Rating: ★★

Barbie is the quintessential girl’s doll. Ruth Handler and her husband Elliot had founded Mattel in 1945. Ruth was inspired by seeing her daughter Barbara play with dolls but decided she wanted to create something that was more flexible and had a woman’s rather than a child’s body. The result was the Barbie doll, which first appeared in 1959. Barbie was a huge success and was spun off into numerous lines with Barbie in various professions from teacher to fashion model, circus performer, musicians, businesswoman, doctor, astrophysicist, athlete, paratrooper and a presidential candidate. (Wikipedia lists Barbie as having had over 200 careers). Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, named after the Handlers son, was introduced in 1961. Barbie has made Mattel into one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world, earning over $1.35 billion in 2020. The Handlers were forced to step down from Mattel in 1975 following tax fraud charges. Ruth Handler passed away in 2002.

Barbie is a live-action film based on the Barbie doll. While all the focus is placed on the film, what seems to have been entirely ignored is that there is a large number of animated films based on Barbie, beginning with Mainframe’s Barbie in the Nutcracker (2001). These number 40 plus with at least two or more being released per year. These are often retell fairytales or are based around various Barbie brands such as her appearing as a mermaid (which we briefly see here at one point) and a fairy.

Barbie comes from Greta Gerwig who emerged in indie films in the 2000s, including works from Joe Swanberg and the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead (2008), moving to more mainstream films such as The House of the Devil (2009), Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love (2012), Arthur (2011) and Jackie (2016), among other works. She has appeared in most of the films directed by her real-life partner Noah Baumbach since 2010 – Greenberg (2010), Frances Ha (2012), Mistress America (2015), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) and White Noise (2022), while he is credited as co-writer on Barbie. Gerwig made her directorial debut with the indie film Nights and Weekends (2008), co-directed with Joe Swanberg, and then gained acclaim with her first solo outing Lady Bird (2017), followed by the studio backed Little Women (2019), Barbie and the upcoming Disney remake of Snow White (2024).

Barbie has become a huge box-office success – it is currently the No 1 film at the box-office worldwide for 2023 and has earned over a billion dollars. It is hard to review Barbie as it has become a social phenomenon where its feminist message has been read as a political statement, along with an attendant backlash against this. And so I am going to approach Barbie on two levels – one in terms of how it works as a film and the second in terms of pulling it apart to look at what it has to say about gender issues.

Viewed solely as a film, Barbie is smart and funny. It is witty and clever when it creates its Fantasy Otherworld of Barbieland – one where Barbie takes showers without water, eats breakfast without milk, takes kitchen supplies out of a packet, magically floats down from her home to her car because dolls never actually walk. Or the beach where Ken goes surfing only to bounce off the frozen plastic wave – the scene after that where the ambulance arrives and turns into a fold-out hospital is an hilarious marvel of production design. There is even a cute opening homage/parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

There is a great deal of amusement in the subsequent scenes with Ken and Barbie coming up against various realities of the real world, including Barbie being reduced to tears by a blistering attack from Ariana Greenblatt over the way that Barbies have created false ideals for women. The scenes where the Barbies hatch their scheme to take back Barbieland from the men by appealing to their egos and then inciting their jealousies to bring them to war with one another are hilarious. America Ferrera has a speech about the contradictions of being a modern woman that you only want to applaud at the end.

As a satire on the war of the sexes, Barbie is often on the ball. However, that is not the way that the film is being perceived by the public. In a good deal of the reviews and social media posting I have come across since the film’s release, much of what is being said is being read as a manifesto. I would be happy to argue the case that the film is too silly to be taken seriously but that is clearly not how people have perceived it. Moreover, by the end of the film Greta Gerwig drops the satire and has Barbie preaching directly to the Kens about the new women rule world order.

This brings us to the political ideals of the film. I feel here that I have to establish my bona fides and be specific in stating where it is that I am and am not coming from. As anyone who has read the site should be aware, I write from a strong leftist agenda. In real life, I have always supported the disenfranchised and when it comes to women’s issues have always promoted equality as an employer and in situations where I have been able to help those who have been undergoing abuse. I deplore Trump-styled Republicanism in its many forms and find myself entirely opposed to its racism, blind nationalism, repudiation of rights for women, gay persons and its steamrollering over concern for the poor and underprivileged in favour of corporate profit. On the other hand, I am increasingly at odds with woke progressivism and aspects of Cancel Culture that will readily destroy the lives and careers of individuals for often minor transgressions based on unsubstantiated rumours, or attack those who does not conform to the same ideological outlook, and its willingness to tear down, dismiss, censor and rewrite older works that do not conform to modern moral standards. In the arena of social media you are pushed into a polarity where you either support a wokest, diverse, inclusive agenda and the attendant ideological censorship that goes with it or criticise this and be dismissed as a conservative/Republican/Trump supporter with no middle-ground in between. I support neither side, I want to reclaim the middle-ground.

There have been a great many people online railing against the feminist politics of Barbie. I do and don’t agree with them. A lot of it seems to have disappeared down the men’s rights rabbit hole of angry, embittered cynicism about women. To the contrary, I am not someone who wants to stamp out the existence of Barbie and what it represents. I am happy for Greta Gerwig to espouse her opinion in whatever way she wishes and for people to find whatever they like (or hate) in the film and feel free to voice it. All opinions should be welcomed and nobody should have the right to quash the other side for disagreeing with their viewpoint. What I do wish is that both those who embrace and rail against the film would end in a more fruitful dialogue about where either are coming from and how they can respect one another’s positions rather than being like two opposing sides on a picket line shouting at one another until they are red in the face.

