As the Hollywood grape vine rustles with talks of a “Barbie” sequel and the internet groans under the weight of trad wife influencers, their caricatures, and think pieces about it all — how might we rewatch “Barbie” (2023) in 2025? A transparent effort to apply a new coat of feminist gloss to a doll condemned for the unrealistic expectations it set for women, the film saved Mattel from certain cultural death. Its ideology is less certain.
“Barbie” ultimately asks one question: what if men were the second sex? Barbie Land is a utopic, if scalding hot pink, matriarchy where Barbies hold all positions of power, every night is “girls’ night,” and Kens exert no material influence on the Barbies’ emotions or conduct. When Barbie is called by the Birkenstock to journey to the real world (Los Angeles) and Ken tags along, Barbie emerges emotionally distraught that young girls are disillusioned with everything she represents. Ken travels back to Barbie Land (soon to be Ken Land) with the conviction that horses — and patriarchy — must accompany him.
Feckless and Sexless
Patriarchy in “Barbie” is more than horses and ambiguously western getups, but not much more. Formerly gainfully employed Barbies become dazedly domestic and servile in the new Ken Land, but missing is the “undertone of violence” characteristic of the harassment Barbie experiences at the hands of construction workers and corrections officers in the Real World. The Kens live out a benign kind of patriarchy made of huge cars, beers, and flat-screen TVs — entertaining, satirical, and direct enough for “Barbie” audiences to get the point. The Kens wage war against one another, but war in Ken Land means aggressive volleyball matches and slap fights in neon three-inch inseams.
Even in the Real World, though, patriarchy looks rather fallible. The all-male Mattel board’s pursuit of Barbie-on-the-run is laughably inept: they are thwarted for minutes by a turnstile that turned out to open automatically; they roller skate stiffly in a comical pack of dark suits; they chase Barbie through Mattel’s cubicles but fail to catch her despite having a 12-to-one advantage. The movie lightly ribs Mattel for its greed, like when Gloria suggests an “Ordinary Barbie” that is immediately rejected by the CEO and just as quickly embraced once he learns that it would be profitable. (The real life Mattel is distinct, somehow.) Although “Barbie” does not shy away from discussing profit, fictional Mattel under Will Ferrell’s leadership manages to escape on the charge of mere foolishness. There is no last logical jump to explain why these bumbling executives nevertheless wield so much influence, and certainly no attempt to connect the capitalist and patriarchal forces “Barbie” seeks to criticize.
“Smooth blobs” in place of genitals might be the order of the day, but to speak of a patriarchy without sexuality is self-defeating. Sexuality, as legal scholar and political theorist Catharine MacKinnon argues, is “a material reality of women’s lives, not just a psychological, attitudinal, or ideological one.” It constitutes the “primary social sphere of male power” and exists at the site of contentions about abortion, the definition of sex, trans children’s right to healthcare, and every other contemporary feminist issue.
On the count of exposing a contradiction familiar to those of the ceiling-shattering, in-leaning persuasion — that men are not more innately intelligent or well-suited to leadership than women are — “Barbie” is stellar. Unfortunately, the punchlines at the Kens’ and Mattel executives’ expense also function to muddy the waters of the patriarchy “Barbie” imagines. If men in power are so ineffectual as to be comical, what, exactly, is so bad about them? And if dismantling their domination were as easy as snubbing their guitar playing so as to encourage infighting and distract them from enshrining patriarchy in Barbie Land’s constitution, why have we still not accomplished it? There is an entertainment imperative to which the film’s creators must respond, but by abstracting the aesthetic of patriarchy away from the sources of its power, “Barbie” neuters its own critique.
Mythbusting
So what shackles women to patriarchy if not sexual violence or economic dependence? False consciousness, says “Barbie,” which seems to think that understanding one’s situation is all that is necessary to overcoming it. At the outset of the film’s central conflict, Weird Barbie presents Barbie with a choice between deception and enlightenment: the high heel representing the status quo in Barbie Land and the truth about the world in the form of a Birkenstock sandal. True to reluctant hero form, Barbie chooses the high heel without question but is forced onto a quest to the Real World — “You have to want to know, okay? Do it again.”
Barbie’s experiences in the Real World, where she is constantly subjected to sexual harassment and learns that Barbies are largely reviled by young girls, are devastating to her. But exposure to the Real World insulates Barbie from the state of blind acceptance that the other Barbies experience when the Kens establish patriarchy. Indeed, Barbie’s enlightenment is what brings about patriarchy’s demise in Barbie Land. After Gloria’s impassioned laundry list of the impossibly contradictory expectations placed on women, one Barbie earnestly remarks,“By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power!” It is with this sentiment that the Barbies hatch their plan to use their docility against the Kens, distracting them with feigned ignorance of The Godfather as Gloria delivers variations of her speech to each of the Barbies and turns knowledge into liberation.
“Barbie” has a prescription for emancipation that quickly mutates into an explicitly Marxist stance: “It’s not just about how they see us, it’s about how they see themselves. Ken Land contains the seeds of its own destruction!” “Barbie” seems to think that patriarchy will sulk away to its demise if only a light is shone on it, an optimistic view of patriarchy that imbues it with some steadfast commitment to rationality that it does not have. But it also reveals something crucial about how the creators of “Barbie” conceived of their own movie: collecting audiences in rooms across the country and screening a film that “gives voice” to the contradictory nature of womanhood, they seem to think, will grant us a similar power to throw off its yoke.
President Barbie
“Barbie” also turns a blind eye to political institutions like the President and Supreme Court as potential impediments to liberation. “I don’t think that things should go back to the way that they were. No Barbie or Ken should be living in the shadows,” says President Barbie. She apologizes to Weird Barbie for calling her Weird Barbie to her face and offers her a position in her cabinet. But when one of the Kens asks for “just one” justice on the Supreme Court, the president counteroffers a lower circuit court judgeship, which they accept giddily — “As long as we can wear robes!” If the Kens in Barbie Land are meant to analogize women in the Real World, then their failed attempt at establishing patriarchy in Barbie Land and distracted incompetence read as a two hour-long strawman of real-life women.
“Barbie” does well by not taking female leadership to be infallible or essential in character. In doing so, however, the film stares down the limitations of representational solutions to societal ills only to put them forth anyway. Barbie recognizes that Kens’ — and women’s — “progress” is wholly contingent on the goodwill of those already in power and happily bows to the structures that make it so. In this utopia, Barbies are doctors, lawyers, physicists, presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Nobel Prize winners. A pantsuited Supreme Court amenable to Ken circuit judges: the limits of our imagination?
Greta Gerwig’s depiction of Ken Land took an age-old comeback (“What if the roles were reversed?”) and ran with it. It is more intelligent, moving, and engrossing than a film whose source material is a few ounces of blue-eyed plastic could have ever hoped to be; a spectacle that does its best to sneak in serious critique. “Barbie” is a film about knowing and not knowing, but the things it ends up teaching us are about the limits of our imaginations, of the constraints we place on our political maneuverability even in our utopias. Intellectual coherence and utterly revelatory politics are impossible bars to set for our entertainment, yes, but they are things worth striving for.
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