Is Barbieland all it is cracked up to be?

A film about “Barbie” is not the kind of entertainment I would normally seek out but I sensed this film would open up a conversation about women’s place in contemporary culture. I expected it to be thought provoking in ways, perhaps, not intended by its producer/director. In this I was not wrong.

I came convinced that the film would not engage with the traditional role of the doll in the lives of little girls. Here I was wrong. The film opened melodramatically in sepia to the theme music of 2001 Space Odyssey with little girls “waking up” to the conditioning of dolls that honed their mothering and nurturing instincts instead of cultivating a spirit of independence and ambition. The awakening arrives in the form of a towering glamorous, colourful Barbie in a swimsuit, winking conspiratorially at them over her sunglasses. The children stamp on the dolls they were lovingly playing with and a bright new age dawns for womankind or so the voiceover infers. Motherhood is overrated, we are told. “Just ask your mother.”

The first ten to fifteen minutes weren’t promising. All rosy coloured Barbieland with nothing but frivolity and lively rerpartee, apparently loaded with references to American cultural memes, as various Barbies strutted around in vertiginous heels, coiffed and groomed to plastic perfection. Suddenly in the midst of frenetic disco dancing, the eponymous “stereotypical” Barbie brings the entire room to a standstill by asking “Does anyone think of dying?” The effect on the audience is equally galvanising after the rush of superficiality and vacuous happiness, parading around in lovely dresses and accessories, with no thought beyond the next hair appointment or party. Here was an unexpected dramatic inbreaking of reality.

Crisis dissolves however, and shocked stares turn gleeful again when Barbie breaks the tension with, “I mean I’m dying to dance.” The music and merrymaking resume with gusto. But the theme returns as the eponymous Barbie finds her perfect body showing subtle signs of ageing. After taking advice from “weird” counsellor Barbie she heads to the real world to meet the child who owns her doll self and is filling her with anxiety and fears of ageing and dying.

She enters the “real world” in California of all places. If any place on earth approached Barbieland in its pursuit of plastic perfection it is surely California with its real life Barbies, Meghans and Victorias parading around with their “Kens”. Oh yes Ken. Ken, the boyfriend of Barbie, was just another accessory in Barbieland. He does nothing, just struts around bronzed and blonde in stylish, gaudy beachwear. However, when he follows Barbie to the real world he finds the men are in charge. Human society is patriarchal. The confident, ever smiling Barbie becomes uncomfortable as men stare and leer and make quips she doesn’t quite get as she walks along a street. The docile Ken of Barbieland perks up, likes the new milieu and its vibe and tells her so.

Posturing louts and patriarchal prigs make up the male population in the real world to Barbie’s dismay and Ken’s delight. But the real world of the film is not really “real” either. It’s shaped to form a message and deliver a feminist manifesto. The board of Mattel in the film, the company who manufacture Barbie, consists of some dozen sharp tailored men. In the real “real world”, the current board has six men and five women. The Barbie lookalikes of all ages that should be easy enough to find in California are nowhere to be seen, which makes Barbie stand out like a cut out mannequin from an advertisement. All around her are relatively unkempt, earnest student types and “growing old gracefully” elderly ladies.

Barbie’s doll owner turns out to be such a student. She has long ago ditched her Barbie doll and rants at the full sized Barbie who comes up to greet her, accusing her for holding back women for a generation. Barbie may come in many shapes and sizes and dress as an astronaut or a scientist or a brain surgeon but she has never won the market as an aspirational, high achieving archetype. The favoured Barbie toy was and is “stereotypical” Barbie, a perfect, poised and pampered airhead who doesn’t do anything more complicated than drive a flashy, candy pink car. That is the doll that captivated the child who is now a very woke young woman. It was her lonely Mom, revisiting time shared with her now grown and estranged daughter, who channeled her anxiety and fear of death into the doll. So Barbie needs to meet the girl’s mother.

The film winds back to the theme of motherhood and sets in on a more amicable course when mother and daughter head off together to fix the patriarchy that Ken brings back with him to Barbieland. The film ends where it began, with the Kens ousted and the Barbies in charge. Barbie has explored her sexed, human identity with its risks and possibilities, beneath the plastic shell. She chooses the imperfect and impermanent real world over the flawless, timeless plastic one.

