In Barbie, As In Life, Patriarchy Is the Insidious Force Turning Women’s Lives Upside Down

It’s among the few mononyms that invoke an immediate visceral reaction—whether reverent or contemptuous—within people. God. Madonna. Barbie. And, like the aforementioned Italian-American pop star, Barbie, too, is a baby boomer, “born” (just a year after Madonna) in 1959—and yet another girl who would change “the game” for all of womankind irrevocably. And that game, of course, is the one called Patriarchy. The system that’s set up to make sure pretty much everyone without a (congenital) white dick will fail. Or at least have a much more arduous time succeeding. And for those who say that’s just “a copout” “now,” one need only refer to a pointed line in Barbie from a white male Mattel employee: “We’re still doing [patriarchy], we just hide it better now.”

This admission echoes something Seymour (Steve Buscemi) from Ghost World tells Enid (Thora Birch): “I suppose things are better now, but…I don’t know, it’s complicated. People still hate each other…but they just know how to hide it better.” In Barbie Land, no one hates anyone. Except maybe Ken (Ryan Gosling). The “man” who becomes the surprising (yet somehow totally expected) antagonist as the narrative of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script goes on. Because, as it is for many an incel, a latent resentment toward a woman who won’t “put out” starts to brew and bubble to the surface within Ken as he not only competes with the other multi-ethnic Kens for Barbie’s attention, but also deals with the brutal realization that Barbie is never going to 1) let him stay the night at her Dreamhouse or 2) look at him as anything other than ultimately platonic background to her Technicolor dream life. 

As for the Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) he’s after, she’s starting to feel a few cracks in the pristine veneers of her world. It starts with unwanted thoughts of death as she interrupts her usual nightly dance party with the question no one wants to hear, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” When the reaction results in deafening silence and horrified glances, Barbie saves the mood by rephrasing it as, “I’m dying to dance!” Even on those pointed-toe feet of hers. Or at least, they were pointed—until the thoughts of death came. That turns out to be the harbinger for cold showers, burnt plastic toast, imaginary milk that’s expired and, yes, flat feet. 

Sharing this news with the other Barbies, they not only shriek in disgust, but also inform her that she’s going to have to see “Weird Barbie” (Kate McKinnon) about this. Weird Barbie is the only one who knows how to fix “weird” things, after all. She’s sort of the Shakespearean answer to the Weird Sisters in Macbeth like that. And also the answer to Barbie’s dose of a The Matrix allusion—except rather than offering her a blue pill, red pill scenario, Weird Barbie offers her a high heel, Birkenstock scenario. The latter, obviously, meant to represent knowing the truth about the Real World—where nothing is nearly as effortlessly glamorous or pretty as it is in Barbie Land. 

Although Barbie picks the high heel—stay in Barbie Land and know nothing of the Real World—unfortunately, she’s told that the shoes were only meant as a ceremonial way for Weird Barbie to present her with the “illusion” of choice. But actually, she doesn’t really have one if she wants to get her pointed feet back and remove the blatant cellulite that’s started to form on her thighs. Weird Barbie also imparts her with the knowledge that, to “restore order” (a.k.a. “be perfect” again), she must find the sad girl who’s been “playing with her” (“We’re all being played with,” Weird Barbie adds) and reconnect so that the sadness goes away and stops infecting Barbie’s body and mind. 

“Leaving Oz,” as it were, is no easy feat though. Far more difficult than simply “following the yellow brick road,” let’s put it that way. And yet, there’s no challenge Barbie can’t surmount—even when she’s no longer feeling quite as powerful in her “lusterless” state. “Lusterless,” in this case, being a lot like what Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) in Jennifer’s Body describes as, “My skin is breaking out, and my hair is dull and lifeless. God. It’s like I’m one of the normal girls.” And Barbie was never meant to be “normal.” Even if that’s what “normal” girls have been indoctrinated to believe is normal. She’s supposed to be extraordinary (effortlessly so), precisely because Barbie is Woman. Everything to everyone, everything all the time. And it is in this spirit of how the doll is meant to represent “women” that sets off Gloria (America Ferrera), an illustrator who works at Mattel and rescues B from the execs who want to literally put her back in a box, on a tirade not unlike what Camille Rainville explored with her “Be A Lady They Said” text. 

