Barbie: the naked empress

I had to overcome deeply rooted resistance to make myself go and see Barbie, having decided she bears considerable responsibility for many of my lingering childhood and adolescent hang-ups, all to do with not looking like Barbie. Some feminist friends whose opinions I respect loved it, and several people assured me it would be a pleasant surprise. I decided that, love it or hate it, I had to judge for myself.

A moment of treachery - my sister Janet and I holding our new Christmas dolls - but I think mine is a Sindy. Dear reader, let me assure you Barbie was my first true love. Sindy never replaced her.

I’ve enjoyed some of the discussions and reviews I’ve seen on Facebook and elsewhere, so I decided to gather these together here in case others are interested.

Here are links to a few pieces I’ve read and reflected on:

• Nina Power’s thought-provoking piece in Compact magazine, titled “Socialism or Barbie-ism”, includes a couple of intriguing quotes about the significance of dolls.

• A piece in The New Yorker by Leslie Jamison makes some interesting points about the ambiguities of little girls’ relationships with their dolls.

• Michelle Eastwood wrote a feminist theological reflection which offers a positive take on the film and the challenge it poses to ecclesial gender politics.

• I tended to agree with David Cox in his Guardian piece, “Barbie’s muddled feminist fantasy still bows to the patriarchy”.

• Brendan Myers wrote a post on the Science Fiction Facebook page which I found over-enthusiastic, but he makes some interesting points re the film’s existentialist themes. He quotes one of the more interesting lines from the film, when Barbie says that she wants to be “part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.”

• Priyamvada Gopal’s is the only one that situates the film in a global socio-economic context, and is the best critical review I’ve read.

Here goes for my semi-considered opinion after a few days of reading and reflecting.

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First, let me say what I did like. Ryan Gosling (“and Ken”) stole the show. I know that it’s a betrayal of feminist principles to focus on the male lead, but sorry gals, his pastiche masculinity complete with galloping horses (think Putin) and Jordan Peterson-type machismo mixed in with a bit of Andrew Tate misogyny did it for me.

The mother-daughter relationship portrayed as one of love shot through with resentment and longing is beautifully depicted in the relationship between America Ferrera as the mother (Gloria) and Ariana Greenblatt as her teenage daughter (Sasha). The healing of this relationship is I think the only truly redemptive feature of the film—an Irigarayan theme perhaps. It acquires a quasi-theological meaning when Barbie encounters her original creator, first as a protective ghost and then as a kind of celestial mother figure called Ruth (Rhea Perlman), inspired by Barbie’s original inventor, Ruth Handler.

The sets were fabulous, with many nods to the memories women of my age have of Barbie outfits and all her many incarnations through the years. She has an endless capacity for metamorphosis, all without losing that tiny waist and those long legs and pert nipple-less tits. Spoiler alert—her visit to a gynaecologist suggests that we’re meant to believe that the smooth sexless curve between her legs has been replaced by something a little more lifelike, though really, I doubt it. I fear Barbie will always fall prey to the shaming male gaze that led to the apocryphal story of John Ruskin being unable to rise to the occasion on his wedding night because he hadn’t realized that women have pubic hair.

Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) is refreshingly eccentric. She is perhaps a token nod towards lesbianism, though anyone who didn’t pick up on culturally obscure clues (Birkenstocks carry a heavy symbolic load and Barbie’s favourite band is The Indigo Girls), would have been left untroubled by any disruption to the heterosexual order of things. (And yes, in case you ask, you can buy the doll).

Cinematically, the film appealed to film buffs who noticed clever references to other films, beginning with a pastiche of the opening scene from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Other references I’ve seen so far include Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz, Saturday Night Fever, Jacques Tati … I suspect there were many more.

But despite it being a clever and at times funny film, I have an insurmountable resistance to (a) feel-good movies that subtly reinforce the status quo while pretending to subvert it; (b) the same twice over when corporate sponsorship is involved—not just Mattel but also General Motors; (c) pink (as opposed to Pink). Overall I found it tedious and ideologically problematic.

