They Live! — The Barbie Movie.
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In 1988 John Carpenter wrote and directed a movie called They Live! If you didn’t see it, it is worth it. The basic plot is that the world is being colonized by aliens that we can only see with sunglasses. These aliens mean to “enslave” humans and they manipulate them to be subservient consumers with subliminal messages that can also only be seen with sunglasses. The movie is an obvious critique of consumerism that is intended to keep people pacified, controlled and subservient while those ot the top reap the benefits. The Barbie movie could have used sunglasses, but alas, it didn’t.
The Barbie movie, being produced by Mattel, could not afford any real criticism of its product. The movie gallantly navigates feminist critique only to attempt to assimilated it as rebranding rather than creating any real sort of enlightenment. However, the movie is still interesting and it has been fascinating to read all the reactions to it, so much so that I am throwing my hat in the ring as well (I will post links of other articles and videos I found interesting at the end).
Barbie The Doll
The Barbie movie is an attempt to rebrand Barbie doll a symbol of contemporary feminism. The film opens with a scene reminiscent of 2001 a Space Odyssey, and instead o monkeys there are little girls that break their baby dolls when Barbie appears. This idea that the movie tries to create is that before Barbie, girls just played at being a mother and that after Barbie, girls could play at being anything — and that this empowered women. It is true that the Barbie slogan is: “You can be anything.” But is that really all there is to it?
Let’s look at the actual characteristics of a Barbie doll. Here is how they are defined in several commercials over the years: Barbies are 1) Small and petite; 2) Beautiful; 3) There are a lot of accessories that come with them; 4) They move and are articulated so they can dance; 5) They glitter and shine; 6) They have long hair, long lashes and jewelry; 7) They have digital accessories; and so on and so on…
The main message in these commercials is not what one can be professionally. It is true that there are Barbies dressed up in the outfits of the different professions, but the female image portrayed here is the crucial aspect of the doll. Barbies are attractive, they are a fashion icon, they have the financial ability to buy all these accessories. The main commercial idea behind Barbie was not that girls don’t have to just play mothers anymore and that now they can do anything, it was that girls can go into the job market now, and buy more stuff, so they can accessorize better and look more attractive, feminine, and well put together.
Lilli
The first Barbie doll in fact was inspired by a German adult doll that was made for men. Her name was Lilli and she was a “gag-gift escort doll” — you can use your imagination to figure out what the function of this doll was. Here are some Lilli images:
Lilli was obviously an objectified sex object for men, but at least it was open about it! Barbie used the image of a objectified sexualized doll and put it in the hands of young girls — the message is pretty obvious, if you keep your attractiveness towards men, whatever else you do, everything will be fine.
This aspect of Barbie was clearly understoof by the band Aqua in the song Barbie Girl. Their lyrics are very clear about this:
I’m a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world
Life in plastic, it’s fantastic
You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere
Imagination, life is your creation
I’m a blond bimbo girl in a fantasy world
Dress me up, make it tight, I’m your dolly
You’re my doll, rock’n’roll, feel the glamour in pink
Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky
You can touch
You can play
If you say, “I’m always yours” (ooh, oh)
Barbie is not a feminist doll. What Barbie represents however, is extremely interesting for feminist thinkers — it is the compromise that women were supposed to make for having their own life beyond being a mother. They can have a job as long as they look good and attractive so they can still be appealing to men, but most importantly as long as they spend most of the money they make from this job on looking good and attractive. This way men benefit twice, they get more attractive partners and these partners are not really going to be financially independent, because the great majority of their money will go to consuming all these products to become attractive.
Even worst that the focus on physical appearance and accessories is Barbie's “accessorization” of professions. A job for a Barbie doll is an excuse to buy more “job related” accessories. So as a Barbie I can dress up as a doctor, or as a skateboarder, or as a… whatever you want, and that’s it. The profession is also an accessory. You make think that this is not so, because girls use the dolls to play make believe that they are doing these things, but the way these professions are presented is more as something you can purchase rather than something you create. Contrast this with say, Legos. With Legos as a kid you build different things, you are actually using your creativity, you are a creator rather than a consumer. The approach to professions with the Barbie dolls is as based in consumerism as everything else about them.
