Barbie is hard to write about isn’t it?
Is that just because we’ve only seen it once, and a few days ago now? Or are you meaning that it’s dense and complex?
Well, those things are part of it, for sure. On the ‘dense and complex’ thing: the film is kind of rapid-fire, but not by the standards of say, Everything Everywhere All At Once or the recent animated Spider-Man movies. It doesn’t feel deliberately sensorially overwhelming in the way those films do. And Barbie is undeniably complex, but maybe one of the things that makes it hard to write about is that it deploys irony in multifaceted and shifting ways, which sometimes threw me off-balance and made me wonder, ‘OK, so how is the film inviting me to feel about this character, or this moment?’
I guess the film has to navigate i) the fact that Barbie is already a very well-known thing in the world, ii) the rules of a fictional world populated by dolls who have some but not all of the features of humans in the real world, and iii) how the viewer is likely to feel about the authenticity or integrity of a film that is trying to function as art (and probably progressive, enlightened art) but is also endorsed by the Mattel corporation.
Yes, that is a lot to navigate! In relation to ii), there’s some LEGO movie style fun at the beginning around how the characters move, the circularity of their lives, etc, but – and this is just dawning on me now – Pleasantville is actually a closer model for this movie than the LEGO movie is. In Pleasantville, characters are living with limited consciousnesses and horizons, and then this parallel universe is interrupted and expanded.
And just as a side note, the film clearly doesn’t want to get too bogged down in the mechanics of how you journey from one realm to the other. It’s a bit more Elf than Pleasantville in that respect – there are gatekeepers (‘Weird Barbie’, and maybe the Will Ferrell character), but the main point made is that it’s just a really long, multi-stage journey.
It’s the ‘limited consciousness’ thing that I think might be at the heart of the movie’s achievements and its limitations – because the film itself arguably has a limited consciousness. One critical response to the film – a response that I think is both accurate and pressing – is to say that although there’s other stuff happening around the edges, overall it feels white, middle class, cis, and straight. I want to say it feels like a rich world second-wave feminist text more than anything.
More so than a post-feminist text? Doesn’t trying to salvage Barbie as feminist feel more post-feminist?
I don’t want to be too prescriptive about the boundaries here, and my knowledge and understanding isn’t perfect, but I still maintain that yes, the emphasis on working life, job roles, and renegotiating relationships with men feel like core second-wave concerns.
We’re jumping around a bit here, but I suppose one question we could ask, as a way of trying to understand the film’s politics, is ‘What has changed by the end of the movie?’
We should do that, but can we come back to the crucial matter of how successfully funny the film often is?
Yes, we can.
So, of course, the film does not end with Barbie and Ken together. The last line of the film is Barbie announcing, with a broad smile, ‘I’m here to see my gynaecologist’. This ultimate insistence on biology is interesting itself in a number of delicate ways (and of course it’s compositionally motivated by the lack of genitals of plastic dolls, something which gets referenced a few times). It’s also the case that self-actualisation is what is being emphasised here – for Barbie, and, slightly earlier, for Ken. Ah, and now I might need to go back and contradict myself, or at least refine an earlier statement. The trajectories the film ultimately endorses – am I right about this? – are journeys of self-knowledge, rather than achievements of systemic change? Which would perhaps make the film less second-wavey than I was suggesting.
But what about the stuff about the men trying to change to constitution, and the women collectively defeating it? Plus the women working collectively to raise one another’s consciousnesses?
Yes, you’re right. It is a bit more complicated than I was making it sound. But is it fair to say that the constitutional stuff feels like a game, and that the ultimate aim of the consciousness-raising is enhanced autonomy in one’s personal life?
Isn’t enhanced autonomy in one’s personal life a legitimate and noble aim of politics?
