Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023) (Patreon)

While watching Barbie, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I not only found it clever and self-aware, but also appreciated the large-scale physical constructions Gerwig got Mattel to spring for. In the design of Barbieland, as well as the "Mattel headquarters," you could really see that Gerwig wasn't joking about her cinephilic aspirations with this film. Jerry Lewis's The Ladies Man's open-dollhouse set was an obvious reference, along with Play Time, and of course the fairly obvious Kubrick nods. It's hard not to accept Barbie as a fairly sophisticated, populist-Brechtian satire on contemporary sexism and the culture industry. This was at least as good at what it was doing as, say, Josie and the Pussycats.

But then, almost immediately after the film ended, I started second-guessing myself. Sure, Gerwig and Noah Baumbach almost certainly made the best possible live-action Barbie movie. But actually copping to my enjoyment felt like admitting I'd been duped. In fact, it felt like deciding that, given all the available options, Joe Biden is a pretty good president. Is he really? Do we actually need a Barbie movie? Should Barbie, or for that matter Barbie itself, even exist?

Putting it bluntly, I began to feel like (in Chris Rock's words) a low-expectation-having motherfucker. Of course, one can take this all-inclusive capitalist critique as far as one cares to. Why should we have blockbuster films, or Hollywood, or an entertainment industry? And while one isn't necessarily wrong to do this, it does have a kind of "turtles all the way down" effect, placing a whole exploitative world-system at the tiptoed feet of a plastic doll. And that's, of course, exactly what the film is about. Gerwig, Baumbach, and Margot Robbie understand that many of Barbie's viewers are coming into the film with a relationship to the object of study that is ambivalent at best.

Barbie does the only thing it can really do in this case, which is to thematize that ambivalence. Barbie (Robbie) enters the Real World and suddenly jokes about feeling self-conscious, but she doesn't quite have the vocabulary for that new feeling. In a way, Barbie is about a new generation coming to consciousness about sexism, pinning it down and naming it rather than just accepting it as the air we breathe. The mid-film reversal, Kendom, isn't just an exaggeration of masculine tropes, although it certainly is that. It's a misguided play-acting at "being a man" by a group of "men" who don't even have genitals. It's the Incel Universe, and the only note I'd give on this is Gerwig might've found some way to directly parody Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.

Some folks have complained that America Ferrera's speech brings the film to a halt, and that it's entirely too on-the-nose, but I think that's the point. The fact that the Barbies are snapped out of their hypnosis by speaking these ideas to one another is silly, but it's also a demonstration of Second Wave feminism's commitment to consciousness-raising, proposing that this might be a necessary strategy once again. Because despite the  historical problems with the Second Wave (its bourgeois hetero-whiteness), Gen Z is facing a forceful reassertion of the kind of overt sexism that the Second and Third Waves (reasonably) believed was behind us. We need coalitions. We need a variety of tactics.

And that includes popular cinema. The role of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), Barbie's inventor, kind of clarifies what's at stake not only with the Barbie Question, but in properly analyzing any cultural object. She made Barbie in a certain historical context, to address a particular need. Once that doll began circulating in the Real World, it accrued all sorts of contradictory meanings, and they all need to be attended to. Barbie's confusion about the Real World is precisely that of an object-relations kind of formalism, that assumes meaning is inherent in the thing itself. It's only in the dialectic between Barbieland and the Real World (and Kendom, as well) that we can grasp the complex maneuvering of a socially meaningful object.

Barbie becomes real by ceasing to be an idea, and embracing the mucked-up situation we're living in. And of course, this means that she is no longer impervious to death, nor is her body inviolable. It is radical to have orifices, to actually let the world inside.