Barbie The Movie
Barbie the movie does not present the picture of Barbie dolls that I sketched above. It presents the sanctioned Mattel version of Barbies as models for young women — saying that they can do anything they want — and it is ultimately an attempt to rebrand the Barbie doll, or maybe even a desperate attempt to save it, by trying to make it compatible with contemporary feminist ideals. That being said, the movie is actually pretty interesting and can be used, and is being used, as a spring board for discussion on these topics, which for me is a big plus.
The Barbie movie uses many ideas that you can find in any philosophy class and specifically if you study feminism. It addresses topics such as the patriarchy, it is highly inspired by Simone du Beauvoir’s work, it is a story of existential dread and search for authenticity. All these are well known philosophical topics.
Barbieland — The Patriarchy
The Barbie movie makes a point about the patriarchy that feminist philosophers have been trying to make since feminism was born with Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) — the problem is not that males rule over females, the problem is submissiveness and significant power differentials. Wollstonecraft gave examples of imbalances of power that she thought hurt both the submissive and the submitter — Kings and their Subjects; Officers and Common Soldiers; Men and Women. Wollstonecraft argued that power corrupts both ways, the ones in power abuse it and the ones without power need to resort to schemes and trickery to move forward in anyway, even when those schemes and trickery are immoral. Wollstonecraft also noted that most of her contemporaries, most women of her time, were ok with the roles they had, but this was because they were socialized to be submissive wives from an early age. Wollstonecraft showed that women could have much more meaningful lives if they were allowed to have an education. With an education they would be able to choose life-paths more adequate to their talent and temperament.
In the Barbie movie, in Barbieland, the Kens represent the women. Barbieland is a patriarchy of women, and it is presented as a parody (you can call it a matriarchy if you want, but I think it is more enlightening to see it as a patriarchy because it is closer to the metaphor the movie is trying to put forward.) The Kens are entirely submissive to the Barbies, they do not have a separate existence. This clearly brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 book The Second Sex. This book is a feminist classic and in it Beauvoir says that women are always defined as the “other.” Beavoir noted that women were socialized to always being in relation to someone else, the wife, the daughter, the mother. This lack of identity hurt women because it did not allow them to think of themselves as an entity with meaning that can be developed my living a meaningful life. This is perfectly mirrored by Ken in the Barbie movie when he says: “I just don’t know who I am without you.” Ken is Beauvoir’s woman.
Another way that Kens are depicted as women is that they are depicted as shallow and as stereotypes, the same way that women are often defined in stereotypical ways — for instance the stereotypical Barbie, the main character in the movie, battles with this issue. She is supposed to be the blond, empty headed, happy go lucky girl, but she has thoughts of death and anxiety that don’t match her expected characteristics. All the Kens in the movie represent male stereotypes. Just like with patriarchy, the movie is saying that stereotypes are bad, so if say you are a men and you are offended with how men are stereotyped in the movie, maybe you should also not stereotype women either?
The inversion of roles in Barbieland is one of the most brilliant aspects of this movie, specially because of how much it confused conservative talking heads such as Ben Shapiro and others, they think this is a man hating movie, but really if they side with the Kens, they are siding with women. It’s a brilliant move by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Unfortunately, more likely than not it goes so over the head of Shapiro and Co, that it is unlikely to have any effect on them (although I am secretly hoping it does.)
The Real World
The real world in the Barbie movie is still pretty sexist, women are allowed some positions of power, but their representation is still less than it should be — for instance the board of Mattel is all men. Conservatives are quick to point out that this is not the case in the actual real world (the Mattel board of directors has five women and six men.) But this movie is a parody, it is not a documentary! Regardless of this example, it is the case that women have less positions of power than men, and that there is still a lot of sexism around.
The interesting part of the movie’s real world is Barbie realizing that feminism didn’t alter things that much. A lot more could have been done in this section of the movie. Mostly there are exaggerated gags that are not that funny. One interesting part is when Barbie encounters the teenager Sasha, Sasha says: “You have making people feel bad about themselves since you were invented.” However, the movie just goes on with its rebranding of Barbie, without anything changing significantly about that stereotype. The main character is still the stereotypical Barbie and that’s it. Sasha goes on to appreciate Barbies later in the movie, all is well in the Mattel world.
