A Few Thoughts on Barbie

There is something exciting about a piece of art that creates a common cultural dialogue. This achievement is harder and harder to obtain in an atomized society where most individuals are ideologically bunkered down and content is so niche that hardly anyone views or interacts with the same media. Greta Gerwig, the co-writer and director, overcame these obstacles to produce a story that has everyone and their mother discussing and debating meaningful questions such as what is real womanhood? How should men and women exist together? What do we do with the human experiences of imperfection, change, and death?

Of course, all that common dialogue in our polarized age has manufactured a bewildering amount of interpretations. A more pessimistic reviewer is not out of bounds when he concludes, “It seems to me the movie is very postmodern in that it is disjointed enough for viewers to get just about any message out of it they want.” I do not think there is a definitive interpretation of the movie as a whole, but I do think there are a few definitive themes the film is forcing viewers to wrestle with. So, this review is less of a unified unfolding of the movie’s overall message and more of a series of bullet points identifying and wrestling with what stood out to me as the movie unfolded. First, I want to look at a few themes I was encouraged by. Second, l will offer what I believe to be a false dichotomy the film portrays.

EMBODIED WOMANHOOD

There has been a lot of mudslinging surrounding how femininity and masculinity are presented in Barbie. Again, contrasting opinions are a dime a dozen on this topic, but I was fascinated by a particular feature of what it means to be a woman that the film does not shy away from: female biology. Think about the differences between Barbieland and the real world as presented in the movie. For Barbie(s), genitalia, bodily functions, and aging are absent. In other words, biology plays no role in what it means to be a woman in Barbieland. Instead, the essence of womanhood is cultural conventions of what women are like and what women do. They have high fashion, are social butterflies, etc.

In contrast, the real world that invades Barbie and the real world Barbie eventually invades does involve bodily experiences as essential to womanhood. Initially, they are small but negative experiences: cellulite, foot problems, and so on. Barbie actually sees these things as a threat to her beauty and essence as a woman, but slowly begins to understand that Barbieland’s vision for a true experience of womanhood is shallower than the raw, risky, and mortal journey of womanhood in the real world.

A subtle but powerful scene where this epiphany of Barbie’s evolving new vision of female beauty comes to the surface is when she is sitting on a bus stop bench next to an old woman. Barbie has never seen such a woman who is the end result of all the human frailties that Barbie is attempting to run from and reverse. Yet Barbie confesses, “You’re so beautiful,” and the old woman smiles and replies, “I know it.” In an interview, Gerwig says she was told to cut this scene, but she responded, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”

Barbie realizes the difficulties of being an embodied woman are actually part of a deeper beauty and journey that is essential to real womanhood. By the end of the movie, Barbie takes on that journey by becoming an embodied woman which is illustrated by a daunting trip to the gynecologist! It seems the experience of true femininity is nothing less than having and experiencing a female body that includes a female endocrine system, female reproductive organs, and female genitalia, not to mention other inevitable human experiences. Transcending these realities is not the resolution to Barbie’s story. Embracing them is. Elayne Allen’s article over at Public Discourse entitled, “Barbie’s Quiet Rebuke of Transhumanism” sums up the moral of the message well:

The movie’s gentle admiration of female embodiment tells women that it’s okay to leave the creepy fantasies of Barbieland; it’s okay to age, be weird, become a mom, have a boring job, and even contemplate mortality. These things have no place in the glamours of Barbieland, but they are ingredients for a life of wisdom…Women, therefore, shouldn’t harbor hostility to their bodies—wombs, cellulite, wrinkles—which transhuman feminism viscerally fears.

While E. Allen points out a conscious critique of transhumanism, I find an unconscious critique of transgenderism playing out. Of course, Gerwig and company would never intend this as they are pro-LGBTQ, and there is even a transgender woman cast as the female doctor on the beach in Barbieland. Yet the experience of biology as a central part of Barbie’s journey to understand authentic womanhood inevitably conflicts with transgender ideology. Transgender ideology asserts that psychology determines identity, not biology. In fact, biology is not as real as inner psychological determination. Therefore, biology is not essential and can be ignored or altered in order to conform to inner desire. Carl Trueman sums up the preconditions for culture’s embrace of transgenderism in the same way:

For transgenderism to be coherent, the society in which it occurs needs to place a decisive priority on the psychological over the physical in determining identity. For it to be coherent also involves a correlative downplaying of external authority, whether that of the person’s biology or of traditional social expectations. Biological and cultural amnesia must be the order of the day. In addition, its credibility is fueled by a powerful individualism and facilitated by the technological ability to manipulate biological realities (The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p.351).

