kens down in Barbieland and women down in the real world. The solution, in the end, is just for these characters to be honest with each other and let their transformation guide them into the best versions of themselves, but that means more for women than it does for men—men are already “enough.” We can see, here, the core question of existentialism coming to the fore: authenticity. But what is authenticity? The film never really answers that implicit question even though that idea is what pervades the entire movie.

It is a testament to Greta Gerwig that all these ideas are implicitly buried under a movie that is, at many moments, very silly, blunt, and kitsch. The majority of the film doesn’t even leave these ideas as subtext and just has the characters all but overtly blurt out ideas like “patriarchy is bad” in the dialogue. But the movie really comes into its own with the tensions between these ideas portrayed on screen for us. Its funniest moments are just watching Ken and Barbie work through their mutual existential crises and watching the effects playout on the imaginative stage. There are moments of sincerity, forgiveness, and compassion that arise in these encounters. At its best, Barbie does touch on the complexity of human existence, it recognizes the plight of both sexes and the lack of meaning men and women struggle with in the modern world, and it does implicitly reject the transhumanist ideology of destroying humanity altogether in order to solve our manifold problems of living together in an imperfect world. That’s pretty good, all things considered, especially for a commercial blockbuster.

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