It’s a bit reminiscent of the story of the Little Mermaid except she exchanges her lot for love. Barbie, however, is not pursuing love but independence and freedom. Ken does not follow her into her new world. Unattached though she is, Sasha’s mother takes her to see a gynaecologist on her first day in the real world. Greta Gerwig, the director of the film, has made the import of this visit clear in an interview. It means Barbie is now sexually active. It is reasonable to construe that her purpose in visiting the gynaecologist is to avoid motherhood. So we are back more or less where we started.

Motherhood is again swept aside in favour of personal autonomy. The Barbies take back their “Supreme Court” from the Kens. The point could almost be missed in such a pile on of images, shifting scenes and rapid one liners but it’s there and the import is fairly obvious.

Despite the film’s feminist crusading against men, its belittling, resentful depiction of them, one can’t help observing that, for a film that aims to raise up women, the archetype chosen is a bimbo doll whose smartness is measured by her success in wowing the world with her beautiful, expensive attire and immaculate high maintenance grooming, an emphatic and overstated femininity in other words. The job on the board or the bench or by the podium seem like secondary goals. And the unasked question is who is Barbie trying to disarm with her cultivated, sexualised beauty? Who is she trying to manipulate and control?

The visit to the gynaecologist suggests an answer. The irony may be unintentional but it’s hard to miss. Is it really not still “a man’s world” in some more convoluted way in this ascendant feminist realm? Is pleasing and indulging men still to be the central part of a woman’s life? It may look like Barbie has exchanged the rigorous cult of beauty for a more relaxed style in the real world of California but is not the new regime of fertility control equally rigorous and very much more hazardous physically and emotionally? Where is this new direction of sexual liberation taking Barbie? How far can she realistically go without recourse to the old oppressive regime of beauty too? Looking around her in real life California, Barbie would find plenty of evidence that growing old naturally and resignedly is not the norm at all.

The looming question that is allowed to break the surface in the film but is not fully explored is what happens when time catches up for women? Sitting on a park bench in the real world beside a naturally ageing woman, Barbie remarks “you’re beautiful” and the woman, serene and at peace with herself, answers, “I know it.” We might ask from what source she draws her serenity? Is she a woman all happily alone and childless in her declining years with all the Kens packed up and gone? Barbie doesn’t ask.

Listening to Greta Gerwig’s interviews at the time of this film’s release, she says there are “different levels” at play. She never quite explains how. I got a sense, as I suspected I would, that the film carries ironies and ambiguities it didn’t intend. It throws up deeper questions than any character comes near to fully framing. The question, can women be empowered in a society that burdens them with motherhood is presumed to be conclusively answered in the negative. Likewise, the question, can women ever find equality in open competition with tougher and rougher wired men?

But what of the flipside questions? Can women be empowered in a world that denigrates motherhood and sees female fertility as a block to empowerment? Can either sex be empowered in a world that sees equality of outcome as the only marker of equality? is there a better way that acknowledges fundamental differences and sees dynamic complementarity and co-dependence as the key to real empowerment and self-actualisation for both sexes?

Gloria gives a pivotal monologue in the film explaining how women in the workplace are expected to be soft but criticised for not being strong and vice versa. It’s a can’t win situation for women in the working world. She never considers how a new, or rather recovered, understanding of the “working world” might offer better answers.

So, the only solution the film offers is a radical social restructuring that forces men to the sidelines and feminises society and its institutions. Balance is not possible for Gerwig and her cast and crew who interestingly enough were also her collaborators in the film’s making.

The film feeds into the victim/oppressor narrative which is the favoured tool of societal interpretation in the academy of today. It’s black and white. Men are ruthless monsters or predators if they can’t be subjugated and psychologically emasculated by female power. One side has to win. Then the world becomes joyfully rosy and uncomplicated, bathed in non-threatening pink.

This is where the world of childish make belief meets the adult world of wishful thinking and self-delusion. There is a fatal flaw in the logic that reduces men to comic caricatures and yet asserts the final goal of women is to achieve full social, professional and sexual equality with them. To find this “equality” it is first necessary to push men to the margins. Equality isn’t possible in this narrative, only dominance.

Thoughtfully considered, this should lead us to revisit ways of living and being that acknowledge the fundamental complementarity and mutual dependency of both sexes and the place where that is most nurtured and realised. That place is the family, the natural unit of husband, wife, mother, father and children. If a society doesn’t value and nurture the place where we are most nurtured, what has it to offer but dystopias of one kind or another? Barbieland may not seem like a dystopia with its light as air pursuit of pleasure but the sugar coating like the beauty is only skin deep. The reality, if it can be called that, is sinister.