On December 15th, Barbie will start streaming on Max for the handful of people out there that haven’t seen it yet. This coincides with some additional thoughts I’ve had on the subject since the last time I wrote about it. Often I watch a movie, like No Hard Feelings or Oppenheimer, and take a few days to tease out what bothered me about it, but Barbie was different. For weeks after it came out, I still loved it just as much as when I left the theater. When friends would raise slight critiques they had about it, I didn’t have much trouble seeing their point and moving on. But recently my thoughts on Barbie have changed a bit.
This started with the previous article in which I argued that Barbie doesn’t try to be about feminism—or female solidarity and equality—but is exclusively interested in patriarchy—the system of male power that maintains gendered hierarchy. I think the point stands, but it didn’t really land as coherently as I’d hoped. Similarly, I wrote another article (unpublished) about how Ken ended up the star of the movie, not Barbie. I finished that article, happy with the writing, and once again, I had this nagging sense that it didn’t come together.
Not to be overly braggadocios, but I’m pretty good at film analysis. I’ve done a lot of it and consumed a lot of it. Writing two articles that both feel not quite right is a strange feeling for me, one that I had to keep prodding at until you got this article.
We all know that Barbie attempts to say something about patriarchy. And I think most of us sense that it doesn’t say that thing as well as we might hope or imagine it could be said. But why?
Why is Barbie unable (or unwilling) to actually get to a point that I can easily articulate?
To maybe get at this idea, I want to start with a question of genre. What genre is Barbie? I think it’s most obviously a comedy with elements of satire, musical, and dystopia mixed in. Each of these genre categories have expectations and different questions we ask of them, and these questions may be at odds with each other.
Barbie as Comedy
I’ll start with comedy which I’ll say has two main goals: to restore social order; to make the audience laugh. The restoration of social order is the classic way comedy is thought of in the Aristotelian or Shakespearean sense. A thing happens that has disrupted the order of a situation—often involving a lack of romantic relationship—hijinks ensue, and a new, better reality is reached. If we think of a classic comedy like Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938) we see Cary Grant starts the movie with the “wrong woman” and without the bone he needs to complete his dinosaur fossil (impotence joke obvious). Enter Katharine Hepburn and Baby, a leopard symbolizing the romantic spark that Grant’s character lacks. Hijinks ensue as Grant and Hepburn fall in love. At the end Grant’s dinosaur fossil literally collapses showing his old understanding of love has been consumed by the new, better chaos of Hepburn.
We can read Barbie as a similar kind of comedy. Margot Robbie’s Barbie exists in the seemingly ideal world of Barbieland. This state is disrupted by her irrepressible thoughts of death prompting her (and Ken) to go to a new world. Hijinks ensue—and a lot of stuff about patriarchy that doesn’t exactly fit this mold of comedy—and then the film ends with Barbieland order restored. You probably caught that a good size chunk of the movie doesn’t fit this structure. More on that in a moment.
But before moving on from Barbie-as-comedy, I want to address the presence of jokes. Barbie has a lot of great jokes of many different types be it sight gags—the Mojo Dojo Casa House—word play—“I’ll beach you off right now” (A line from the trailer which, fun fact, I first heard before the Super Mario Bros. Movie)—or cultural references—like the Kens explaining The Godfather. But I think the biggest laugh, and one of the biggest laughs I can ever recall in a theater, came in the film’s last line as Robbie’s Barbie, now transformed into a “real woman” goes to see her gynecologist. The line strikes me as incredibly funny for how Robbie’s Barbie/now Barbara has an incredible amount of giddiness at doing something that most women dread doing. As a one-liner, it’s a great cap to the movie highlighting the order that now exists from Barbara having found her right place in the world.
Barbie as Dystopia
But you don’t have to approach Barbie exclusively as a comedy. And the more I think about it, the more I think there’s good reason to read Barbie through the lens of dystopia. TED-Ed has this excellent short video about what makes something a dystopia. Dystopian works examine a seemingly ideal society (or, at least, someone’s version of an ideal society) and expose the cracks in the society. As the video notes, “dystopias are cautionary tales not about some particular government or technology but the very idea that humanity can be molded into an ideal shape.”
This is a good summary of the core idea of dystopia, and I think it also gets at why Barbie only sort of says something. Barbie is significantly about molding the world to an ideal shape. Will Ferrell’s CEO of Mattel character wants to literally return Barbie to a box, restraining her ability to further upend social order. He wants to keep things how they’ve been and not allow “irrepressible thoughts of death” Barbie to be a thing. When Ken sees patriarchy, he decides that the world has an ideal shape organized around men on horses. At the start, and end, of the movie we see the “ideal shape” of Barbieworld, and it’s one that leaves out Ken-ness.
