By Jess Flarity

The cultural landscape around Barbie currently ebbs and flows like a kaleidoscopic tide. Everyone (writing reviews) seems to think that the movie/doll/idea can encapsulate how they personally feel or think about gender/feminism/capitalism. The film gets excoriated about its representation of body image, disability, and corporate ties, only to be exonerated as perfectly describing the complications of modern womanhood, manhood, and subversion. You can see anything you want in the film; Andi Zeisler’s idea of “marketplace feminism” is what immediately jumped to my mind after I watched it, and so that’s how I initially focused my thoughts. A few days and a dozen plus reviews read later, I’m not certain about anything Barbie-related, and feel like I’m trapped in a nightmare funhouse mirror room all painted in shades of bubblegum.

The strangest part is that us adults are the only ones fixated on the film. I know a handful of girls ages 8-12 and you know what they all play with in their free time? Digital tablets loaded with Roblox and Youtube. If there are dolls (Barbie included), they’re stuck in a jumbled box in the corner of the den with the other discarded plastic toys. I watch the children’s eyes spin as they play slot-machine style games about owning pets and dressing up, or they sit slack-jawed as an over-enthusiastic teenage girl does her makeup, opens shimmery mystery boxes, or squeezes out tubes of colorful goo. At birthdays and Christmas, over half the kids’ presents are slim envelopes filled with Robux and gift cards. If I looked over and saw one of them brushing Barbie’s blonde mane, I’d have to assume both that the power was out and their batteries had died.

My original review is listed below, but it already exists piecemeal inside a bunch of other reviews, with this one about patriarchy and capitalism summarizing what I really think. But I’m currently upside-down on the movie, trapped somewhere between Barbie Land and Reality, still wearing my rollerblades while bicycling through a campground placed over an ocean of snow. If you happen to find the way out, please tell the rabbit that I’m going to be very late for tea…

Original Review – Barbie: The Crown Jewel of Marketplace Feminism

When I googled “Barbie Movie” to do research for this article, a magical sparkle invaded my screen and transformed my search result’s background into that iconic Pepto Bismol shade of pink (it also does this if you search for Ryan Gosling or Margot Robbie, but aptly, it does not work for Michael Cera). Wow. Now that’s advertising! Who knows how much the movie studio paid Google so their engineers could whip up this technological feat, but there is also a long commercial for their new image recognition technology, Lens, at the start of the movie, so this may have been only part of a bigger marketing deal. Barbie’s advertising budget was $150 million, more than the actual filming budget of $145 million; this is just the first indicator of how closely capitalism and feminism are intertwined in this film.

Yes, Barbie is obviously a feminist film, though I think Time magazine is the most accurate when reviewer Stephanie Zacharek describes it as feminist in a “scattershot way.” In many ways, the movie is an allegory for what it means for women or anyone female-identifying to align with feminism today, as the movement pulls individuals into a dozen different directions. For men, Barbie’s message is much more clear: love yourself and get out of our way. Easy. What is the message for women by the end of the film? Life is complicated, so you best get your vagina checked? If so, I feel like director Greta Gerwig’s vision has already been fully encapsulated by this one-minute faux commercial from That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Barbie is the ultimate achievement of marketplace feminism, simultaneously criticizing itself while also promoting itself in a brilliant flash of self-deception. It’s a feminist triumph; also, please continue buying our plastic dolls made from petroleum products that were/are manufactured at slave wages. Andi Zeisler pointed out in 2016 in We Were Feminists Once how marketplace feminism has already “bought and sold” the movement, but this book must not have appeared on Gerwig’s Women’s Studies course list. Without recognizing this shift in the present day, Barbie’s feminist awakening feels almost nostalgic, like a teenage girl or young mother in the early 1960’s stumbling upon a copy of The Feminine Mystique. It resonates with audiences because it’s familiar—and safe. It’s a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé kind of feminism, which only makes Ben Shapiro look even more ridiculous when he compares people’s outrage at his burning of the dolls in a publicity stunt to the burning of the Quran, though overreaction to commonplace values has already been the standard in the conservative playbook for decades.

