Little Pink Houses for You and Me

There’s no reason a freaking Barbie movie should be this good. So the fact that this Barbie movie in particular is a juggernaut is, frankly, amazing. Not because of its quality, which is very high, but because of its subject matter. How often does pointed political satire both break box office records and ignite the zeitgeist? Any filmmaker that can bring together huge crowd of girls and women together to celebrate what it means to be female deserves all the credit in the world. Kudos to the visionary Greta Gerwig for what is, inarguably, a triumph.  

That being said, I didn’t like it.

The only things I knew about Barbie before going in were what I gleaned from the trailer. I also knew Ben Shapiro was BIG mad, but he’s always mad so I didn’t pay any attention to that. I also knew my twenty-year-old daughter loved it, which was enough to get me excited to see the movie. We don’t necessarily have the same taste (it would be a little weird if we did) but she has good taste and I love her, so that was enough to get me jazzed to check it out.

I expected an uplifting “girl power” comedy, which I got. But I couldn’t help shaking the feeling that something important was lost. When I walked out of the theater afterwards, I felt deflated.

Barbie is huge.

In Barbieland, every night is Girls’ Night and every day is the best day ever. Barbie, and her fellow Barbies, rule the world with perfect magnanimity. Barbies love Barbies. Ken is Barbie’s occasional arm candy, a vapid accessory to the film’s hero. Awesome. It’s a great turning-of-the-tables on the traditional cinematic paradigm. Here, Ken lives only for the female gaze, the male ingenue wilting without the sunshine of Barbie’s eye. Ryan Gosling is hilarious as Barbie’s insecure boy toy, milking the irony for all its worth.

When Barbie is suddenly hit with unexpected thoughts of death and unexplained pockets of cellulite, she has to travel to “The Real World” to repair the rip between between the two worlds or something. This is where the movie started to unravel for me.

(Side note: why LA was chosen as a stand-in for the real world is baffling to me, but ok.)

From the moment Ken and Barbie glide into our world on neon rollerblades, the crushing weight of “The Patriarchy” bears down on our hero. She is immediately assaulted by leering men and their crass comments. The doll begins to feel like, “an object,” and we come to understand that the problem with this world boils down to one thing: men.

Unlike the day-glo fantasia of her home world, here men have all the power. In this world, women are, at best, tolerated. Even the “enlightened man” admits in an unguarded moment that the patriarchy is alive and well, they just hide it better than they used to. It’s grim, dude.

In Barbie’s “Real World,” men are clumsy when they’re not being crude, idiots when they’re not being insensitive. As a representation for the world we share, it’s superficial. As a comedic idea, it’s tired. The CEO of Mattel, played by Will Ferrell, is a lumbering goof presiding over an all-male Board of Directors who might have been cast from the Keystone Kops. Their only goal is to, literally, put Barbie back in her box. Heavy-handed symbolism aside, it’s confusing. Why are there only men in the room? Are we meant to believe that in today’s “real world,” Mattel is run by an inane cabal of dudes in three-piece suits? In fact, the only employees we see at Mattel are men, with the exception of America Ferrara’s put-upon executive secretary. Even Mad Men showed a broader range of female professional achievement.

This is a world that seems to have no place for women at all. The few female characters we meet in the Real World are withdrawn, sullen, or deadpan foils for Ken’s jokes. I understand the analogy Gerwig is trying to draw between male underrepresentation in Barbieland and female underrepresentation in the real world, but the parallel doesn’t track. In our world, the real real world, women have never been more represented.

Just to be clear: that’s a good thing.

In this world, women have spent the last hundred years fighting to achieve parity with men. Nobody sensible would ever argue that the work is finished, but it’s progressed enough for me to not read Barbie’s Real World as false.

Ken’s take on the Real World, to my eye, is funny but feels similarly false. Within moments of encountering The Patriarchy, Ken is all-in, demanding to perform an appendectomy because he is a man. He goes from put-upon to boorish in the blink of an eye. It’s funny but jarring. Are we meant to believe that within every man is a bully just waiting for the right moment to start pushing people around?

If stereotypes are true for one sex but not the other, doesn’t that undermine the film’s “I’m OK, you’re OK” message?

There’s a short sequence at the end where Barbie encourages Ken to find his true self but the previous ninety minutes or so have been spent defining feminism as primarily oppositional: girls vs. boys, boys vs. girls.

In fighting the patriarchy, Barbie sometimes resorts to the same chauvinistic tropes feminism is supposed to be overcoming. For example, later in the film, the Barbies use their feminine wiles to trick the Kens into fighting each other. Is “girl power” reductive to women outwitting men by doing nothing more than batting doe eyes at them? Isn’t this exactly the kind of stupid fem Barbie is supposed to be lampooning?

Yes, girls can be anything, do anything. But in elevating the ideals of feminism,  Barbie overreaches, making the crucial mistake of placing women on pedestals. I don’t just mean the run-of-the-mill “Lady President” pedestal. I mean in their personal interactions. These Barbies are women marching in sisterly lock step. They have no interpersonal conflicts that don’t originate with men. They have no professional rivalries or petty jealousies or insecurities. They’re… well, they’re Barbies. That would be ok as a comedic concept if the Ken dolls weren’t plagued with all of the worst human attributes, their pettiness quickly turning (symbolically) murderous.

When The Patriarchy is finally defeated and Barbieland is restored to its rightful place at the film’s end, I was left sharing Barbie’s ennui. While the Kens are mollycoddled with vague promises of future progress and Our Ken is gifted a tie-dyed “I’m Kenough” sweatshirt, Barbie is left wondering about her larger purpose. She doesn’t want to be “stereotypical Barbie” anymore, no longer wants to fill up somebody else’s dream space with tightly choreographed dances and bespoke songs. She wants to go from being an ideal to dreaming up ideas. Good. We want the same for her. In the film’s final joke, Gerwig puts a female twist on the Pinocchio fairy tale. It’s funny, but I wonder if she ends up further undercutting the film. Despite the trials and tribulations of Barbie abroad, does defining her newfound humanity by her private parts end up reducing her to no more than a broad? There’s much to love about Barbie. It’s a movie that aims high and achieves much, but, for me, ends up just missing the mark.

UPDATE: My daughter hated my essay and this is her response, which she said I could post.

“The ending of Barbie going to the gyno is not just supposed to be a funny bit. It’s one supposed to show Barbie just living as a normal women without having to end with her surpassing for amazing accomplishment and 2. Greta Gerwig said that she felt insecure about the gynecologist and things of that nature as a child and wanted to include it in the film to make it more normalized

I also don’t think every interpersonal conflict relates to men at all. It relates more to purpose, identity not in relationship with men but as individuals. Im surprised you took it that way

Also, who cares that the Barbies play off the petty jealously of men to create conflict? Not only is it done in such an absurd, unrealistic way that it’s clearly poking fun, but also how many movies written by men display women in a same or worse light? That’s actually how women are displayed in most films. It seems like the Kens can take one for the team in this film, especially when I would think it’s used as a way to talk about this typical portrayal of women

I think it’s interesting people are so focused on ken and his unlikable characteristic and whether or not they are accurate and representative of all men. Angry that a few bad (but to some extreme true) tendencies of men have been dramatized and generalized to all men in the film. Sounds familiar?”