So in Barbie, we can see numerous dystopian situations as forces hope to shape the world to their image. But even though Barbie very much is this layered dystopia, it doesn’t want to be. It doesn’t want you to think too hard about the inequity that plagues Barbieland and the real world. YouTube video essayist Jessie Gender put it extremely well in her video “How Barbie Cis-ified The Matrix.” The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999), of course, is a dystopia and it knows it. It’s very much a movie about Neo coming to see the fractures in the world around him strive for a different one. It’s also, as Jessie and many other people have pointed out, super-duper trans. There are many videos that unpack this in more depth, but for the purposes here I’ll just state it and move on. The Matrix is a film (and series) about Neo realizing he doesn’t fit the boxes of the world, rejecting them, and striving to create a society that is better.
Barbie isn’t. There’s a reason Barbie rejects the Birkenstock when given her red pill/blue pill moment by Weird Barbie. She doesn’t want the world to change. It has changed due to the irrepressible thoughts of death and she wants to get it back. The movie itself, I would argue, generally wants to make Barbie’s choice of the fancy shoe, too. It doesn’t want to get into the grimy details of its dystopian creation because, in Barbieland, it wants to revert everything back to the beginning and in the Real World (our world), it wants to sell a lot of toys.
In summation, while you certainly can marry the genres of dystopia and comedy, that’s not really what Barbie tries to do. It is a dystopia, on a few different fronts, but it wants you to mostly ignore this fact. It wants viewers to continue living and thinking in the dystopian categories. It doesn’t want viewers thinking about how to unsettle and rewrite this society.
A good proof of this comes in the form of how right-wing media talked about the film when it came out. Of course some kind of right-wing backlash was inevitable, but it wasn’t the one I expected. I expected there would be outrage at the idea of Hari Nef, a trans woman, playing Barbie but there really wasn’t. The outrage was at how Barbie is “anti-men” while railing against general “wokeness.” This is because, in the world of the film, Nef doesn’t really exist as anything trans or as anything outside the societal order. As Jessie puts it, “Her trans identity is not commodifiable and thus not reflected upon within the film.” It’s just ignored and erased, a very dystopian thing to do.
With this in mind, let’s think about the final moment of Barbie again. As noted in the comedy section, this line got a very big laugh, but it’s much less funny through the lens of dystopia. Barbieland was one kind of dystopia (in which the Kens were shaped into the ideal humanity as the Barbies saw it), then it was an inverted version of the same dystopia (Barbies shaped into the ideal as Kens saw it), and then it went back, which, in terms of comedy, is what it “should” do. However, at the end, Robbie’s Barbie/Barbara has left that dystopia and entered our own where women’s health is still dictated into the shape a lot of white cis men want for it. It’s harrowing. It’s the kind of moment like at the end of Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968) when its revealed that the planet has been Earth the whole time.
Escaping one dystopia to land in another is a horrifying Black Mirror kind of thought. But Barbie, a dystopian comedy that wants you to ignore the dystopia part, plays this as a joke. And it is! In the language of the film, we ought to laugh. But when we think deeper, we ought to be horrified. Nothing has changed. It’s been a lateral move if any move at all and all systems remain perfectly intact.
And now, at the end of three articles and nearly 5 months of thinking about Barbie, I think I got somewhere toward the answer of why Barbie seems unable to say what it’s trying to say: It’s because the message of its comedy/musical part that seeks restored order is exactly at odds with its dystopian part that should be upending societal structures. What happens, then, is the dystopian elements fade to the background making the middle part of the movie not fit the flow of the rest of it. It could probably harmonize the comedy and dystopian elements by going more pointedly with the satire lobbing a critique at specific aspects of the world rather than vague jokes about patriarchy. But harsh satires don’t make a billion dollars.
At the end of the day, Barbie is incredibly colorful, infectious, high-energy fun with many great jokes and many great moments. But it’s also, sadly, not as deep as I thought it was on first watch or as deep as I wanted it to be. Its high concepts and nods to things like The Matrix create easy opportunity to compare it to other dystopian works even as the film itself wants to live in the Matrix. Barbie is the rare dystopian film that tries to convince you you should keep living in the dystopia. It seems that we, like Barbara, don’t have much choice, a fact that is equal parts darkly comedic and deeply horrifying.