I’m about to bang on like a grumpy old woman, but I’m well able to suspend my feminist and socialist principles in the name of entertainment. I love Mamma Mia and Absolutely Fabulous. I have an appetite for Scandi Noir thrillers where women come to gruesome ends. I weep copiously through operas and ballets that show women dying of unrequited love or consumption. Mimi. Violetta. Giselle. Odette. There is no end to my capacity to suspend moral judgment and feminist principles in order to be entertained, but not when I’m asked to believe that I’m being morally educated at the same time.

Barbie is about existentialism as well as feminism—one sharp-eyed viewer observed that the hot pink, cloth-bound books in her house include Kafka and Camus (thank you, Julie Kemp), but she remains the stereotypically beautiful all-American gal when all is said and done—the modern bourgeois feminist who can have it all (even a vagina), be it all, do it all, while the grim reaper is kept at bay by healthcare specialists whose premises look like corporate headquarters. Billie Elish’s song, What Was I Made For?, expresses the existential question that awakens Barbie to reality. Ruth tells her, “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.” A brief encounter in the “real” world has Barbie telling an old woman she’s beautiful, but that’s as close as we come to any significant encounter with aging, while death remains an abstract idea throughout.

Margot Robbie is excellent, but the script doesn’t stretch her character as Stereotypical Barbie beyond … well … stereotypes. Blissfully happy Barbie in a timeless Dreamland where nothing is real finds herself thinking of death, and the fantasy implodes with burnt toast, curdled milk, flat feet, and existential angst. She learns to shed delicate tears and accepts the reality of aging and death, but snot and snivels would have been a step too far. As narrator Helen Mirren says, breaking the fourth wall in the best joke in the film, when the existentially awakened Barbie laments that she’s no longer pretty, “Note to filmmakers: Casting Margot Robbie is the wrong person you want to make this point.”

I found myself musing on how I might have done it differently. Maybe Barbie could have experienced a rapid aging process when she enters the real world, so that she might catch up with those of us who first played with her when we were little girls. I'd cast Joanna Lumley as Barbie and script it along the lines of Absolutely Fabulous.

The feminist polemics delivered by America Ferrera act as a wake-up call for the tribe of Barbies, who then resort to age-old feminine wiles of seduction to trick their dim-witted menfolk into waging war on each other. Ferrera’s monologue has generated considerable enthusiasm, but this weary old rhetoric of US progressive feminism has been around for a long time, even though it still retains deeply truthful resonances. Similarly, the sexism and misogyny that Barbie experiences on her first foray into reality with “and Ken” are dated caricatures. Sexism today is often more camouflaged and more deadly, while feminism is losing ground daily. The film offers not even a whisper of acknowledgment that women’s rights in the US have been consumed by a Far Right regime that makes it more like the patriarchal Kendom by the minute.

The real world that Barbie enters is that of an elite and insulated bubble of white privilege and wealth, with no border guards or barbed wire fences to keep her out. It’s a world that’s unattainable for the majority of US citizens, let alone citizens of the two-thirds world. Her apotheosis is a celebration of the kind of radical individualism that neoliberalism only offers to its beneficiaries.

As well as being an advertisement for Mattel, the film is also sponsored by General Motors. There is no climate crisis in Barbie’s “real” world. White progressive feminism is complicit in the dystopian nightmares confronting us, and there is very little of this reality in Barbie’s MAGA feminist fantasy.

This is the world that Oppenheimer’s bomb was created to defend. The women of Iraq know what it costs to defend that world. So do the women of Afghanistan. Humans only have one ending. The American dream is an idea but ideas can and must have endings lest they hasten all our endings. The idea that Barbie tries to sell us has a flipside, for it is underpinned by unthinkable violence. To quote Nina Power, “behind every Barbie, an Oppenheimer.”

Priyamvada Gopal has written a review that exposes the film’s dark underbelly. She writes:

As American women are urged to be anything they want to be—meaning, really, middle-class professionals like doctors, lawyers, and astronauts, with a few Nobel Prize winners in the mix—we are left with silence about the capitalist economic order in which the relative affluence of those women who can make these choices is facilitated by the indigence of millions of women globally whose choices are rather more constrained. … [U]nless our own imaginings of liberated futures can be more critical of the world we live in and expand beyond middle-class professionals and girl bosses, the future, feminist or otherwise, comes to us in varying shades of grim.