Perhaps of liberal politics especially, yes, and I’m all for it. This is the difficulty I’m facing here. I’m torn between wanting to suggest that the film doesn’t go far enough, while also recognising that a lot of what it is endorsing, and a lot of the work it is doing, is good, and still necessary. One point I’d add on this is that even if we give more weight to the constitutional side plot than I’m giving here (and of course we can draw parallels with Trump and other less constitutionally-constrained strongmen), the sense of any systemic change in the real world is entirely absent. Although it would of course be presumptuous to try to pursue that in a storyline (‘Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved’).
Is there something about the way the film treats the relationship between structure and agency that we need to talk about further?
Yes! And that will probably let us get to humour soon. For me, the film’s satire really starts to bite, and I got my biggest early laughs, when Barbie and Ken arrive in the real world, and Ken discovers patriarchy. Tonally and politically it’s quite complex, and awkward-in-a-good-way. The film encourages us to laugh at the joy of this man-child, played with a glint in his eye by Ryan Gosling, as hitherto-undreamt-of status and possiblities open up to him. The presentation of patriarchy as a big elaborate structure, and also a way for little boys to fulfil their infantile and selfish needs, feels clever and satisfying.
And then Ken returns to Barbieland and installs patriarchy there.
Yes, and here’s where I struggle, as I often do, with how to deal with the allegory. The way the film deals with the fact that patriarchy installs itself so easily is to draw a parallel with disease and innoculation. The idea is that because the female residents of Barbieland have never had to deal with patriarchy before, they haven’t got any inbuilt immunity or resistance. My question is: What, and how much, does this tell us about the real world? The initial rules of Barbieland are so different from ours that it’s hard to map our social relations and politics onto its. In Barbieland resource scarcity, education, childrearing, sex, and reproduction are barely present, thus removing many sources of gendered conflict that structure real-world relatonships. Politics is only present in the guise of declaring laws and presenting awards.
There’s the risk of sounding too literal-minded here isn’t there? I mean, of course a doll-world isn’t like our real world, just like any fantasy leaves holes that, if they were filled by real-world concerns, would destroy the fantasy. Isn’t the film asking who, or what needs, the fantasy serves?
Or perhaps the process of bringing the real world into contact with the fantasy world is to show which elements of the real world stand in the way of the fantasy world existing. And this takes us to what I see as some of the film’s main successes – both politically and comedically. I think the film is exceptionally good at portraying male insecurity. The passage of the film where the Barbies indulge the fragile masculinity of the Kens – by, for example ‘tell[ing] them you’ve never seen The Godfather and you want them to explain it to you’, or letting them stare into your eyes while they play guitar to you – is acute and hilarious.
Now, the critical, negative way of developing this point would be to say that the film reduces sexual politics to interpersonal interactions. It hasn’t got much to tell us about structure or systemic change, but it can cast a very sharp eye on the way men often behave. Is that sufficient?
A more generous, and I think more accurate, way to go would be to point out that interpersonal interactions are the place where norms are reaffirmed, contested, resisted, paid lip-service to, treated ironically, and so on and so on. So they are not some kind of unimportant epiphenomenon; they are one of the key sites in most people’s lives where politics happens, day to day. ‘The personal is political.’
And the details of these interactions are something that film as a medium is very well-equipped to present.
Yes, absolutely: we have characters, narrative scenarios, and close-ups of faces and gestures, so we can get an extremely rich and poised sense of how the characters are inhabiting their roles. The opportunities for irony, among other effects, is great.
And the film is very good at making Ken especially a character driven by emotions that he clearly feels strongly, but doesn’t fully understand.
Yes. It feels too wishy-washy to just say that the film extends generosity and empathy towards Ken, but it’s true and important nevertheless. And more broadly, the moments of genuine emotion – Margot Robbie’s crying, and her various realisations – are crucial to the emotional shape and effect of the film.
Yes. So, a film that’s hard to pin down, but interesting and valuable to try to think through.
Yes. We didn’t even really touch on the existential stuff about death, but I think let’s leave it there for now.
Between Sympathy and Detachment 