Barbie (

2023

)

There is a moment in Dr. Strangelove (1964) where the titular doctor loses control of his hand, and snaps unconsciously into a Roman salute before he's able to restrain himself. It happens entirely against his conscious will, undermining the doctor in a moment where he desires nothing so much as to be taken seriously by the leaders of the free world (not that it matters as everyone in Dr. Strangelove (1964) is varying degrees of insane). Apparently, it's based on a real disorder (alien hand syndrome) but in the film it can be seen as Dr. Strangelove's Id leaking onto the screen, his repressed fascistic desires breaking free from his carefully controlled persona. Barbie is what happens when a film has the same inability to control it's messaging as the character of Dr. Strangelove. It spontaneously undermines its own world-building and message in order to deliver a blunt polemic that it has no more control over than an unconscious spasm. I honestly have never seen anything like it before, certainly not in a movie this mainstream and this commercially successful.

This strange phenomenon begins right at the start as we are introduced to the magical world of Barbie-land, where all the Barbies and assorted other dolls in her entourage live and play in an endless procession of beach days, sleepovers, and dance parties. There is no concept of strife or conflict of any kind, as all the Barbies live harmoniously with one another. Sickness and injury are theoretically possible, but all are instantly curable with minimal fuss. Death, at least as far as we can tell, is impossible in Barbie-land. Indeed, when the Barbie serving as the film's protagonist, begins to develop an understanding of the concept of her own mortality, it is treated as a sign that she is defective in some way and needs to be fixed, a revelation that will prompt her adventure into the real world and her quest to find her owner, an adolescent girl named Sasha to figure out just what is going on.

Barbie-land is the highlight of the film, the props and costumes are well designed and create the illusion of a never-never land that remains frozen in pink amber even as the real world shifts and changes. Yet this fantasy of a doll's play world come to life is undermined by a few strange decisions. First of all, counted among the Barbies is a transsexual woman, and I find it rather difficult to imagine Mattel releasing a post-op Barbie, even in today's political climate. What clashes with the tone even more though is the inclusion of a frumpy, middle-aged, morbidly obese Barbie. Granted, I am a man whose daughter is too young to play with Barbies, so I'm not exactly up-to-date on the intricacies of the Barbie line, but I can't imagine that there is a Barbie that looks like this unfortunate woman. From what I understand Barbies are supposed to be somewhat idealized creatures. There are no ugly Barbies or fat Barbies, any more than there are sick or old Barbies.

Had this been the end of it, I would have shrugged my shoulders and dropped it altogether. After all, a certain degree of world-breaking political correctness is to be expected in every modern Hollywood film. I can only speculate whether this is a hard requirement handed down from the studio moguls or just a soft, social requirement created by the writers/directors who want to be invited to all the fashionable parties where they can boast about having the correct politics. Yet, the film cannot help itself, any more than poor Dr. Strangelove can when he feels a burst of German patriotism forming in his breast, and it feels the need to vent its politics with a sudden and seemingly unintentional spasm.

Here, the film decides to focus briefly on 42.5 BMI Barbie for a moment where she delivers a brief monologue first on the dangers of allowing corporations to have a political voice and then asserting that her feelings and reason are not in conflict and in fact they complement one another. These are not the sort of things that little girls think about or incorporate into their play sessions, indeed they are the sort of things that emotionally-stunted adult women are more likely to gravitate towards. The former, regarding the political voice of corporations, is your standard high-status view that nobody really disagrees with (unless of course they are directly benefiting from it) and that dullards like to parrot because people call them “brave.” While the latter, the dichotomy between reason and emotion, is one that the screenwriter has obviously never thought about. For them, their emotions are always valid by virtue of them being their own emotions, whereas most adults learn by the time they start paying taxes that they are frequently upset about things that don't matter, frightened of things that cannot possibly hurt them, and happy about things which fail to benefit them in the slightest. To regard these feelings as always being in harmony with reason is to follow the path that leads some women (and men) to have emotional breakdowns in Walmart.

This sequence isn't a problem just because it's preachy (though it is), or because it betrays the screenwriter's obvious insecurities (though it does and that does make it a little funny). It's a problem because it forcibly injects something from the real world into Barbie-land. Since much of the film's comedy will be playing on the difference between the real world and Barbie-land, as well as Ken and Barbie's ignorance and confusion when placed into the unfamiliar reality, this becomes a more serious issue than it may first appear. There is a reason that Jack Slater doesn't take a break from busting cartoonish bad guys in The Last Action Hero (1993) to give a short lecture on the Rodney King Riots! Doing so would undermine the premise of the film and serve to make its absurdities unbelievable.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the real world is often presented as being as surreal as Barbie-land. Sure, some places are relatively mundane and familiar but then the film shifts focus to the Mattel HQ, both it and its employees feel like they came from a wacky cartoon. Will Farrell brings the usually loud and annoying performance he has been doing for the last 20 years to the role of the Mattell CEO, and gives the usual impression of being an especially obnoxious child trapped in an adult body al la Big (1988) without any of the charm. But it's not only him who feels like a rough simulacra of a human being, the other employees of Mattel give a similar impression. In one memorable scene, the Mattel employees chase Barbie through their offices, following set paths like they are themselves wind-up dolls (rather than just regular people who make wind-up dolls). There's even the ghost of Barbie's creator Ruth Handler haunting the office, a fact that all the Mattel workers glibly accept with little more than a shrug. This is not the real world that we know.