Barbie posits a different narrative. In Barbieland, a plastic world that transcends the limitations and messiness of biology leaves Barbie with a shallow femininity, a shiny but hollow identity of womanhood. It is only when she embraces the limitations, risks, and imperfections of a female body that she partakes in true femininity. In a review of the film by a transgender woman at The New York Times, the author acknowledges that some trans people noticed the predominantly binary portrayal of gender and the centrality of biology for Barbie’s journey toward true womanhood:

As a trans woman who writes and thinks a lot about film, I found the movie’s approach both deeply frustrating and strangely resonant. Yes, the film does well by trans people in some regards, especially by casting the trans performer Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie and giving her plenty to do. She isn’t just on hand to score “we love trans people!” points. Yet the film’s storyline and its politics set up a kind of pure distillation of womanhood that seems specifically rooted in the cisgender experience and affords little room for anything outside a rigid understanding of gender…Several trans women I know object to the film’s final line, in which Barbie, now a human, goes to a gynecologist. In this critique, the ending suggests that genitalia equals womanhood. I don’t agree with that reading; the final 15 minutes are about the thorny weight of being human, a state of reality that necessarily involves, for example, gynecologist appointments.

I agree with the trans people the author acknowledges. It does seem the point of the final scene is to equate biology as essential to womanhood. That should be uncontroversial, and it actually appreciates the absolute differences between men and women including the unique experiences and even difficulties faced within a female body. To downplay or deny the unique experience of biological women in order to legitimize men who transition to living as women is belligerent disrespect towards women. Janice Raymond, a feminist scholar writing in the 90s, describes this disrespect by pointing out that even the “surgically-constructed woman” (transgender woman. I.e. a biological man who engages in surgical alterations), “does not possess” true womanhood. Why? “Because these men have not had to live in a female body with all the history that entails. It is that history that is basic to female reality, and yes, history is based to a certain extent on female biology” (Transexual Empire, p.xx). Whether they intended to or not, the writers of Barbie gave voice to silenced truth in our age, an embodied woman is a true woman, and even with its challenges, it beats a synthetic and curated self-creation of womanhood.

TIME, DEATH, & DAUGHTERS

Another theme I appreciated was its wrestling with the existential anxieties of normal human experience. These pierce through to Barbieland, the land of immortality, immutability, and perpetual ecstasy, when the mom in the real world projects her cloudy thoughts on Barbie from the other side. Early on in the movie, Barbie puts a massive stick in the spokes of a dance party (one of my favorite scenes of the whole film) when she randomly calls out “Do you guys ever think about dying?” At the sound of those words, everyone peers at her like a monster. To speak of death is a completely taboo subject. It is too dark, too weighty, too complex. There is an assumption that those sorts of questions are a drag. Those are issues out there and far removed from the glitz and glam of being forever young, wild, and free.

That vibe is how most movies and T.V. shows portray the lives of young people and consequently how many young people avoid the deepest questions of life. Who cares about contemplating aging, suffering, or death when you are twenty years old with a full tank of gas on a Friday night? Barbie portrays this culture in the fantasy world but not in its real world. The central characters in reality are a normal mother-daughter pair who have been through the highs and lows of progressing through the hoops of time. The thoughts of death projected onto Barbie by the mother grow out of her depression that her daughter is getting older and more distant. Time is change, and change is hard.

The daughter went from mommy’s little girl to rebel teenager leaving mom with a crisis of meaning in life. She says she’s “a boring mom with a boring job and a daughter who hates her.” The fractured relationship between these two and its restoration is at the heart of the movie in my opinion. How do you wrestle with change, aging, and eventual death? For the writers of Barbie, human beings should experience change, aging, and death together, particularly within our most foundational relationships. Throughout the adventure to reclaim Barbieland and save Barbie, the daughter and mother’s relationship is reclaimed and therefore they end up “saved” as well.

One of the transitions Barbie has to wrestle through is the complexity of real human experience with its shifting feelings and external circumstances. She tells the mom: “Why did you wish me to this human world of complicated and messed up thoughts?” Is being truly human worth the rollercoaster of our inner and outer life? The mom replies, “That’s what life is…it’s all change.” Augustine calls this being “conditioned by time.” To be human is not to stop time and change. To be human is to embrace time and change as good gifts even while experiencing them as burdens. Barbie forces its viewers to wrestle with these unavoidable human realities even if it does not provide conclusive answers to them.

