The Barbie movie is a surrealist and dazzling foray into a pop-culture feminist critique that unfortunately feels either purposely vapid or intentionally radical at its conclusion. But for reasons we’ll explain below, it’s hard to fault the film.
The Barbie Movie introduces (for comedic effect) a caricature of feminist utopia. The men are relegated to joke jobs like ‘Beach’ and the women are doctors, scientists, and the president. We are introduced (briefly) to a Barbie supreme court where the Barbie’s are finishing the Liberal argument on why corporations shouldn’t be allowed to participate in politics
In our assessment, money is not speech, and corporations have no free speech rights to begin with. So any claim on their part to be exercising a right is just their attempt to turn our democracy into a plutocracy.
The Barbie’s cheer and it seems corporate lobbyist Barbie need not attend.
Soon thereafter we are immersed into the governing drama of the story.
First is Ken’s unrequited love for Barbie. She is independent and fulfilled without Ken in her life and (in a gender role-reversal) Ken is entirely defined by his relationship to her. Thus, without Barbie’s affection he is a shell of a man, just as (the viewer is invited to fill in these dots) a housewife is a shell of a woman without family and the love of the husband.
Second, all is not so great in utopia as Barbie begins to have depressive thoughts and physical deformities (cellulite!). Barbie and Ken go on an adventure to the real world to investigate. While there, Barbie experiences discrimination and Ken finds the virtues of patriarchy.
The film starts with the predictable
construction workers: “”You got fries with that shake“‘“, “is that a mirror in your pocket“
then makes the necessary stops at talking points which feel just as childish as the teen who says them (but I presume is meant to sound intelligent)
Teen: “You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism”,
And then addresses a more nuanced issue like female representation in business
the Mattel CEO: “We had a woman CEO in the ’90s”,
Problem identification obsession seems to force the films no-solutions conclusion later on. Barbie goes back to Barbieland, Ken installs patriarchy (because the other Barbies are ‘helpless’ against it), and we enter the pivotal point of the film. The monologue with Gloria to which the viewer is regaled with all the contradictions and problems associated with being female.
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.
We can summarize this seminal moment: most of these are cultural critiques and the rest are impotent because they apply to both genders. For example,
‘You have to be thin but not too thin’
This rings false for a lot of reasons. First, about 70% of America is overweight so who exactly are we expecting to be thin? You’d have to contort this into a media critique to have it make any sense to day-to-day people. Second, this can apply to men just as easily ‘you have to look strong but not too strong’. I.e. be physically fit but not an extreme body builder, etc. etc.
Another:
‘But never forget that the system is rigged’
Against whom? Women? Poor people? As compared to what? Socialism? Scandinavian Social Democracy (I assure you, leftist parties in Sweden still draw the same critique at their own nation)? This critique isn’t only applicable to women (is it rigged against blacks too?) and so it loses narrative power. The Barbie’s use bits of this speech to make all the docile Barbie’s ‘woke’ and suddenly find a sense of gender-solidarity. From this they hatch a not-so-elaborate ploy to make the Kens fight amongst themselves (take note: theme), meanwhile the Barbies re-establish their matriarchy in triumph.
The governing argument is a vapid one. It says that education and gospel preaching is necessary for making people ‘woke’. Because once they hear the ‘truth’ they will suddenly awaken to the red-pill reality of our sexist world, like a Marxist fanfic, an irresistible sense of class/race/gender consciousness emerges and upends the existing (unjust) order for the establishment of a new, almost equally sexist and unjust order.
This is a fantasy with self destructive (for Liberals) messaging. Let’s take a step back for a second and just summarize what this is actually going on.
- The Barbies control Barbie World. If they have any gender solidarity its primitive and not well defined. The nascent Kens were subjugated because they, like the proles of 1984, didn’t have the intellectual firepower to vocalize the injustice inflicted on them, I guess.
- Then once the Kens get educated in patriarchy they immediately discover gender solidary and unify, overtaking the existing order
- the movie explains how this is possible… somehow, “Oh, my God. This is like in the 1500s with the indigenous people and smallpox. They had no defenses against it.”
- The Barbies discover the oppression inherent in patriarchy from the real world and through this re-form their primitive solidarity of earlier into female solidarity.
- The Barbies establish a new world order only slightly less oppressive than the previous one (Kens can have real jobs, but no, not a supreme court justice).
The message is clear, once you lose your solidarity (say based on race, gender, or class) you lose power in society and return to an oppressed state. History, this film argues, follows a crude dialectic of one group bashing in the skull of the other.
The problem with this message is that the axiom of the argument (people are self interested, inherently racist, sexist, etc.) means that the very utopia implied by liberalism is impossible. For example, why should white people give up the reigns of power if everyone is infected with inherent racism? Why should they willingly give up power to a group (say, nonwhites) who may turn around and mistreat them just as bad as the whites mistreated them to begin with? Hopefully you can see the issue here: the seeds of fascism are sown in Liberalism’s soil.
This is an argument with good intentions (identify problems, educate other’s on real world oppression) with unintended consequences (if everyone is inherently evil then why should I give the -other- more power over me?) and maybe the film’s writers fall victim to it because there really isn’t an easy way out (but that’s for a different post).
And if one wants to argue that this is looking into it too far because hey this is just a playful, for fun movie then at a minimum the film is feminist-washing a vapid product because there are no real solutions to the proposed problems. Barbie solves Ken’s love by telling him to give up on her. She solves her existential crisis by moving out of Barbie World. Barbie believed that she was a vessel for positive feminism in the world and this was shown to be a sham. No replacement was given other than sexist revolution. Barbie enters the real world and the credits roll.
The governing problem of our age is not the preaching of woke ‘truth’ but precisely the discernment of what ‘truth’ even is. This is an ideological movie which fails to understand itself because after peeling back the layers, it can’t resolve the trap Liberalism has laid for itself.
- Yes, it is beneficial to teach people that catcalling is bad.
- Yes, it is good to mock gender discrimination in hiring.
- Yes, it is bad to engage in setting unfair cultural standards and expectations for one-another.
But the solution to this problem is not conflict based on gender, class, or racial lines. This is a child’s analysis-solution because it refuses to look two steps ahead. If the solution to our problem is to divide into tribes then there is no reason for these groups to work together, there is no reason why rural whites should agree with the arguments of the Liberal and change their supposedly racist ways. If we choose to interpret our reality in those terms then the takeaway for viewers is not complicated: pick a side and never, ever switch.
Summary
The Barbie movie falls into the same dangerous pitfalls of the internet leftism, an ideological echo chamber which is obsessed with dividing people into tribes and castes in order to give urgency to an argument but in doing so exacerbates the very extremism they claim to combat (misogyny, racism, bigotry).
The Barbie ideological playbook is therefore a pseudo-religious one. It hopes that by merely exposing heathens to the gospel can they save souls and awaken them to the sexist reality which sits before them; but of course salvation resides in an entirely different dimension. The Barbie Movie ends with a trip to the gynecologist; immersing oneself in female ‘reality’, leaving behind the now broken Barbie World to sort its own crisis.
But underneath it all the lesson to the Ken’s should be clear. Once you have hold of power, there is apparently no rational justification for ever letting it go or to build a more inclusive society. And that is a dangerously radical message.
Plato Shrugs 