More than one person I told was surprised when I said I’d been to see the Barbie movie. I’m pretty sure I’m not the target audience: I’ve been a critical socialist feminist for fifty years and I don’t need validation for my views; I never had a Barbie as a child (Sindy was the fashion doll of choice for my demographic in the UK); the bubblegum pop soundtrack made my ears bleed. But I was curious, my youngest daughter and friends had raved about it, and it felt like a watercooler moment. FOMO kicked in, and the chance to haul out my favourite neon pink nail varnish tipped the balance.
So my TL:DR review: it was great fun and I loved all the knowing intertextuality, but as a feminist statement it was problematic in lots of ways. Do go and see it, wear pink, take your friends, have a laugh: all the leads are terrific and the evocation of the way children play with dolls is spot-on. But don’t expect any nuanced analysis of gender relations. And note that there will be spoilers in what follows.
My initial thought was ‘this feels like a feminist fable written by a man’. I assumed that was because of the inevitable final say that Mattel, holding all the copyright and sensitive to their target markets, must have had over the narrative. I was interested to hear from a friend that the script was a collaboration between Greta Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, not solely written by Gerwig as I’d assumed.
There are some great telling moments. America Ferrara’s monologue, already much quoted, about the impossibility of being acceptable as a woman, is nothing more than the thoughts women everywhere will have expressed at some point to their friends, their daughters, their partners, but it’s no less true or affecting for that. I was caught off-guard by the ending; I had imagined Barbie was going for a job interview, or even to start college. Invoking gynaecology in such a last-minute cameo suggests – what? That being a real woman means having recognisably female genitalia? That women can only find true fulfilment through motherhood? Interesting narrative strategies, but nailing them onto the closing scene raises all sorts of questions about the confidence the filmmakers had in their cinematic gender analyses.
Ken’s crestfallen face when Barbie tells him she can’t hang out with him because she’s having a girls’ night – again – was a perfect illustration of where the problems lie with both the film, and Mattel’s attempt at reclaiming Barbie as a feminist icon. Ken was conceived by Mattel as Barbie’s boyfriend, and the career roles he’s been given since then have been pretty unimaginative in terms of gender: early roles included astronaut, boxer, USAF pilot, and doctor. More recent ones include more traditionally female roles like nurse, teacher and cook, but they’re qualified: ‘science teacher’ (men can’t teach the arts?), pizza and hamburger chef (fast food only?). The cast list for the film shows the Barbies in a variety of aspirational roles including lawyer, diplomat, physicist and President. The Kens are reduced to roles like ‘Beach’, ‘Basketball’ and Tourist’. It’s scarcely a level playing field.
Now, if we were going straight satire here, it would be more than permissible to say look at the way men (IRL women) are objectified and reduced to decorative roles, while women (IRL men) have all the power and responsibility. It’s not a nuanced take, but at least it’s holding a mirror to reality and showing its absurdity and injustice. But it’s when the film looks at responses to Ken’s consciousness-awakening about gender inequality that it takes a wrong turn.
When Ken returns to Barbieland to preach a la [insert name of ridiculous men’s rights advocate of your choice here, I can’t be arsed to think of one], the instant outcome is that all the Kens uncritically embrace male superiority and entitlement, while all the Barbies ALSO uncritically accept their diminishing and degraded role within that worldview. We have evidence that the former is a dangerous doctrine and has had some impact on uncritical males, but why would the latter be the case? Why suggest that high-flying careerist or subservient simperer are the only available roles for women, and passive eye candy or aggressive ubermensch the only available roles for men? Or that it’s a happy ending (as this one suggests) if whichever is the more powerful gender patronises the other with offers of possible gradual change over time?
The truth is that we need positive, constructive, flexible and open role models for men as well as women. Women will never stop having to fight for liberation from imposed gender norms unless men can also develop the confidence and understanding to stop pushing back against them accomplishing that.
This is emphatically not a ‘poor men’ stance. I fully accept that men have their own gender struggles with issues like toxic masculinity. But they’re fighting it against a backdrop of centuries of patriarchal privilege and institutional advantage: to quote a wholly overused adage, women are running in the same race, but backwards and in heels. Men need to be genuine feminist allies and recognise that discrepancy. But cultural texts with claims to feminism also need to recognise the (increasing rather than diminishing, as anyone of my extended feminist tenure might have imagined) complexity of gendered power disparities and their potential solutions. Reducing them to cartoonish binaries is a lazy response, and a sadly missed opportunity.
Talking of missed opportunities, here’s a thought: what might have really lit up this film would have been introducing another male doll – Action Man (or GI Joe in the US). Because no boy ever asked for Ken for Christmas – he only functioned as Barbie’s boyfriend. The doll that boys had was not even described as a doll: he was an ‘action figure’. Let’s see Action Man explaining the problems of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy to Ken. But that would mean Palitoy (or Hasbro) talking to Mattel, and somehow I don’t think either has a genuine interest in promoting gender positivity – unless it’ll sell product, of course…
Smugface Lazybones 