The movie’s real world is also supposed to represent Barbie’s search for authenticity. She begins from her existentialist angst, her thoughts of death, and these lead her to start her search for authenticity. The real world is supposed to represent this search, but it quickly becomes disconnected and confusing (as the real world often is) and she escapes back to fantasy land brining two humans with her. However, now that she has experienced something more authentic, albeit confusing, she can’t help but want to go back to the real world and try to become her authentic self at the end.
Is Self-Awareness Enough?
The Barbie movie asks an interesting question in several instances. When Barbie, at one point in the movie breaks the fourth wall and admits that her looks are problematic, and that indeed she never felt “good enough”, the narrator says: “Note to film makers: Margot Robbie is not the right person to cast to make this point.” But just like she was casted for the movie, so do Barbie Dolls remain the same. The movie is not revolutionary in any way, it is still a commercial movie that rebrands Barbie to incorporate modern feminism in hopes of making more sales and more profit.
When Barbie returns to Barbieland the Kens have taken over and the women have been brainwashed (another movie that does this way better is The Stephord Wives in 1975). She then colaborates with Weird Barbie to make the women return from their hypnotic state. In order to do this, they are sat down and told some feminist ideas which instantly wake them up and change their views. The claim that just from reading feminist literature the world will change is sarcastically addressed with this device.
The movie seems also to be slightly aware of the capitalist issue with Barbie when for instance the outfits are presented as ads — but it does not have the courage to actually challenge the capitalist idea that companies are good — for instance, Mattel executives go back to Barbieland to fix the Ken fiasco, not because of profits, but because they “care about the girls.” It ultimately is a Mattel move, they are trying to claim thei stand for values and not for profit.
The movie is therefore somewhat self-aware, as I am sure that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, as intelligent people, are aware of all these things. But is self-awareness enough? I still think the movie could have gone a lot further, I wish it wasn’t a Mattel movie, I would like to see what would be written if it wasn’t, but Mattel would not let that happen, would they?
The more concerning aspect is the idea that is somewhat subliminal in the entire movie and that is explicitly articulated by Gloria in her speech. The idea is that he world is just full of contractions and that there is nothing we can do about it:
“We have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”
It is true that the world is complicated and that there are no easy solutions, but maybe we can take some baby steps and start by not buying any more barbies?
The Gynecologist
At the end of the movie Barbie meets with her maker, Ruth, because she wants to return to the real world, but is not sure where she belongs anymore. Ruth tells her to close her eyes and shows her images of childhood, and mothers and daughters. After seing this, Barbie decides to indeed return to the real world. This imagery is, in my opinion, a reversal of the opening scene. The role of mother and care taker is again re-instated. I don’t have a problem with appreciating care taking, and I understand that care work has been highly devalued because it is made most often, by women. I agree to some of the philosophers of the Ethics of Care, that this is important and has been ignored for reasons that include bias against women. But can we place the duties of care in everyone’s hands rather than just on the women? Wouldn’t that be nice? I think we need to stop talking about mothers and daughters and start talking more about parents and children.
In the very last scene, Barbie is seen going to the gynecologists'. The implication here is that since she is embracing authenticity, she now has genitals. I find this very problematic. We all know about the difference between sex and gender. Mary Wollstonecraft showed very clearly that gender is constructed. Why then focus on the gynechologist and the reproductive organs of women. Is the movie taking the conservative stance that to be authentic women have to embrace their reproductive function? Not to mention the callousness towards transgender women, I have a problem with anyone being pegged down because of their reproductive function, whatever sexual organs a person has, we are much more than that and care taking should be equally shared by adults who take care of the child and by adequate social structures to support those who are care takers.
We should look to a future both beyond the idea that mothers are the only or main caretakers and that jobs are accessories used to consume more and more and more. The Barbie movie does not point in any of these directions, and I think because of this it fails as a feminist movie. To be fair, it was an impossible task to begin with. Barbie was inspired by a sex doll for men. Barbie gave little girls and adult doll to aspire to be. Barbie is problematic. You can’t rebrand that.
Interesting pieces on Barbie (I will add more as I find them):
