I was invited to contribute to a symposium on the Barbie movie for n+1, which you can now read here! There are a lot of great pieces. As the only simp swimming in an ocean of skeptics, I was way too enthusiastic for the length of the piece, so I’m giving free reign my enthusiasm here instead. Please enjoy the following
director’s cut of my brain on Barbie
I will be discussing Barbie as a simp, not a reviewer. I didn’t watch it with any kind of critical lens. Within the first few minutes I was fully sobbing, and by the end I was like oh this is my favorite movie of all time. Besides maybe The Shining.
To get the obvious out of the way: Barbie is a polemic. It probably qualifies as propaganda. And I hope it brainwashes people as effectively as the fascists on the far right seem convinced it can. I heard a cisdude describe it negatively as “didactic,” and I would have to agree. I plan to gesture toward Barbie in the future if someone happens to need the details of my campaign plaform.
People have pointed out that the movie doesn’t actually fix the problem of capitalism, of the patriarchy, and of white liberal feminism, and oh my god guys, terrible news: they’re right. The movie totally didn’t fix those problems, not even close tbh, so we’re going to have to keep thinking of ideas to deal with them besides “ask Hollywood blockbusters to fix it??” See you at the next brainstorming sesh.
The movie provides a refuge from the echo chamber of cultural objects that reinforce the bizarro world of the patriarchy and creates an internal system of meaning in which femme existence is powerful and world-defining. The only other film I’ve ever seen that has given me anything close to that XX chromosomal high is Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, a Czech New Wave film that features two girls wearing flower crowns, trolling men, throwing profiteroles onto the ceiling, and debating the efficaciousness of various forms of radical resistance. It rules. But also, it came out in 1966, so I’ve been waiting a long time for another one!
Barbie opens with a recreation of the monolith sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the former we get little girls holding baby dolls instead of monkeys, a giant Barbie instead of the monolith, and Helen Mirren in voiceover instead of atonal soprano keening. The entire theater was laughing until we got to the part where the little girls bash their dolls’ heads in. At that moment everyone stopped laughing, except for me. The gag was a little too violent and visceral to be universally funny. One of my favorite Maria Bamford jokes is about home renovation reality shows going too far in the reveal: “you like the wallpaper? It’s your baby’s skin!” I like humor like that, especially when it relates to feminine domesticity or maternal love.
I saw Barbie twice. The first time was the night before my grandmother’s funeral. I cried at both events, but I cried more at the movie. The shot that really set the tears in motion was, weirdly, the bird’s-eye view of Barbie’s dreamhouse in the opening credits. I’m not sure why this goofy, Busby Berkeley-esque zoom into a plastic dollhouse is so moving to me, but I think it has something to do with the ecstatic happiness of it. Maybe it’s about the need for a place to live, the need for a new world, or a new planet. Swooping into this rubberized femme toy utopia, I had a feeling of being somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere I’ve been trying to get to for a long time.
My grandmother figured out how to live in this reality, and her life here was full and big and powerful. She was definitely one of the people who makes meaning, not one of the objects that gets made. I think I cried so much at Barbie (the second time, too) because I’m still trying to figure out whether I’ll succeed in feeling more like the former than the latter. The one thing I definitely know that I am is a Barbie that got weird from getting played with too hard.
What Barbie does really well—indeed with dialectical rigor—is show how impossible it is to imagine the glories of a high femme utopia without reckoning with the ways that our collective view of femme-ness has been forced into permanent lockstep with capitalism. We cannot imagine a world in which the instinct to bedeck onself in ornamentation, to beautify one’s person, isn’t a consequence of an economy in which one’s body is the primary commodity.
Every morning it’s like I wake up in the Barbieverse, where femmeness is an expression of power, domestic labor is financially well-compensated, and Issa Rae is President. Then I regain consciousness, and, like Ken, I go “everything is almost like, reversed here.” It sucks. I was hoping the movie would help with that cognitive dissonance, especially with this thing that happens, not constantly, but consistently, in my life, where, essentially, people tell me I look like a dumb annoying “jezebel” and should look and act differently if I want to be taken seriously.
This includes educated people (peers even) who have told me they wish I looked different because I’m so much smarter than they thought when they met me. Or have asked whether it’s tough for me since they “know men who would probably assume certain things if you’re presenting yourself that way.” If I’m feeling generous, I’ll explain how they’re actually participating in the maintenance and perpetuation of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy ((thanks bell hooks) ) by saying things like that. If I’m feeling ungenerous, I’ll just sneer “read a book, ya little fuck!” Or if I’m having a really bad day, I just spike a volleyball at their head and run away real fast.
Do you know why I think that happens? In spite of the grudging integration of bimbo-ification into our cultural zeitgeist, in spite of the image-rehabilitation of Britney and Paris, in SPITE of the girlboss, the post girlboss, in spite of the memes that misunderstand that Audre Lorde quote about self-care being a radical act, in spite of yoni eggs, in spite of AOC, in spite of pervasive therapy-speak, in spite of the fucking Barbie movie.
In spite of all this, I think our culture still really hates femmes. I think our culture still really hates femmes. Like really hates femmes. Like ragey hate.
