Come on Barbie, let’s smash patriarchy

Ah ah ah yeah! The Barbie movie marks the end of the world as we know it - bring it on!

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I wasn’t going to do a Barbie thing because everyone is doing a Barbie thing and it didn’t seem relevant to my general area, but then I saw it and was like oh ha ha this is the end of times we’re at the end of times and this movie is the singularity. Let me explain… 

But first! A disclaimer: god I loved this movie. Please go and enjoy this movie. It’s way problematic but it’s also GREAT. We can hold these two things in our hands at once. We’re adults! We can do hard things! Anyhoo. Spoilers ahead. After an existential hiccup, Barbie and Ken travel to the real world to try to fix stuff but Ken ends up importing patriarchy to the previously meticulously matriarchal Barbieland and super self-conscious feminist hijinks ensue. 

This film somehow contains all things at the same time - an awakening story, a mother daughter relationship story, a patriarchy story, a female solidarity story, an evolution over revolution story, an anti-consumer-culture-anti-capitalist-anti-beauty-standards told by hyper beautiful people flogging plastic dolls by the many. It’s a lot, and it’s also somehow gloriously, ridiculously vapid. Everything and nothing at once. 

It is also a film entirely without subtext, and to me that makes it kind of perfect. Not that I don’t love a good bit of subtext, but in this context it’s just great. Why bother keeping the quiet part quiet when you can say it loudly and get more laughs because of it?

Garth Marenghi knows what’s what

This film knows what it is — a massive ball of contradiction and hypocrisy — and does it anyway, forgoing a cheeky wink and replacing it instead with a full frontal wide open fourth wall. 

There is, of course, discourse. Director Greta Gerwig says that she’s subverting the thing while also doing the thing.

Jessica DeFino

rips that idea a new one in this glorious take down. And yet. The Barbie movie is a bit like ordering a vegan meal from Burger King. It says all the right things about health and animal welfare and the planet, but fundamentally you're supporting the thing you're against, even though, technically, your burger is 100% meat free and organic¹.

Can we do feminism and anti-consumerism on a technicality? Ehhhhh I guess? Maybe? Sometimes? Not really? The way we’re trying to loophole our way to radicalism is at once fascinating and a tiny bit terrifying.

Literary academic types like to talk about storytelling as a form of collective sensemaking, a kind of manifestation of our collective selves and a way of passing on survival-necessary information². The storytellers are the world expressing itself, if you like: The Matrix is a powerful reflection of our conflicted identities in a world designed to sap us of our physical and psychological power; Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power is a full-chested scream from every woman who ever felt like the oppression they suffer would explode out of them; anything by Dan Brown expresses the fantasy that life is a problem to solve and there is an actual answer at the end of a series of complex struggles. You get the idea. So in trying to be the thing and critique the thing, what is Barbie actually doing?

There’s a scene about two-thirds in which America Ferrara’s character, the bored, frustrated mother Gloria, monologues about the difficulties of being a woman. 

“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. “

Etc etc for many more words.

And this, really, sums up the problem with the movie. You have to be anti-capitalist but you’re a film that exists to feed a behemoth franchise. You have to be anti-consumerist but you’ve already sold a billion plastic dolls. You have to be feminist but Barbie’s treatment of Ken inspires his incel behaviour making it the women’s fault all along (plus he gets all the best jokes). 

And yet it balances all this with just the right amount of self-awareness to eek it over the line. It’s like it has somehow reached the triple point of storytelling, where the story, the real world, and the critique all exist in perfect equilibrium. Zero degrees Kelvin. Kenvin, if you will. Thermodynamics and Barbie crossover jokes! Who knew?

This attitude of ‘we know the problem and we’re doing it anyway’ is peak capitalist hubris, where the system is so certain of its own permanence that it can critique itself from a point of absolute security. Mattel and Warner Bros aren’t including critiques of capitalism in their films because they want people to critique capitalism. They’re doing it because, hilariously, it makes them more money. And maybe they weren’t entirely happy with the storyline but, fuck it, they have the somewhat justified confidence that capitalism is here to stay, so who cares? Say whatever you want. It makes no difference and listen to that - kerching kerching - the cash registers are overflowing. 

It’s like the baddie at the end of an action film who, having captured the goodie and lashed them to a chair, decides to exposite their entire evil plan because they think they’ve got it in the bag. It’s just capitalism from now until forever mwaahahaha and add a cheeky moustache twiddle for good measure. 

But, well, we all know what happens just after the evil plan is revealed. And we all know that equilibrium is fragile and transient, disrupted by the smallest of outside influences. And we also know, because history exists, that very often the point at which great empires think they’re here to stay forever is actually the point at which they’re about to collapse. 

 

1. Thanks to Martin Hill, whose BK analogy I stole wholesale

2. Bietti, Lucas M et al. “Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking.” Topics in cognitive science vol. 11,4 (2019): 710-732. doi:10.1111/tops.12358

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