A text that, just as Gloria’s speech does, expounds on all the ways in which women are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. “Be sexy, but not too sexy…” or, to use a portion from Rainville’s statement on how women can never live up to the impossible and conflicting standards (let alone the standards of a “Barbie body”) they’re held to by a merciless patriarchal society: “Be a lady they said. Don’t be too fat. Don’t be too thin. Eat up. Slim down. Stop eating so much. Order a salad. Don’t eat carbs. Skip dessert. Go on a diet. God, you look like a skeleton. Why don’t you just eat? You look emaciated. You look sick. Men like women with some meat on their bones. Be a size zero. Be a double zero. Be nothing. Be less than nothing.” Be whatever he wants you to be at any given moment. And yet, because Barbie Land is actually that rare thing—a matriarchy—the Kens who exist within it have never known anything like what the men of the Real World get to “enjoy” (if subjugating is what you’re into): total power and control. When Ken sees how Real World “functions” upon crashing Barbie’s “Restore Barbie Body” mission, he can hardly believe his eyes and ears. That, all this time, he could have been using his “Kenergy” to “make” Barbie his. 

The thing he doesn’t account for—as so many men do not—is that no one can really “make” a woman do anything she doesn’t want to (though, not to be crass, the Taliban tries). Not when her heart isn’t really in something. And as we’ve seen happen in many a fairytale/Disney movie, when a woman is figuratively and/or literally locked up against her will (à la Rapunzel or Belle in Beauty and the Beast) by a man who didn’t get the message (she’s not interested), she’ll do whatever it takes to set herself free. And it is Gloria’s speech about the impossible nature of what it is to Be A Woman in Real World that becomes a means to deprogram the Barbies who have fallen prey to Ken’s “message of patriarchy.” With Stereotypical Barbie being the only Barb immune to the rhetoric because she had already been exposed to it in Real World, Gloria compares the way in which the other Barbies become so susceptible to this “plague” to how indigenous people fell prey to smallpox in the 1600s because they hadn’t experienced it before. Luckily, her speech is the vaccine, allowing Barbie and Weird Barbie (along with some questionably named discontinued models) to pluck the deprogrammed ones, Barbie by Barbie, and reinstate Barbie Land to its true status quo (though Stereotypical Barbie herself will never be the same again).

Of course, the work of having to “teach” Real World men that they can’t always get what they want—women included—is something that Gerwig clearly takes very seriously. After all, she just had a second son with Barbie co-writer/frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach. She must indeed feel the weight of that—the responsibility all mothers have to raise sons who aren’t misogynistic pricks. And yet, it is the mother-daughter relationship that Gerwig addressed with such heartrending efficacy in Lady Bird that appears here again, too. Not just between Gloria and her anti-Barbie tween, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), but the one between all mothers and daughters, as Barbie witnesses the joy and pain of motherhood when Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the creator of Barbie and a key talisman from earlier in the film, allows her the chance to feel like a human. Like a woman. And yes, some women “just” want to be ordinary. “Just” want to have children. “Just” want to be, full-stop. They don’t need the additional pressures of Physicist Barbie or Robotics Engineer Barbie. Maybe, as Gloria suggests with a new pitch to Mattel’s CEO (Will Ferrell), it’s “enough” (not to be confused with Kenough) to “just” be Ordinary Barbie. In short, being a woman “allowed” the same luxury as men—which is to be merely “mediocre” without risking condemnation. 

With Barbie, one hopes the very clear message will get across to younger generations of men and women, who can both understand not only the damage patriarchy does, but also the fact that it’s not always an end all, be all “goal” to secure a romantic partner just because that’s what you’ve been told you “should” do. Alas, will Barbie, in the end, be just another “thing” patriarchal-run industries and governments can point to and say, “See, we let women ‘do’ things all the time” simply because they’ve become more comfortable with “letting” women “talk their shit” as a clever means to ultimately still keep them “in check”? That, one supposes, is something that only time and subsequent generations will tell (if they live long enough in this increasingly hostile environment to do so).