The Feminism of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie
I wanted to hate Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but the many rave reviews from friends whose opinions I respected told me I wouldn’t.
I wanted to only because I don’t like the idea of films being bankrolled by consumer products, even if they are allowed to be subversive. It’s the classic Capitalist technique of assimilating critiques in order to neutralize them, and expectedly, the film doesn’t do much to challenge Mattel’s profit-driven influence on culture, body image, and health. “Like … other entertainments tethered to their consumer subjects, “Barbie” can only push so hard,” Manohla Dargis writes in her New York Times review. But since a critique of Mattel is beyond the scope of the movie, I will leave it at that. Instead, I’ll talk about what it does do.
Barbie makes an ingenious and effective statement about the patriarchy and, subtly, the damage a binary narrative of main character/helper character has on the whole human race. This is due to Gerwig’s smart set up of a doll world vs. a real world. Female dolls, all named Barbie, rule Barbieland and everything revolves around their needs. Male dolls, all named Ken, don’t feel they even exist unless a Barbie is gazing at them.
But it’s suggested this world is generated by women designing dolls and little girls playing with them in the real world. It’s a land that only exists in the imagination. In the real world, the opposite is true, which Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) learn when they travel there. To Barbie’s horror, and Ken’s delight, this world has a thing called the patriarchy.
Several critics have objected that Ken’s journey is the more compelling one. Dargis calls Gosling a scene stealer, and Tarpley Hitt writing in The Nation bemoans the fact that “it is Ken, whose status as an afterthought casts him an obvious underdog, who ends up having the most interesting, and funniest, arc.”
But just because Ken is a “boy” doesn’t mean his story cannot carry the load of the feminist statement Gerwig is making. I don’t think we are drawn to Ken’s story because of Gosling’s performance (which is great) or the character’s arc, so much as this is where the true feminist emotional punch lies. Seeing a male undergoing the exact arc a woman goes through in the real world — becoming disillusioned by the limits of the helper role, needing to find out who she is without the person she is taught to derive her identity from, and the grief of realizing it’s the person she loves who did this to her — shifts the lens just enough to make us see it anew, and more clearly. Also, men identifying with this path in a movie is a flatly ingenious way of showing them what it really feels like. For women. In the real world.
Once one sees Ken’s arc as a strength of the feminist statement instead of a weakness, I don’t think one can argue the feminism is “muddled.” Barbie’s arc, then, becomes whether or not she wants to live in this real world or not, which I think is an under-appreciated but important dilemma. Little girls can pretend all they want that they are the center of the universe, and Beyoncé can sing all she wants about girls running the world, but at some point you have to ask yourself the value of a feminism that only exists in fantasy or song. The really hard choice is facing the reality, and perhaps sacrificing to do something about it. Many feminists I know prefer to pretend, in their Liberal urban cocoon, that the feminist universe has already arrived — if those pesky Republicans would just give in already.
The fact is, white men still control the real world, in the ways that count, which are political and, crucially, economic (hello, Mattel), and are not interested in giving up that control. They will do what is necessary to make it appear the patriarchy is over, like funding a movie about it. Only on the other side of a long and painful fight will this ever change. But so long as they live in denial of this reality, women are no threat.
Is the movie itself part of the problem, funded as it is by Mattel? (And driving who knows how much in toy sales?) I think another ingenious thing is how Gerwig manages to avoid this. In Barbieland, once the protest regime Kendom has allowed patriarchy to take hold, the key to breaking its stranglehold on the Barbies is for women to talk to each other about what is happening. Here and in the real world, awareness is hope, and a freedom in itself. Patriarchy after all is primarily a belief system, something like a cult. Even if the movie does not take down the Mattel corporation, it does this important work of talking about the patriarchy, out loud, through its doll world/real world conception.
I agree with Hitt that the Mattel doll designer character Gloria’s (America Ferrera) “pep talk about how hard it is to be a woman” that frees the Barbies is “trite” — the most poorly written segment of the film for me. It’s like Gerwig copied and pasted portions of feminist theory, put it into every day language, and couldn’t figure out a way to poeticize or personalize them to give them emotional power. I wish she’d have hired me to write that monologue, I could have killed it. I also agree with Hitt that the portion at the end when the character based on real life Barbie inventor Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, walks Barbie through a pink-tinted desert of the real is the “most phoned-in scene” — to me the second-worst piece of writing. I suppose directors will learn a speech at the end explaining the moral is unnecessary when playwrights finally do, heh. But still — Barbie’s one-word choice, “Yes,” as well as her funny, film-ending one liner, really work for me. It is hard to decide to live in the real world, and it is work to see what is worth embracing about it. I liked it.
(I disagree with Hitt’s repeated criticism of the logic of the world. Barbie starts having thoughts of death not “for whatever reason,” but because the doll designer in the real world, Gloria, put them there. But beyond that, I think it’s one of the great strengths that Gerwig does not require or provide explanations for things that happen. They have an internal, poetic, emotional logic and that’s not because it’s “a toy story” — it’s because it’s art.)
I also disagree with Hitt that the end product is “a commercial.” Just as Gloria demonstrates in the movie, talking about patriarchy is the key to freedom from it in our world too. The fact that the movie talks about patriarchy is an accomplishment in itself, even if it needs to soft pedal any critique of Mattel. The proof of this is how outraged certain people are. You might have seen the condemnation from men on the right on social media. I also spoke with two different women who were upset it wasn’t appropriate for children. One had taken ’tween nieces without knowing it was for adults. The other was mad that the toy theme made children want to see it, but then parents had to explain why they couldn’t. But it’s not that they can’t — with no sex to be had (no vaginas, no penises), the one swear bleeped out, and a PG13 rating, there was nothing in it to hurt them in my opinion — unless you believe that thing to be the naming of the patriarchy. I am convinced the speaking of this word in a movie within earshot of children is what makes it controversial, and what makes certain people angry. It’s also why I believe children should go see it ASAP! (Ha ha, jk! Or, am I?!) The patriarchy is protected precisely by the pretense it doesn’t exist.
Honestly, the most obscene thing about the movie is that even though it’s for adults, Mattel is marketing dolls to children based on the movie characters. Therein lies the sin, not in making a good movie for adults.
Through clearly showing the doll world to be an equal and opposite, and imperfect, reaction to the real world, Gerwig also subtly suggests the ideal would be neither of these. This comes out most overtly when Ken asks to be appreciated for himself. We need a value system essentially different from a binary, one that appreciates a person’s unique qualities as justifications in themselves, instead of categorizing to consolidate power for one side or the other. In a binary, whether it’s the Barbies in Barbieland, the men in the real world, or the star-bellied Sneetches, those in power are their own reason for being, and that privilege needs to be extended to everyone. That would be a very different world indeed. That would require overturning Capitalism’s arbitrary norms and absurd power imbalances, which is definitely beyond the scope of Barbie.