Gerwig does manage to get in a few jabs at Mattel throughout the film, but as other reviews have already pointed out, the toy company obviously doesn’t mind taking a weak punch in order to boost sales. The executives read the script and did the math; any short term backlash the company will face is nothing compared to the media saturation the brand has achieved, and with the movie tie-ins, they will laugh all the way to the bank. This is what makes Barbie a victim of marketplace feminism of the highest order—no matter how severely the film critiques capitalism or the patriarchy, it remains a propaganda piece that will increase sales. Gerwig could have had Margot Robbie directly quoting from Angela Davis or Andrienne Rich half the time, but the movie would still end up being a two-hour commercial.

Here’s how the most important issues get glossed over—for example, at one point, Barbie discovers she might be promoting sexism and even a fascist (see Orwell’s definition from 1946), but this is also with an ironic wink. With the culture wars burning hotter than ever, as evidenced by the Bud Light-Mulvaney controversy, the creators of the movie very cleverly nod to complications without fully resolving them. At the film’s climax, there’s a long sequence where the mom character explains how patriarchy uses cognitive dissonance to trap women in a cycle of self-defeat, and once the Barbies realize this they “unbrainwash” each other. Afterwards, the Barbies trick the Kens to a battle against themselves (that somehow transforms into a dance number), so everything is fixed! Hooray! Let’s all buy pink dresses to celebrate! 

The film’s initial breakneck sense of pacing makes it so the audience doesn’t pause too long to think at all, TikTok style, with dazzling sets and outfits that hypnotize viewers into a state of blissful confusion. I’m also calling it now: prepare for a flood of Barbie-Ken couple’s outfits come Halloween, or even Ken-Ken and Barbie-Barbie pairings, because there was a powerful message of supporting LGBT+ people in the movie, right? According to the LGBT+ cast members, including the trans actor Hari Nef, the film is a real “party,” which is why Gerwig chose to leave in that controversial, yet super-hot make-out scene between Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu at the end. Beach me off, Ken!

Just kidding, that scene never happens because it would get the film banned in the international market, so it doesn’t exist outside of Archive of Our Own.

This gets to another important phenomenon related to the movie, the real-life dressing up aspect that some are calling “Barbiecore.” When I saw the movie at the latest 10 o’clock showing on a weeknight, there were still about a half-dozen young women wearing ridiculous high heels and elaborate pink dresses in attendance. Join the fight against consumerism with a hot new look. There is an enormous gap between generations and how they approach the film; for older people, we just show up and watch the movie, but for Gen Z, going to see Barbie has become a very “Instagram-able moment” that needs to be captured, uploaded, and reinforced positively on social media. Of course, all of this is a form of feminized, unpaid labor for big tech and free viral marketing for Mattel, but at least now in 2023 you can pre-plan your outfit using the image generator Midjourney. This prompt imagines Barbie in Wonderland, for any crossover fans:

I could write an entire second review on how the movie approaches Ken, who in so many ways is the central character of the story and the first person to actually have their own personality, but I’ll quickly summarize here. Gerwig co-wrote the screenplay with her partner Noah Baumbach, writer of The Squid and the Whale, White Noise, and other neurotic Hollywood hits, so I will assume Baumbach is responsible for the movie’s portrayal of the male psyche, or he at least served as Gerwig’s sounding board. Ken is a second-class citizen in Barbie Land, very much like the men in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Matter of Seggri”, a story about a planet organized around a population that is only 1 in 4 male, resulting in interesting subversions of our own culture that is distinctly Le Guin. When Ken learns how the real world is a patriarchy, he tries to up-end the power dynamic in Barbie Land, while also participating in as many “himbo” moments as possible, which is always played up for laughs. He even gives up on patriarchy when he learns that it doesn’t involve horses, playing the part of the loveable male buffoon, similar to cartoon sitcom characters like Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, or even Fry from Futurama.

