She has to be everything. He can just be Ken.
By Taban Isfahaninejad
photo: Warner Bros
If there’s one thing that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie wants you to believe, it’s that self-expression really, really matters. What Barbie (Margot Robbie) describes as “voicing the cognitive dissonance imposed on women” is the key to breaking out of sexist brainwashing and saving the Barbies’ hot-pink world. There’s a strong fantasy running through the movie of meaningful speech, of a vocalization of personal experience that leads neatly, inevitably, and satisfyingly into real change.
The self-expression in Barbie, though, isn’t just any self-expression. It’s specifically a self-expression that’s designed to be reproduced, stereotyped, and reapplied to as many people as possible. Barbie is, after all, everything. The diverse types of Barbies in Barbie Land are an expression, or representation, of the diverse types of women in the real world. This starts with the Barbies Gloria designs to accurately represent her true feelings and culminates in the final addition of “Ordinary Barbie” at the end of the movie. Gloria’s attempts to express/represent herself kick off the plot, her expression of the contradictions of modern womanhood prompt the solution, and her suggestion for a new type of Barbie is a neat bow on the whole story.
Ironically, Barbie ends up being less self-expressive as a character than Ken, specifically because she has to be everything while he is just him. Barbie has to represent every woman; there has to be a Barbie to match every feeling; and when the Barbies are ranting about life under patriarchy, they have to represent as many people as possible. Specificity and the genuine representation of a character are sacrificed on the altar of reproduction. Ken, on the other hand, doesn’t narratively have to do or be anything. He’s not obligated to be good male representation, and beyond a diverse range of skin tones, the Kens aren’t obligated to represent the full spectrum of male possibility. If anything, they do the opposite, and therefore end up coming across far more human and real than any of the Barbies- or even Gloria and Sasha. Ken has wants, needs, strengths, and weaknesses; he wants Barbie, needs attention, is relatively good at showing affection, and not particularly good at handling rejection. What are Barbie’s character traits? She’s perfect, and then when she’s not, she would like to be perfect again. Her only real identifiable trait is her initial slighting of Ken, and learning that you should be more accommodating to your boyfriend is hardly a great feminist character arc.
Even as Barbie exalts self-expression and representation, it’s deeply resigned to its ultimate inability to enact real change. You can make fun of Mattel, as long as it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. You can fight patriarchy in a blockbuster, as long as it’s cosigned by a corporation. You can have America Ferrera rail against beauty standards, as long as your movie is simultaneously selling merch that includes hair straighteners, hair curlers, hair dye, blowout kits, nail polish, whitening toothpaste, brightening serums, makeup, lip gloss, and “bikini serums”. You can cast Margot Robbie as a character whose attractiveness is supposed to diminish throughout the movie, as long as you insert a freeze-frame voiceover of Meryl Streep pointing out that you know this doesn’t make sense. Not only is self-expression ultimately pointless in affecting real change, but its pointlessness is a selling point: not only because it lets you be ironic and disaffected, but because it means corporations deeply invested in the status quo can join the fun too. The futility of representation is a good thing, because it means resistance gets to be a harmless hobby. Barbie’s identity as a feminist movie is less because it’s a movie that explores ideas related to feminism, and more because it’s a movie Mattel decided should be feminist. This shows in everything from the 30-year-old talking points it uses to co-opt the spirit of rebellion without actually challenging the current day’s feminist debates, to the choice of director Greta Gerwig.
The philosophy of a safe, validation-based rebellion isn’t unique to Barbie. Especially online, expression is often treated as a comfortable, non-alienating avenue for rebellion and, more importantly, validation. In the online sphere, the validation of personal experience becomes more important every day, as seen in the rise of “what-about-ism,” (when a comment or question is countered with a false equivalency, or by bringing up an irrelevant point.) The main social media platforms heavily rely on and emphasize algorithmic layouts that tailor the entirety of the users’ online media experience specifically to them. Everything you see on the platforms you consume the most content on is designed specifically for you. In such an environment, validation becomes the norm, and the second a tweet on the timeline isn’t describing the viewers’ specific experience perfectly, everything falls apart. When a new show tries to provide “representation” for a particular group, it’s often criticized for failing to represent every member of that group in a single character; or else, people who are used to being represented in every TV show rail against watching something that, for once, doesn’t cater to them specifically. Put people in a situation where every piece of content they see is tailored specifically to them, and as soon as they’re not explicitly included or validated, all hell breaks loose.
Many people have and will continue to defend movies like Barbie as escapism, but escapism is not apolitical. It’s understandable that in a world where everyone is physically and mentally and financially exhausted all the time, it might be tempting to cope via a barrage of seemingly harmless “little treats,” but something that harms no one— that is pure escapism, pure fun, with no challenge on any side— only maintains the status quo. Self-expression and discussion can be impactful, but only if there’s an imperative for the opposing party to listen. If, setting aside a few far-right nutjobs, Barbie is challenging no-one, what’s the point of its politics? Barbie is reproduction distilled, the essence of mass media: a list of talking points and stale feminist sentiments meant more to create a mental association between the movie and feminism than to actually start a real conversation. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why, aside from its confusing politics, it’s just not very good.
Comments