It’s still acceptable, or at least common, to mock, belittle, or dismiss people whose self-presentation involves visible effort to look femme. In no way is the degree of hatred towards people who love makeup and heels greater than towards other targets of our culture’s rage, but it is a specific type of hate. It’s ubiquitous, mutable, and persistent across polarities, on the right and left, across the gender and sexuality spectrum, across industries.
The antipathy toward femmes is an essential tool in the maintenance of cisgender norms. Because if the practices that constitute femmeness were truly recognized as a creative act that—for some people—constitutes their sense of wholeness and visibility, the category of femme-ness would be divorced from biologically assigned gender and recognized as simply a way of being human. The continued objectification and abjection of femmes by the patriarchy is essential in quashing the potential for revolutionary solidarity.
There’s variation within the types of violence directed towards femmes, but consistency in its presence: towards sex workers,when an actress gets too much plastic surgery or wears too much makeup, in the violence towards trans women, in the violence towards femme gay men, in the bemoaning of Madonna’s inability to “age gracefully.”
As recipients of both privilege and expolitation, femmes (particularly white and economically privileged femmes) have historically been seen as conspirators with the patriarchy, willing participants in their own labor extraction, beneficiaries of a system built on the exploited labor of everyone else. And historically, they frequently have been.
Like the creation of whiteness itself, the reification of femininity under the WSCP is a key element in the maintenance of power, through the division and alienation of oppressed groups from one another. It’s no secret that solidarity has always been a challenge for the left lol, and the continued objectification of femmes by the patriarchy, and consequential suspicion and resentment from other oppressed groups, is essential in quashing the potential for revolutionary solidarity.
It’s also an essential tool in the maintenance of cisgender norms. Because if these behaviors that constitute femmeness, (ornamentation etc) were truly recognized as a creative act that, for some humans, constitutes their sense of wholeness and visibility, it would be divorced from biologically assigned gender and recognized as simply a way of being human. This is why TERFs always discuss femininity in purely negative and defensive terms.
Ken says he wants to be boyfriend/girlfriend with Barbie but it seems obvious that what he really wants is for her to be his mommy. He only has a good day if she looks at him, and is clearly having a little fort/da moment every time she leaves the frame. Ken is stuck in an infantile phase of object impermanence. He doesn’t believe he exists if Barbie can’t see him, “in the warmth of her gaze”.
The core of the conflict between Barbie and Ken comes down to property ownership. It’s only when he wrests control of the Casa away from Barbie and into his own (fingerless-gloved) hands that the pure, undiluted Ken-triarchy takes shape. This housing crisis will spare no one, not even in Barbieland! And still, I want to live in Barbieland so badly. I kind of almost think I could? I was in a movie with Hari Nef once where she played my gorgeous, self-assured, and professional boss, and I played an unhinged, messy femme who cries a lot. In this movie she plays Margot Robbie’s gorgeous, self-assured, and professional doctor, and Margot Robbie plays Barbie who cries a lot. So . . . maybe.
Both Barbie and 2001 end with extradiegetic montages through which their protagonists move from one dimension of reality to another. In 2001, astronaut Dave has a fight with his AI and has to abandon his penis-shaped spaceship. Having reached the limits of control and understanding, he escapes the universe through the shards of post-modern fragmentation, literally zooming through lava lamps and psychedelic light shows that I’m pretty sure are meant to signify the breakdown of the self in the face of infinity. The film ends with a fetus floating in space, apparent as a signifier for our hero only, unconnected to the necessity of a uterus or the person to carry it.
Barbie’s closing montage happens when she’s choosing to become a person instead of a perfect doll, accepting all the messy contingencies (death!) that come with it. Her consciousness takes in a collage of tender home movies of 20th-century women. It’s extremely sentimental, shockingly so in a movie that had hitherto stuck with deep fried eyegasm art direction. It was almost cloying, certainly cringey, and I was shocked by how much I felt like the movie earned it. I was a little surprised by tthe ending and by how earned it felt. In contrast to Dave’s death-drive in the face of meaninglessness, she chooses sentiment and messy humanity over Barbieland’s logocentric perfection.
If 2001 is about the impossible burden of postmodern (masculine) individualism, it posits the only recourse as obliteration. As Ken says, “it’s was really hard running stuff.” But what that vision doesn’t take into account is the possibility of putting down that burden, of giving up on the whole phallocentric labor of self-definition and like, giving someone else a turn. turn.? Or, even better, the possiblity of a collective identity that allows for shared victories and mutable selves: sure, you didn’t win the Nobel Prize, but at the same time, “you” did.
Like the hard, enclosed pods of 2001, Ken’s Dojo Casa House has a clear property line around it defining what’s his and what’s not. He adds a swinging saloon door with a flashy horse design on the outside to make sure everyone notices it. When Barbie’s in residence, it’s all open-concept real estate. She never even uses her door: just floats out her window, vibing.
I think people expect a lot from this movie—and I get why. It feels like we need a monolith to come and change things if we’re going to get out of this mess, and we only get so many chances at one. Usually, we’re living in an echo chamber of the patriarchy respawning patriarchal art. Men’s stories are the center of all our narratives, and they’re asked to do very little heavy lifting because it’s assumed that everyone will be interested in those stories. But not everyone is, OK?
Are you Nobel Prize Barbie?