Sincerity is a dangerous thing. It’s the fastest way to put a divider between people, which can both buy loyalty and draw ire. It’s a difficult thing to put on the line for most of us. Densely laced with this sincerity is the satire of the Barbie movie, which many of you with women in your lives will have watched. For many reading this, feminism is essentially a dead cultural conversation, one which has been superseded by the T in LGBTetc., but it is still a term that holds cultural cachet. Barbie is likely the last gasp of feminism as we’ve known it. Since all of its values have been absorbed into popular culture, there isn’t anything left for feminism to do but reminisce. Women got their equality. Everyone got their equality. Now men can be women.
There is still a holdout of older Millennial and Gen X feminists who care about things like Patriarchy and how it’s bad for both sexes. These “left behind” feminists, like JK Rowling or Ana Kasparian, are like the useful idiot academics who helped the Bolsheviks take power in the early Soviet Union. They fought the revolution on the grounds of principle, but power kept moving on inertia after the victory, and they were lined up against the wall. Many feminists from this wave have tried to stake their ground but inevitably have to fortify or abandon their beliefs entirely, building a retaining wall on the slippery slope or reluctantly going along for the ride.
Unlike many other online voices, I will encourage you to see the Barbie movie. It’s a pure product in some ways, as it is made to be silly and funny but it also has at its core a message which the creator, Greta Gerwig, truly believes. Go see it, make a night of it, dress up as a Ken, let go of seriousness for a few hours and embrace it. Once the show is over though, see if you can find some popular conversations about it. What I’ve heard from many normal people who aren’t terminally online, even feminists, is that it’s preachy. Finally, after decades, normal people are sick of being rammed with this stuff. Thankfully it’s probably the last time they’ll have to put up with it, because the conversation has moved on. You no longer need to convince the women in your life that being a plumber or astronaut isn’t glamorous, now you need to convince them not to gender transition their child.
Barbie is elegiac; it is a woman’s lamentation for the dreams she was sold as a child. The surface level story is designed to be ignored: Barbie leaves the exaggerated world of matriarchy and enters the real world, Ken goes along for the ride and discovers patriarchy, he brings it back to brainwash everyone in Barbie land and creates the sort of exaggerated society that feminists think the 1950s were, then Barbie undoes the brainwashing with This One Weird Trick and finally becomes human and willingly enters the real world. There are many subtle tropes that aren’t given enough time to preach for themselves, like the trans Barbie, the disabled Barbie, the diversity of the cast, etc., but cynically they are stuffed in there because feminists can no longer even recreate the Barbie world of the late 20th century. The conversation has moved so far beyond that point that even Aqua’s Barbie Girl has to be referenced and reinterpreted in order to fit in to the current thing. There wasn’t enough twerking.
Look at the view count on that - in case you don’t want to click it (fair enough), it’s at 1.3 billion at the time of writing. This stupid 90’s European dance song, a throwaway product of its time, is so memorable that Barbie can’t be referenced without it - it’s almost more Barbie than Barbie itself. It has assumed a kind of hyper-identity much like the line “I am your father” has for Star Wars. The group never intended any of this to happen. They certainly didn’t intend for their music to be unsurpassed in pop culture. There was simply no way for any modern artist to beat this, which is absurd given it’s a two decade old throwaway dance tune. It had to be absorbed into the blob of liberal capital just like all those girls who thought being CEO Barbie was cool and badass had to front up to the reality of being paid to set meetings and write emails.
If you’re a bit sadistic, you’ll enjoy the experience of feminists getting their just desserts, helplessly ranting as they are tamped down in the cultural squeeze. For anyone else, it’s genuinely fascinating. You need to go into it prepared to completely ignore what you’re being shown, otherwise you’ll be overwhelmed by the preachiness of it. Look beyond the single mother rant in the second half of the film where she feels she can’t meet anyone’s “reasonable” standards, and even beyond the reason why it’s there as a moment of earnest self-reflection by the writer on how Barbie was herself an unrealistic product pushed by “girls can do anything” feminism. Why is this packed between Ken’s show-stealing antics? Why was the writer sold this fantasy as a child? Why have movies about toys been so successful in the last 10 years? Why is the movie theatre full of people over 25? Just like Aqua’s Barbie Girl, this isn’t a product for children.
Ultimately, the writer’s only answer, and the only way she can tie up all the threads in this complicated mess, is by having Barbie become a human and enter the real world. The world that Ken supposedly took all the worst things from and used to destroy the matriarchal utopia, and the world that shattered every child’s dreams. That’s why I encourage you to go see Barbie, because we can’t keep spiralling in our own little perfect fake worlds online. If you have reservations to going to watch it, is that because some online clique would mock you for it? Did someone else tell you the film wasn’t worth it? Barbie doesn’t tell you the truth, it’s purely someone else’s view onto the world, just like other people’s view of the film itself. When you’re in a hall of mirrors, you don’t get out by asking for directions from the other people stuck in the maze.