A FALSE DICHOTOMY: EXPLOITATION OR ISOLATED EGALITARIANISM

The hot topic of this movie in cultural commentary is the dilemma of men-women relations. Is this film a diatribe against men or a subtle critique of the shortcomings of the feminist movement? Again, I think the movie does not have enough consistent messaging to rule out either idea. When asked if the movie is “unashamedly feminist,” Gerwig said, “Of course, I am a feminist. But this movie is also dealing with [the idea that] any kind of hierarchical power structure that moves in any direction isn’t so great.” The worldview of the director and writer assumes authority is inherently problematic.

Nevertheless, the power structures portrayed in Barbie are always gendered. In Barbieland, women are in all the positions of power and relevance. In the real world, the film presents men in all positions of power and relevance which Ken takes back to Barbieland in a barbaric fashion. Of course, generalizations and caricatures are a part of good comedy. SNL’s cold opens would be boring without them. I do not want to overanalyze the film’s depiction of gender relations, but because they dominate the film, it is hard not to see their centrality in the messaging. Here are a couple of observations.

The portrayal of Ken as an accessory to Barbie without inherent meaning or dignity independent of Barbie is supposed to be a critique of how women have been and are still evaluated in the eyes of many men. More on this later. Also, Barbie’s innocence from male exploitation in Barbieland makes for a rude awakening as she enters reality. She immediately experiences the “male gaze.” This brings up a fascinating theme (or lack thereof) in the film. There is no sexualization in Barbieland and neither is sexuality presented as the solution to personal fulfillment in this movie (a breath of fresh compared to most Hollywood productions). There are subtle sexualizations in Ken’s kingdom, but for the most part, even the patriarchal vision in Barbieland is not sexually exploitative. It is in the real world that sexualization is exposed as potentially dangerous and dark.

Finally, this gendered game of King of the Hill in Barbieland throughout the movie presents two moral lessons it seems the writers want us to believe: Power corrupts men, and isolated egalitarianism is utopia. Not only are men presented as exploitative of women when they are fueled by patriarchal power, but they are also inevitably going to eat each other alive with this power. Think back to Gerwig’s comment. She believes power itself is a disease. That shows in the plot. Yet this power does not seem to corrupt women in hierarchal structures. This contradicts her conviction. If “any kind of hierarchical power structure” is destructive, then hierarchical power structures of women are destructive as well.

When the Barbies do take back control of Barbieland, it did not seem to me that the Kens would now benefit from Affirmative Action. So, I take it that Gerwig and crew understand power structures not to be ideal, but in reality, they are unavoidable, and women are the better choice for them. One of the most subtle illustrations in the movie is a nod of sympathy for the male experience in the modern world. The sudden undoing of Barbieland as a female-dominated ecosystem is a parody of women changing the man-centered world overnight in the last fifty years. The dysphoria of this shift and its pace for how men and women see themselves has not been acknowledged. Barbie comedically exposes it by spinning it around.

Now, there are places where the caricatures in this film actually paint a reality that is not an overgeneralization but are actually serious contradictions. By doing this, a draconian view of “patriarchy” is imagined despite the facts. For example, one of the biggest patriarchal depictions is Mattel’s office and employees (Barbie is Mattel’s product). Women are presented doing clerical jobs while the CEO and 12 executive board members are 100% male. The point is Barbie, a supposedly female-empowering brand, is owned, ruled, and sold by a corporation still firmly in the patriarchal system. It is a powerfully (and hilariously) portrayed problem.

But the truth is it's simply not true. In real life, Mattel’s board of directors is 6 men and 5 women which reflects the overall state of corporate life. 45% of the 449 board seats filled last year in Fortune 500 companies were women. I imagine many saw that ridiculously chauvinistic portrayal of Mattel’s board and assumed it reflected reality at Mattel. Sorry. It doesn’t. These sorts of depictions breed hostility based on an exaggerated and even false assumption that we still live in 1950 in many ways. Women are obtaining more degrees than men. Women are entering home ownership more than men, and increasingly earning the same or out-earning men: “In almost half of opposite-sex marriages in the U.S., women are now earning the same as their husbands — or out-earning them, by an average of $53,000.” Barbie’s rigid patriarchal portrayal of the real world simply is not reality in Western culture today.

