[WARNING: This post discusses the movie Barbie with spoilers]
It’s been a week since Greta Gerwig’s movie Barbie was released and the internet is abuzz with comments of all sizes and types. Surely, mine is not needed but, as happens, the more I think about the movie, the more restless I get. I was delighted by Gerwig’s clever script (co-written with her husband Noah Baumbach) but I am now quite worried about the main narrative arcs, those of Barbie and Ken, which are not exactly fulfilling.
I have read lots about how empowering this movie is for women but, to be honest, I don’t quite see it. Barbie, who spends the whole film rejecting Ken’s clumsy advances is rewarded… with a full set of genitalia, presumably of the female kind, which is what apparently makes her human. Her ‘owner’ Gloria’s narrative arc does not empower her at all, either. I expected humble, hard-working Gloria to be named Mattel’s new CEO instead of the obnoxious, cocky guy Will Ferrell plays, since she restores the lost balance in Barbieland. Yet, in her last scene she is just driving Barbie to her first appointment with the gynaecologist. How is that scene empowering for either of them? And how come the all-male Mattel board is left untouched? Shouldn’t Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler (played by the great Rhea Pearlman), have something to say about the company she co-founded? (the real CEO, by the way, is a man but the real Board Of Directors currently consists of six men and five women).
What worries me most profoundly, hence this post, are the many comments online praising Ryan Gosling for stealing the show with his performance as Ken. On the other hand, I hear voices wondering whether Ken has too much protagonism for a movie called Barbie, and I agree: Barbie’s personal crisis, unleashed when she senses Gloria’s intimations of mortality (and despair at cellulitis) is subordinated to the collective crisis the Barbies face when Ken returns from the visit to the real world with a plan to establish patriarchy.
As Gerwig and Baumbach have it, Ken’s main problem is that he is too dependent on attracting Barbie’s interest and she is not that interested in him, a male doll created mainly to be her accessory. Barbieland is a matriarchy and the men appear to be just a sort of adornment, with no housing of their own (where do they sleep?) and no function, except being around. Ken himself says that his job is ‘beach’, when he is asked in the real world, not even ‘beach bum’, just ‘beach’. His uselessness, lack of an identity of his own, and dependence on Barbie is what prompts him to hide in her car as a redundant stowaway when she decides to seek her ’owner’ in the real world. What is most puzzling in the Barbie and Ken relationship is that Barbie’s tepid attitude clearly signals it is not romantic, while he appears to consider himself her boyfriend. Given their lack of genitalia (for these are dolls, let’s recall), it is hard to say what exactly Ken craves from Barbie though, as his arc advances, it appears to be recognition as a man.
I have referred here several times to Lorenzo Mediano’s intriguing novel El secreto de la Diosa (2003, The secret of the Goddess) which still remains for me the most plausible account of what could have happened in Prehistory. I was reminded very much of this novel as I watched Barbie. In Mediano’s novel, his tribal Homo Sapiens live in a matriarchal society built around the cult of the Goddess, which reflects women’s ability to engender new life. Since sex and birth are separated by nine long months, the men fail to understand their own role in procreation until a clever young man puts two and two together and concludes the men are being duped. What follows is the violent overthrow of the Goddess cult and the submission of the women by means of what we now call patriarchy. In Barbie Ken makes no crucial discovery about how sex and birth are connected because Barbieland is sexless (though there is a pregnant doll, Midge, married to Allan, Ken’s best friend, which Mattel once produced but quickly withdraw from the market for fear she might be misread as a single mother). Ken simply travels to our own world and discovers, together with Barbie, that it is a patriarchy. This is where the movie becomes truly scary.
Ken’s ideas about the patriarchy are quite muddled (he believes that horses play a major role, presumably after he learns what a cowboy is) but what is frightening is how quickly he manages to upend Barbieland’s matriarchy by having all the Kens brainwash all the Barbies into grateful submission. Gerwig and Baumbach may make fun of all the stereotypes attached to patriarchal masculinity, but Ken is a man with a mission and his mission is very ugly. Gloria (played by America Ferrera) is given the counter-mission of returning the brainwashed women to matriarchal sanity by reciting all the ways in which men in the real world undermine women’s bodies and minds. This, of course, is what feminism is supposed to do: open women’s eyes to patriarchal reality, renew their awareness of who we truly are. Yet, although this process of consciousness raising may work for the women, who eventually manage to restore their power and their matriarchal institutions, it does nothing for the men (they seem, anyway, more interested in fighting each other).
I watched the film on July 22, the day before the general elections in Spain, when there was still a chance that the right-wing, ultra-patriarchal party Vox might enter the Government and, believe me, Ken’s coup d’état seemed to me just a horrifying allegory. Still, I was left wondering why the Barbies found no way to integrate the Kens in their democracy. The image of the all-pink, all-female Parliament voting itself back into action was empowering, yes, but also worrying because it was the counterpart of the Mattel’s all-male board in the movie’s ‘real-life’ world. As I noted, there is no room in that board for Gloria, but there is no room either for the Kens in the Barbies’ seat of power.
Margot Robbie, who plays wonderfully the constantly amazed Barbie, is also one of the four film producers (the other three are men) and she did have a say in how the film should develop. She has been apparently gently mocked by her friends for deciding not to turn Barbie and Ken’s story into a romance, thus missing the chance to kiss attractive Ryan Gosling. Robbie was adamant that Barbie’s narrative arc should not conclude with love so, as noted, it concludes with the doll’s transformation into a flesh and blood woman. What is Ken given instead? Well, he is given a tie-dye hoodie with the legend ‘I Am Kenough’ printed on it; the hoodie, by the way, is going to be shortly sold by Mattel who did not think in advance it might interest anybody.
If Ken is finally ‘Kenough’, this means that he was not enough before; he is still not enough for Barbie, but he becomes enough for himself to be in short, his own man. I find this a very positive message (patriarchal misogyny will end the day men stop feeling resentful because they need women), but in the end we are still building a post-postmodern doctrine of the ‘separate spheres’ in which love is out of the equation, even the possibility that men and women share power and feel pleasure in each other’s company. Ken ends where he started, on the beach, just less inclined to chase Barbie around now that he is his own man. He is not just Barbie’s accessory but the possessor of his own identity, which spells out through the word Kenough that he is now ‘man enough’. Fair enough…
Mattel has already announced their intention of releasing as many sequels as they can to Barbie, which is, of course, a serious mistake. Gerwig’s film is adorable as a parody, and it should not be read as a two-hour long advertising for Barbie merchandising products. Inevitably, this is what it will become, as its amazing box-office performance has turned into the windfall Mattel sorely needed to get out of the red numbers zone. The improvised decision to sell a whole line of Kenough merchandising gives a clue about how little Mattel understood Gerwig’s film but also of how quickly they are catching up. Gerwig has declared she has no more to give to Barbie, but Mattel and Warner Bros. will no doubt find alternatives, both to direct and to script the sequels. The first sequel faces, in any case, the challenge of what to do with a fully human Barbie in our patriarchal world, and the challenge of whether Ken should follow the same path. It doesn’t look good.
Enjoy Barbie, but don’t buy Barbies; love the parody, but don’t accept Ken’s gleeful enjoyment of patriarchy; celebrate women’s power but find ways to communicate with men. At least the ones who are Kenough. And don’t ever vote for the other kind, do not let yourself be brainwashed by them, whether you are a woman, a man or non-binary (by the way, Mattel’s ‘gender-neutral’ Creatable World dolls, launched in 2019, were discontinued in 2021; none appears in Barbie).