While Barbie’s character arc ends much earlier in the film, Ken’s arc isn’t complete until he learns to love himself—this eerily mirrors how Joseph Campbell’s vision of “the hero’s journey” ends with a note of satisfying completion for a man, while Barbie’s more open ending is an example of how nobody can agree on what “the heroine’s journey” even is, though many still look to Maureen Murdock’s vision as the most cohesive. Having Ken serve as the audience’s punching bag is another of Gerwig’s very safe moves for the film (don’t have the women attack each other too much—a woman enemy is problematic!), and so he becomes the main antagonist as a default. The scene where Barbie officially “breaks up” with Ken feels uncanny, as Barbie adopts a reassuring, matronly tone with him, when only twenty minutes earlier the audience was told that men expected women to be both their mother and lover…so then Barbie is constrained to one or the other, too? Ugh! Ken too perfectly plays the sympathetic victim role while also getting redemption—if Joanna Russ had written the movie, Barbie would have pulled a pink shotgun out from under her bed and blown him straight out of the dream house.

“What’s it feel like to be a woman?” Ken asks Barbie. It’s like that.

One last critique I want to bring up is the issue of the “nine-dash line” that looms over this film as an echo of how globalized capitalism lurks in the background of everything related to Hollywood. A hilariously crude crayon drawing of the world map confirming the nine-dash line lingers on the screen for just a bit too long, obviously to appease a Chinese audience and investors, which makes sense considering the dolls are now (as of 2020) manufactured there. Who cares about supporting imperialism and getting banned in Vietnam and the Philippines when you’ve got 1.4 billion potential additional viewers to reach? But Barbie herself can’t be blamed for oversights related to tricky geopolitics—and neither can Gerwig, who probably didn’t even notice how great the impact of those innocent-looking little dashes would be when the map showed up on set. Some very sneaky plant at the studio perhaps got those in, which only reinforces the massive issues the film has regarding feminist values within capitalism. Note: supporting the overreach of global superpowers over conflicted territories aligns much more with traditional patriarchal and nationalist values than anything related to women’s rights.

As a final thought, I went back to see Barbie a second time to confirm my initial insights (and also to see the movie sober), and while I still found the sets and costumes to be astounding (though less so without edibles), the dazzle feels much more forced. However, I can see Gerwig’s vision more clearly; her audience is not people who’ve read more than one book on feminism, but the mothers and girls in the suburbs and rural communities across the U.S. who might still think of the movement as “the other f-word.” This movie will cause some uncomfortable conversations that may eventually help move our society towards gender equality, though within a very narrow band of the population. Unfortunately, I think these chats will be largely overshadowed by people talking about dance numbers, cute outfits, and references to the Mojo Dojo Casa House. Even in a feminist movie by a feminist director about a toy that was intended to originally be a feminist icon who can do anything she sets her mind to, the Ken meme’s are what will stick around the longest. What can we do? It’s just a…beach.

P.S. I tried to make connections to one of the original science fiction short stories about Barbie, Philip K. Dick’s “The Days of Perky Pat”, but I was unable to find enough threads to make any cohesive arguments. Gerwig and Baumbach elected for the “portal” version of the Reality to Barbie Land interface as a way of showing off her ridiculous number of vehicles, one of the most important markers in capitalism. This didn’t leave any room for the fictional Chew-Z or Can-D drugs from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the novel based on the short story, though I’m sure Mattel wouldn’t have allowed any references to hallucinogens anyways. Still, they snuck in that one motherf*cker curse near the end with the Mattel logo over it, so that’s something they should be proud of getting past the censors.

Jess Flarity is a PhD candidate specializing in 20th century literature and masculinity theory at the University of New Hampshire.