The Sublime, Feminist Humanism of "Barbie"

Greta Gerwig's new film is a joyous, hilarious, and at times heartbreaking celebration of what it means to be human.

Given that I am a gay man living on the planet Earth in the Year of Our Lord 2023, it’s not surprising that I, like so many of my kind, was eagerly awaiting the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. I fully expected to love it, not least because it stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Reynolds, a startlingly photogenic on-screen pairing if ever there was one. The film itself more than lived up to the hype, and I found it to be uproarious fun from the first minute to the last. What I most certainly did not expect, however, was a film which used the ridiculous, the sublime, the witty, and the beautiful to interrogate what it means to be human and how damaging it is to live under the restrictive and toxic hegemony of patriarchy.

After a very humorous prologue delivered by the divine Helen Mirren and constructed in a style evoking Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus 2001: A Space Odyssey, we find ourselves immersed in Barbieland, a bubble-gum pink utopia in which the various iterations of Barbie co-exist in a never-changing routine. Having been convinced that their existence has solved all of the problems in the real world, they spend their days in a sort of halcyon existence, where everything is always the same, nothing ever changes, and pink is the order of the day. One fateful day, however, Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie finds her existence challenged by intruding thoughts of death. The disruption soon spreads and, in order to combat it, she undertakes a journey to our world in order to find the girl whose own unhappiness has caused the realm of Barbieland and that of the real world to infiltrate one another. 

 Just as Stanley Kubrick used the operatic grandeur of the big-screen sci-fi epic to interrogate the nature of humanity in the face of the vastness of the cosmos, so Barbie uses the utopian aesthetic of Hollywood escapism and American commercialism to examine and critique what it means to live under the dominance of patriarchy. What begins as Barbie’s effort to restore the equilibrium of her own world soon becomes something far grander and more troubling, once it becomes clear that the person responsible for the blurring of the realms is Gloria, a disenchanted employee of Mattel who has also been struggling with her increasingly-strained relationship with her daughter. 

The highlight of the film comes when Gloria lays out with meticulous detail the many traps that women experience every single day of their lives. Like so much of the rest of the film, it’s delivered in a quasi-ridiculous way but, at the same time, it’s clear that this speech is in deadly earnest. Women do live in a perpetual set of double-binds, each of which is more restrictive and ridiculous than the last and each of which works to keep women so distracted by their adherence to what men want of them that they become complicit in their own oppression. In the film’s imagination, it is precisely the unpacking of the mechanisms of this ideology that provides the Barbies with the means of undoing the damage wrought by the Kens and restore the natural order, with the important caveat that the Kens will now have more to do than simply “beach.”

For her part, Barbie realizes that the unchanging nature of Barbieland, and her own identity as a toy–i.e., the receptacle of other people’s unrealistic expectations, desires, and frustrations–has been more stultifying than fulfilling, even as she also has to confront the reality that change is both the best and worst part about being human. No matter how much we might like things to stay as they are, no matter how fervently we might desire a world that remains unchanging, that’s simply not how things work nor, more to the point, should they work that way. Margot Robbie’s exquisitely crafted performance allows us to feel her every emotion, to see the way her desire for a utopia restored influences her every action. As she so often has throughout her screen career–whether in I, Tonya; Mary, Queen of Scots; or Babylon; or Birds of Prey–she excels at showing the hurt and anguish and strugle beneath the glittering facade and radiant smile. Robbie’s performance allows us to see the glorious and complex humanity at the heart of the toy, and it’s fitting that, in the end, she becomes a real human and that her first major appointment is with a gynecologist. The plastic utopia of Barbie has become the messsy, quotidian reality of embodied womanhood.

For his part, Ken also has to contend with the fact that he has, for the entirety of his existence, been little more than an appendage to Barbie. His rootless life–emblematized by his job being simply “beach”--and Barbie’s consistent rejections of his amorous advances leads him into an identity crisis that is the mirror image of hers. Unlike Barbie, however, whose journey to the real world allows her to eventually see the joy to be had in being human, Ken finds himself barraged by contradictory images of what being a man means in the real world. In one of the film’s most brilliant sequences, he stands before a bank of monitors as various images of masculinity parade before his eyes. It’s the perfect distillation of the self-perpetuating mechanisms of patriarchal culture.

This being Ken–the ultimate himbo–he internalizes the very worst elements of the patriarchal project and, upon returning to Barbieland, he leads an uprising that results in the Kens taking over the Barbie’s houses, renders the Barbies themselves into little more than trophy wives, and even sets in motion a constitutional amendment that will grant the Kens complete and total power over Barbieland.These scenes are at once both the most sublimely ridiculous and yet terrifying, precisely because they are so true-to-life. After all, is there anything more ridiculous than hyperbolic machismo? 

Fortunately Barbie is a good-hearted film, and Ken isn’t a villain so much as he is a misguided and lost soul. Just as Robbie makes the most out of her existing star text to give a textured performance as Barbie, so Gosling allows us to see the deep well of hurt and angst beneath Ken’s matinee-idol good looks and blonde locks. This is a man who has been left adrift, and it’s only when Barbie helps him realize that he can be whatever he wants to be–that he is, in other words, Kenough–that he finally starts to establish his own identity and sense of self. Like Barbie, he has discovered what it is to be human.

Barbie’s interrogation of the toxic influence of patriarchy on both women and men and its feminist humanism are a key reason why conservatives–most notably Ben Shaprio–have reacted with outrage, labeling it as woke horror run amuck. If there’s one thing that conservatives seem to hate more than anything else, it’s a pop culture text that either highlights the experiences of subalterns or challenges the status quo. If all of that isn’t enough of a reason to celebrate Gerwig’s achievement, then I don’t know what is. 

Barbie’s insightful storytelling, its gorgeous aesthetic, and its searing takedown of the power of the patriarchy helps to explain its growing box office success. Like the best that cinema has to offer, it asks us to think carefully, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what it means to be human and how we make sense of the world around us. Just as importantly, the film also tears apart the obfuscating veil of patriarchy, revealing the mechanisms and the false consciousness which allows it to flourish and perpetuate itself. By wedding together the humanist and the feminist, Barbie reminds us all to be more mindful of the world around us, to organize and forge a collective consciousness, and to never be content with what we’ve been told we should want.