Watching Barbie the Movie But Seeing Ourselves

“Barbie was supposed to be called ‘Barbie and Ken’,” said Ken actor Ryan Gosling in a press tour interview. So, is Barbie and Ken a love story? 

After what can only be described as a thorough marketing campaign and the release of multiple trailers, many excited viewers, dressed in hot pink, walked into theaters to watch Greta Gerwig’s newest cinematic work, still not entirely sure what they had bought tickets for. 

Warning: there will be spoilers ahead, starting with the fact that Barbie is not a chick flick. It is fundamentally a movie about humans. Did every word of America Ferrera’s monologue about womanhood apply to men or even to all women? No. Yet there are societal issues Gerwig raises in her usual sublime style.

Beyond a world of objectification

But let us set the scene. Barbieland presents a neon colored and hard-plastic fantasy of a subversion of real-world patriarchy. However, this is a very sanguine, compassionate take on the patriarchy. In Barbieland, the Barbies’ biggest crime is that the men are benevolently ignored. The Barbies don’t abuse them, hurt or kill them. They don’t force men into servitude; they’re just not all that interested. 

Photo by Елизавета Крылова on Unsplash.

In Barbieland, everything is perfect for women, yet men do not suffer. They are not in servitude, they are not being objectified or harassed. They are just not the main characters. The Kens are ignored and undervalued, not hated and sexualized. Even in a world meant to mirror the real world’s patriarchy, the women didn’t want power over men. They just wanted to do their own thing.

When Ken brings patriarchy, all the women are displaced and effectively forced into servitude, perpetually compelled to provide attention. Barbie doesn’t hate Ken. She just does not love him. Ken had the power and support to make his own world within Barbieland but chose to take away everything that brought Barbie joy and purpose simply because she rejected him.

Emotional labor

Ken was disappointed at the apathy he faced at Barbieland, but in the real world Barbie was disappointed at how unsafe women were. Because in a world run for and by men, women are never safe. That’s the difference between feminists and misogynists. Women live with these experiences, so they were already familiar with the contents of the movie without ever having seen a single scene. 

Ken makes no attempts to comfort Barbie as she experiences crying and distressing emotions throughout the movie. He does not express many emotions at all, as you would expect for a beach blonde doll. That is, apart from his breakdown in Barbie’s bed, sobbing hysterically into a pillow - a moment in which Barbie comforts him despite the fact that his frankly terrifying emotional outburst was triggered by his own decision-making.

Ken took everything from Barbie - her home, her friends, her sense of worth, her safety - and did not bat an eye. Even when he realizes it’s still not what he wanted and he is long aware of the unfulfilling nature of patriarchy and its consequential isolation from true community and identity, he does not apologize for the damage he has caused. Barbie apologizes for not returning his feelings and for how she treated him. 

Photo by Shi Min T on Unsplash.

This is not a question about whether Barbie should or should not have apologized to Ken; rather, it is proof that the damage Ken has done is irreversible. Ken can move on and go back to how it was before, but Barbie cannot. It mirrors how the mental work women have to go through to preserve the mental state of men, even at the detriment of their own happiness, has penetrated Barbie to the point of no return. She does not ask for an apology from him, nor does she seem upset over not receiving one. It is “just what women are supposed to do”.

Patriarchal pressure

Barbie, however, is so much more than the interactions with Ken, though Gerwig brilliantly reflects on how the experiences of women are necessarily filtered through the lens of patriarchy and daily interactions with it and people who enact it. Barbie centers the female experience and the pressure to be extraordinary. If even stereotypical Barbie, the icon of mainstream successful womanhood, feels like she is not “good enough for anything”, not smart, not pretty enough, what hope could any of the rest of us have? 

Photo by shark ovski on Unsplash.

Gerwig shows, with many interactions and small moments, the sadness of the experience of girlhood and womanhood in a patriarchal system that perpetually pits women against each other and against themselves. Here’s to the Barbies who grew up thinking they were going to be somebody extraordinary only to find out they were just like everybody else.

A traumatizing binary

The Barbie movie is an incredible depiction of boyhood and girlhood. Ken’s establishment of the patriarchy evokes the same feeling so many women feel when growing up and noting your male friends’ sudden lack of eye contact, watching some of them become monsters. Women often remember childhood male friends for the soft hearted boys they once were. Much of growing up is grappling with those changes and the ensuing loss of connection. However, growing from girlhood to womanhood also entails realizing how much of that community of women is about trying to keep each other safe and look out for each other.

Gerwig’s visualization of Ken coming into patriarchal manhood can best be captured by what Terrence Real describes as “the normal traumatization of boys” (in bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love), because ultimately, patriarchal structures prevent any authentic intimacy and relationships with the self and a larger community. 

Ken’s suggestion to Barbie to be his “long term distance low commitment casual girl friend” perfectly encapsulates this paradigm shift from earlier Ken in Barbieland, completely enamored with Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie character. Bell hooks offers insight in The Will to Change: “sexist logic has convinced them (men) and convinces them still that they can have connection and intimacy without commitment”. 

The narrator tells us that Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day when he sees Barbie. He is devoted to the idea of loving and needing Barbie while simultaneously having no idea of her wishes and feelings. Their identities were tied to each other with no real understanding who either of them was, because the hetero-patriarchal binary views true identity as superfluous in the face of clearly defined gendered role-playing.

An opportunity for solidarity

The saddest part to me is the women who will not watch the Barbie movie. Women who will mock it and denigrate it and say that whatever version of womanhood this represents, mine is different and therefore more worthy. Often, because they think men want to hear it. I want to say sorry to those women. I cannot imagine not feeling connected to womanhood. I am so sorry for that pain, that loss of community.

Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash.

Existing on the fringes of the community of womanhood has also been my experience growing up as a queer woman who only found her community later in life. “Weird Barbie'' is what it is like to exist as a queer woman. You sit both within femininity and outside of it, never quite accepted by it. Weird Barbie sits on the fringes of Barbieland, on the outside, while her friends try on clothes that never seem to fit her quite right. Weird Barbie has time to catalog the world because she has been on the fringes of the Barbie/Ken dynamic.

After the movie, I noticed a solidarity with the many women leaving the theater as we stumbled into a warm summer night. The way that they have fallen in love with womanhood. The softness, the complexities, the loyalty, the brilliance. The transcendent reality of an identity both enacted and socialized upon us. So, Barbie is most definitely a love story, but she does not fall for Ken. She falls in love with being a woman, and allows us to do the same.