This does not mean the type of barbaric patriarchy displayed here is not still present in our culture. The enormous popularity of figures like Andrew Tate and the acceptance of him amongst popular conservative personalities (though I object that these people are actually conservatives rather than just right-wing populists) like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens should dispel ideas that these sorts of chauvinistic ideologies are extinct.

So what is Barbie’s alternative to overt power structures and exploitative gender relations? To me, the clearest message of the movie is to promote what I am coining as isolated egalitarianism. In Barbieland, Ken is simply an accessory to Barbie’s self-sufficient life that is unessential to her flourishing. Ken recognizes he is dependent on Barbie for meaning and value. A large part of the plot is the process of reversing those roles and exposing the moral rot of it all. In the end, when the Barbies regain rule of Barbieland, the problem of Ken being a dependent accessory without inner self-worth or meaning is dealt with through the tweetable (and hilarious) phrase “I am Kenough.” The idea is Ken should not depend on Barbie or anyone else to find significance and meaning. He has all the resources and value in himself to affirm himself as a person and find meaning in life.

This communicates two important beliefs of those scripting Barbie. First, human beings do not and should not receive meaning and identity through external realities like culture and family (or God). Instead, meaning and identity are constructed and discovered inwardly and are not dependent on anything or anyone outside of your own inner desire. It is an isolation of the process of knowing your identity into an exclusively individualized act.

Second, there is a vision of male and female relations that is completely independent of each other for a full life. Men and women are not common human beings with distinctly gendered experiences and contributions that mutually depend upon one another for a healthy society and healthy individuals. They are autonomous and self-sufficient people who can create their own identities, lives, and communities with no dependence on the complementarity of the opposite sex. This flattens not just the differences between men and women; it rejects the idea that gender relations work together to create full lives and healthy communities. In sum, men go do your thing without any help or dependence on women, and women go do your thing without any help or dependence on men.

The false dichotomy between exploitative gender relations and isolated egalitarianism should be rejected and subverted by a Christian vision of gender relations. How does God describe the meaning of human beings?

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

Your meaning is found in your received identity as the image of God, and get this: you alone as a man or woman are not the sufficient fulfillment of your meaning. There is a singular image but it is displayed in the diversity of male and female (unity and diversity is key here). The diversity (binary) of male and female is a part of displaying the unified image of God. The image is incomplete if it is just one individual. The image was made to be fulfilled in community. Yet the image is not copies of the same individual but the diversity of two different sexes of individuals. Adam needed a helper. Someone fit for him, and someone fit for her (Gen. 2:18-25). That terminology of Eve being a helper is not derogatory or second class. The term “helper” in Hebrew is commonly associated with God himself (Ex. 18:4; Deut. 33:7, 29; Hos. 13:9; Ps. 70:6; 121:1-2; 124:8; 146:5).

How does this respond to Barbie’s false dichotomy? It denies the isolation of finding significance and meaning as an individualized project, and it identifies the distinctive and dependent differences between men and women as necessary for fulfilling our ultimate meaning. According to the Bible, knowing who you are and finding fulfillment in that identity is not something you conjure up in yourself. It is something received externally by God’s revelation who creates you in his image. Importantly, you do not understand and live out this identity simply as individuals. God’s image is fully revealed in the unity and diversity of male and female.

In Barbieland, one sex has to be chosen to be an unessential accessory, or they have to maintain complete independence from one another. In contrast, the Bible reveals an essential dependence of men on women and women on men as each brings to the table unique ways they contribute to the whole image of God. This is not just in the context of marriage. In the church, forming a Christian identity and a godly community requires the relationships, roles, and gifts of both men and women. We are dependent on the opposite sex to accomplish God’s vision for our lives and to see his glory displayed in the world.

In contrast to the isolated self-making and gender independence of Barbie’s solution to exploitative power structures, the Bible offers a corporate receiving of a concrete identity that is lived out and nourished by dependence on the sexes complementing one another and revealing the glory of God together. That’s what we are made for.

AN EXTRA DICHOTOMY: BEING MADE OR BEING A MAKER

I am leaving this one unexplained and open to interpretation. Here’s a tip: Listen to the track on the Barbie Movie soundtrack entitled, “What Was I Made For?” Wrestle with its lyrics and how it explores the deeper theme of either being created or creating yourself.