My rule of thumb about almost any film that has come out during the woke era is to take what it is saying about gender, race etc and ask how it would play out if the gender or race roles were reversed. To me this provides an essential snapshot of whether a film is truly embracing equality or is just substituting embittered feelings or advocating supremacy of one side over the other in the name of consciousness raising. If what is being said could not be said by a white person, male, straight person etc about the other side without howls of outrage about racism and sexism, why should it be acceptable when voiced by someone who is disadvantaged?

To this extent, I want to conduct a thought experiment about Barbie – how would the film work if the gender roles depicted were reversed? Let us imagine instead a story based on G.I. Joe (which would be the rough equivalent of the Barbie doll line). It would go something like this:- G.I. Joe lives in G.I. Joeland and enjoys doing all the things that men do because men can do anything they set their mind to – playing with horses, vehicles, guns, watching sports, car mechanics etc. However, Joe begins to have thoughts of mortality and finds his perfect male physique is developing a pot belly and a receding hairline. And so he ventures out into the real world to confront the boy who is playing with him. However, Scarlett, a member of the G.I. Joe team who has a crush on Joe, has snuck into the back of his Jeep. In the real world, Scarlett discovers books about traditional women’s roles. Armed with these, she returns to G.I. Joeland and conducts a coup, turning the members of the G.I. Joe team from soldiers into provider dads, making them express their emotions, do the lawns and take the garbage out, while the women go out and enjoy the party lifestyle while causing all the men to fall at their feet with the promise of sexual favours. The G.I. Joe’s regain control of G.I. Joeland by tricking the women with the promise of going shopping. That leaves the rest of the Joes to get back to the serious business of fighting Cobra, Scarlett is rebuked for her silly crush on Joe and told to go out and find herself and that when she does maybe one day there will be a place for her on the G.I. Joe Team with the other men.

When you reverse the sexes, the story plays out as something really datedly 1970s that might have been made as a reaction to first wave feminism. And yet when the genders are turned around, what we get is supposedly a progressive feminist manifesto for the 2020s. My apologies for using caricatures of gender roles here, but then that is exactly what Barbie is doing with men. And that is the problem I have with the film – that what is being promoted is not equalising the balance of the sexes but is essentially replacing one form of gender disparity – the so-called patriarchy – with a women-rule outlook.

The problem is in part Greta Gerwig’s conception of Ken. For Ruth Handler, Ken was always intended as Barbie’s boyfriend, although the post-Handler Mattel had the two to split up in 2004. Gerwig caricatures Ken as no more than an accessory to Barbie, while conveniently choosing to ignore that there have been also as many incarnations in terms of professions for Ken the doll as there have been for Barbie – as an astronaut, athlete, banker, businessman, dentist, doctor, firefighter, model, rock star, spy, a Starfleet officer and the various wings of the US Armed Forces, even as a rapper. At least in the real world Barbie line, there is an equality among the two genders.

Contrary to this, the film’s Ken is needy of time with Barbie, while she openly states at the end that she does not love him. All of the problems that occur are seen as generating from Ken’s feelings of resentment over this. And yet, after failing to introduce the patriarchy, the only solution for the Kens in the new women-dominated world is one where women have no need of men, where Ken is told to stamp out any romantic/sexual interest and go off and find themselves where, they are patronisingly told if they do, they may earn a seat at the table eventually (in much the same way in much the same way as women have been denied that seat for centuries).

All the end has done has swapped one version of Barbieland where men are dominant and women subservient for one where women are in charge and men are told they must suppress what interests them and their masculine ways of doing things and behave before they can be accepted. To be honest, I don’t see that the end the film arrives at is necessarily any better than the one where the women were running around subservient to the men except that Greta Gerwig clearly favours the former. If women in the real world don’t want to live subservient to men (which if after all what feminism seeks to redress), why should men willingly accept a secondary position in life? There’s a third way called power-sharing where everyone sits down and agrees to settle their differences and respect the other. Why can’t we have a world where all have an equal part at the table and the needs of all are listened to and addressed?

Greta Gerwig’s version of feminism is very much a male exclusionary one. It is a world where her Barbie is so strong she has no feelings for Ken and no possible need for him in her new world order. I have zero issue with anyone who wants to arrive at the conclusion. (Although for all that, it should be noted that it is not one that Greta Gerwig herself has chosen and has been cohabitating with Noah Baumbach, her co-writer on the film, since 2011 and with whom she has two children. The film’s production company is even called NB-GG Productions after their initials).

The film’s end is a prescription that seems as much a fantasy as the world of Barbieland is. It is one that notedly excludes any women who may decide they may actually have some use for men – for anything like companionship, sexual desires, raising children, being providers, marriage or any of the options listed under relationship status. It seems almost as though the bulk of women who are not single, self-assured and independent are swept off the film’s radar and it decided they don’t exist. I don’t have anything invested one way or the other – it is of no particular concern to me whether a woman is single, married, has children etc as long as it is doing she is happy doing so – it just seems odd that this entire sector of real world women, who would far outweigh the number who are single and independent, has been erased from the film’s brand of feminism.

(Nominee for Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).

Trailer here