Barbie: A Commentary on the Gender Crisis
Movie highlights
- Pre-school girls smash baby dolls only to be appalled as tweens by the substitute Barbie appeal.
- A puzzled Ken is incredulous at Barbie’s dismissal of him as a boyfriend.
- Perfect costumes and outstanding acting conjure a convincing Barbie Land doomed to fall apart as reality seeps in.
- A yellow-clad Stereotypical Barbie exits her realm and enters Billie Eilish’s What Was I Made For?
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie synopsis
Barbie (Margot Robbie) – an iconic Goddess created to inspire girls to transcend the limitations of motherhood and imagine a future where they can hold any office they choose (doctor’s, lawyer’s, astronaut’s, president’s, writer’s, etc.) – lives in Barbie Land where every day is perfect and every night there is a party. Barbies enjoy being professionals whereas Kens are mainly beach decors. The heroine of the movie, a Stereotypical Barbie with no particular vocation aside from serving as a beauty idol, suddenly begins to experience symptoms all too familiar to real women whose self-esteem Barbie was meant to boost but has essentially wounded.
Both Barbie and Ken (Ryan Gosling) struggle with an existential crisis. During her journey, Barbie discovers the dystopia of reality and gets to walk in Ken’s shoes, which are very flat indeed. Although the movie provides brief glimpses into the grim world of humans, the main transformation takes place in the Platonic pastel-coloured life-in-plastic where gender role reversal brought by Ken from the Real World contaminates Barbie Land. Only with the help of a mother-daughter duo from the Real World is peace restored in Barbie Land and life there can return to a new normal: the post-revolutionary pondering of gender equality, importance of individualism, and ultimate purpose of romantic love.
Barbie ending is left open to interpretation as Barbara Handler (Barbie doll turned into a woman) makes an appointment with her gynaecologist. Barbie has turned down a happily-ever-after as Ken’s eternal “bride wife” girlfriend, met her creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), and opted for a full-fledged life as a real woman, come what may. The deeper meaning of womanhood is up for the audience to debate and decide.
Meta narrative
Barbie is a tragi-comic commentary on the current trend of feminism attempting to subvert patriarchy. Like an enlightened hero, Ken introduces the notion to Barbie Land. Barbies first fall for the initial appeal of role reversal when Kens take over their dominion, only to be horrified by the model when their eyes are opened to the trap. However, it takes longer to realize that the initial governance of Barbie Land is an exact mirror of the proposed Kendom. It does not matter much whether Barbies or Kens have the upper hand as far as social structure goes since, either way, both genders of dolls are essentially sex-less. Neither possesses genitals and, hence, reproductive power, as explicitly announced by Barbie when she visits the Real World.
The dream of motherhood is crushed from the opening scenes and turns out to be the nightmarish source of Barbie’s thoughts of death, depression, and cellulite as real women still cannot have it all: respect, status, career success, and children. The audience is reminded that the only married dolls in Barbie Land, pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell) and her husband Allan (Michael Cera), were soon discontinued by Mattel “because a pregnant doll was just too weird”. Midge gets a passing glance and is a no-show at Barbie parties and sleepovers. Allan is shown far apart from his wife, not quite a Ken, thus, evoking rather homosexual vibes. He even wears a rainbow striped T-shirt. Each Barbie holds one job the Stereotypical Barbie cannot decide upon. None is scripted to get married and raise children. As a result, matriarchy (the rule of mothers) is as unwelcome in Barbie Land as patriarchy (the rule of fathers). The only debate can be about egalitarian scripts for social behaviour of childless singles which would nonetheless ultimately play out as a compromise (not quite a win-win) in terms of positions of power and “long-term long-distance low-commitment casual” relationships in private life.
Meanwhile, the Real World of movie audience has everything figured out as far as adult world is concerned. Men and women can aim for any job, choose to be single or in any type of consensual relationship, have multiple partners, and even try out gender swap. Even the wage gap is being bridged. Everything is more or less perfect until parenthood is introduced when the dream bubble bursts. In the movie, Stereotypical Barbie and her feminist Utopia gets saved by the middle-aged mom Gloria (America Ferrera) who volunteers to help the protagonist, being aware of what stakes await Barbie Land, with a Ken uprising and Mattel executives as prosecution. Girls like Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) can merely create a Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) whereas wishing to be true to the biological feminine calling can cause a personal collapse with unfathomable ramifications.
However, neither Gloria’s extensive monologue on what it is like to be a woman and simultaneously a working mom, nor Ruth’s serene warning on the pitfalls of true femininity in the Human World can stop Stereotypical Barbie from taking an informed leap of faith. She chooses to become a real woman just like Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy. At the end of the film, the audience can deduce that Barbie aka Barbara Handler has got that dream fulfilled. Perhaps she will go through Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman next, but even that film ends on a positive note. Thank God, AI is coming to save humankind. Let’s see if it will have any better luck in modelling a society where women can safely choose to be mothers, with that status being as coveted, financially secure, and politically independent as any high-ranking job with no strings attached.