Yet it's not just unfunny comedy where Will Farrell mistakes speaking loudly for wit or literal ghosts hanging around the corners of old buildings. There is something more fundamentally surreal about the real world as it is depicted here. It manifests at times in small ways, like how Sasha is part of a clique of four girls, one Hispanic, one Black, one Asian, and one White. This is Barbie-land logic creeping into the real world. Barbie comes in a racially diverse set, as little girls want their toys to be like them (as opposed to little boys who want to be like their toys, see the perennial popularity of Goku and Vegeta across all racial categories). In real life, most people gravitate towards groups that are more commonly racially homogeneous, even in areas that are very racially diverse. The sort of Burger King Kid's Club level of diversity shown by Sasha and her friend group is a small missed opportunity to contrast the fantasy of Barbie-land with the less pleasant reality.

This weirdness is also present in a larger conception of the world, particularly in the way the film sees reality as conquered by the patriarchy. Ahh patriarchy, where men are more likely to be unemployed, uneducated, imprisoned, drug-addicted, or suicidal than their female counterparts. Where the most common complaint among women is finding a man who makes significantly more than them so they can marry without losing face. I understand that folks in Hollywood don't really inhabit the same world as the rest of us, but do they really not know that the movie industry is somewhat unusual for being controlled by male rapists?

The film also seems somewhat aware that the patriarchy it rails against doesn't really exist anymore. It chooses to represent the masculine domination of media with Rocky III [1982], a film that is now more than 40 years old! Surely if the patriarchy is alive and well there would be plenty of fresher examples of cinematic machismo. It's not like we've spent the last decade and change remaking classic films with women ranging from plain to downright unattractive, standing in for the male heroes of old. Amusingly, as evidenced by examples as diverse as the latest Star Wars trilogy to the latest batch of Marvel comics to the newest big-budget video games, there is no piece of pop culture so overwhelmingly consumed by men or ostensibly made for purposes of carefree escapism that cannot spare time for a boring lecture on feminist propaganda.

When the film does try to trot out instances of real-world patriarchy they feel dated and fake. The most obvious of these is when Barbie walks by a construction site and is cat-called by the all-white workforce there. This feels like a gag that is only slightly more recent than Rocky III [1982]. Indeed, the fact that the workers at the construction yard in Southern California are yelling at Barbie in English rather than Spanish is enough to make this seem faintly ridiculous. Likewise, the preppy white guys who slap Barbie's ass in another scene just after she arrives in the real world. Now, I don't doubt that there are guys who would sexually assault women in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded street in Los Angeles, but I do think they are a bit more disheveled than these blokes.

It even undercuts its own argument about the real world being dominated by the patriarchy frequently for a few laughs. The most notable instance is Sasha's father, who is a clueless dweeb that both his wife and daughter feel perfectly comfortable ignoring or treating as a joke. For a moment, Sasha's mom worries about what her husband will say if she takes her daughter on a trans-dimensional odyssey to Barbie-land, but then quickly remembers that he's a dweeb and his opinion doesn't matter in the slightest. In a real patriarchy, a wife wouldn't dream of taking her daughter to another on a day trip (let alone a journey to another dimension) without express permission from her husband. Remember kids, the “Patriarch” in patriarchy means Father.

Yet most damaging to the film's message about the oppressive patriarchy of the real world as contrasted with the perfect never-never land of Barbie-land is the character of Beach Ken, a poor besotted soul who dotes endlessly on our main Barbie. Yet, he is in a world where his existence is not valued, where he is treated at best as a desirable accessory rather than a living being. It's Barbie's land, and he's just living in it. To paraphrase Orwell, Ken lives in a world where if he wanted a picture of the future he should imagine himself simping for an unattainable girl – forever.

The problem though is that this position for Beach Ken feels far more relevant than any of the film's dated complaints about the patriarchy. There is a reason why the image of Beach Ken's actor, Ryan Gosling, staring up in hopeless devotion at a gigantic, animated woman in Blade Runner 2049 [2017], became a meme. For many men, the prospect of a loving relationship with a woman feels like an impossible dream only slightly more absurd than getting an IRL anime girlfriend. Obviously, this is not a phenomenon that affects all men, but a significant (and growing) minority of men are legitimate incels and better-adjusted and more successful men with wives and girlfriends are at least somewhat aware of how precarious their position in the world is.

So when Ken learns about The Patriarchy in the real world and brings those ideas back to establish a patriarchal Ken-dom in Barbie-land, I suspect that quite a few of the avowed feminist men in the audience felt a perverse thrill. Finally, the shoe is on the other foot, and the society built to reassure women's insecurities may throw a few crumbs towards the males. What's more, again the film seems to have gotten its messaging rather confused, because while ostensibly the rise of the Ken-dom is treated as a disaster, as of the context of the film it doesn't seem that bad. Instantly, all the Barbies submit to the new world order, except a few malformed and defective freaks who live on the fringes of Barbie-land society. What's more, the previously liberated women are perfectly content with their new role as arm candy for their new masters: the Kens. The only way that they can realize how wrong and stupid they are is to listen to a long, unfunny screed from the unattractive actress playing Sasha's mom.

I don't think the avowedly feminist writer/director really thought this one through.