I’d like to preface this review by saying that I AM the target audience for Barbie. I’m a 35-year-old woman who played with Barbies as a child, and I have two nieces who are the right age for me to buy Barbies for. I was eager to see Barbie, and I went with a friend who was also eager to see it. I was even willing to wear pink, except I don’t have a movie-theater-appropriate pink outfit. I like seeing fun dumb movies in the theater, and I like both of the lead actors. I went intending to thoroughly enjoy myself, and indeed, I did thoroughly enjoy the first two acts and bits of the third.
But the movie also left me dissatisfied. This was partly because the third act didn’t
have enough material, which made its pacing a slog. But mostly, my problem was with the message:
I can’t stop thinking about how epically the movie screwed it up. So I’m going to share my thoughts with all of you.
NOTE: I am not attempting to express what my politics may or may not be in this essay. This is about the Barbie movie's message and how it failed to convey it.
THE STORY
Act One: Stereotypical Barbie has a perfect life
where every day is the best day ever. On
the other hand, the Ken who was designed to be her boyfriend (Stereotypical
Ken), is unhappy. All he wants is Barbie’s
attention, but she largely ignores him, and he becomes jealous when she pays
attention to other Kens. In Barbieland,
Barbies hold all the jobs and all the power, and Kens are relegated to standing
around hoping for Barbie attention.
Then one day, things start going wrong for Barbie:
she starts having thoughts of death, her feet go flat, and she develops cellulite. After consulting with Weird Barbie (the Barbie
who’s been played with too much and so has chopped-off hair and Sharpie on her
face), Barbie learns that the way to solve her problems is to find the girl who’s
playing with her in the Real World.
Prodded by the Ken he’s most jealous of and desperate for the attention of the woman he loves, Stereotypical Ken sneaks in the
back of Barbie’s car when she leaves for the Real World. When Barbie realizes he’s come along, she
expresses her disdain for him but lets him stay.
Act Two: Barbie and Ken enter the Real World. There, Barbie discovers that some of the jobs
she associates only with females are held by men, and some rude men wolf-whistle her. On the other hand, Ken discovers that people
actually have a tiny bit of respect for him in the Real World instead of
completely automatically dismissing him because he’s male. Eager to learn more, he goes to the library
to research what this means. Meanwhile, Barbie meets the girl she thinks
is playing with her: a young teenager who immediately gives her a hateful, nasty
little speech because she
wants to make Barbie cry. Mattel, the
Barbie company, shows up soon after and takes Barbie in, intending to return
her to Barbieland. Finding Barbie gone,
and excited by a world where men get some respect instead of being banned from all jobs and homes, Ken heads back to Barbieland
alone to share what he’s learned.
Feeling something is off in Mattel (where the boardroom is
filled exclusively with men), Barbie escapes in an action sequence. The boardroom’s secretary, a woman who
happens to be the mother of the vile teenage girl we met earlier, pulls up in a
car with her daughter and escapes with Barbie.
We learn this woman is the actual person who was playing with Barbie; she was using her to express her grief over her perceived victimhood due to her bratty daughter and womanhood. Barbie, the secretary, and the horrible teen
decide to go visit Barbieland together.
Act Three: the trio of women arrive in Barbieland,
only to find it has been transformed into a kingdom of Kens. For some reason, bringing the idea of male
empowerment to Barbieland made all the Kens start dressing like dude-bro gangsters
and brainwashed the Barbies into their adoring bimbo slaves. (??) For the first time, Kens get to live
in houses and do the things they like, instead of being repressed; and the
Barbies have turned into Stepford wives.
Ken points out how unkind and unfair Barbie has been to him, and asks how she
likes it to be treated as he’s been treated, but he clearly also still adores
her and wants her approval. Totally
missing his point, Stereotypical Barbie collapses in despair, which prompts
secretary and her vile teenage daughter to immediately abandon her and return
to the Real World. However, due to a
chance encounter, they change their minds and return.
Back in Barbieland, secretary and vile teen meet up with Weird Barbie and a few discontinued
Barbies, who have for some reason not been brainwashed. Secretary goes off on a rant about how poor,
downtrodden, and abused women are in the Real World, and how unfair life is,
and for some reason this unbrainwashes the normal Barbie present. (Which makes ZERO sense, because Barbies would
have never experienced anything whatsoever that she talks about, since they have always been the oppressors and far worse than the Real-World men depicted in the movie.) Secretary's rant is long and boring and then repeated during a heist sequence in which Barbies kidnap other Barbies and have
them listen to this rant until they are all secretly unbrainwashed.
Now, Ken’s plan has
been to hold an election and vote for Kens having power in Barbieland. Wanting to stop the Kens from gaining any power (and to keep Barbies having universal power), Barbies decide to stop any Kens from voting so that only Barbies get to vote. The Barbies therefore run a romance scam in which
they pretend to like their respective Kens, only to abandon them and make them
jealous so that they fight West Side Story-style. The Kens do, but then they reconcile and
become friends, forgiving each other and showing some of the only real kindness
in the entire movie.
In the meantime,
the Barbies successfully vote that only Barbies can have power and Kens can
have none, the Mattel boardroom men show up again for some reason (???), and the Kens
are once again forced out of the Barbie dreamhomes and told they can do nothing but stand around decoratively. The Barbies throw them a tiny bone saying
maybe they can do something small once in a while. Stereotypical Ken accepts his defeat
graciously and expresses his love for Barbie.
She immediately rertorts that she doesn’t care about him at all or
recognize that he has any worth and that he’d better go find himself and stay
away from her. She then decides she
wants to be human for no reason, and leaves to live in the real world.
THE MESSAGE
Obviously, the intended message of the movie is, “Patriarchy is bad. Women have it super rough and are
victims of The System, which needs to change.”
That’s what characters say, over and over. But actions speak louder than words, and do their actions convey?
Let’s look at our characters:
Barbie is vapid
and silly. She fails to recognize any value in Ken, who adores her, and purposefully ignores, manipulates, and spites
him. During the course of the movie, she
experiences emotions like sadness over the fact that the world isn’t what she
wants it to be, and that’s all the character growth she gets. She begins as she ends: utterly self-absorbed
and careless of others’ feelings.
Our two human
characters—the secretary and the teenage daughter—are spiteful, vicious,
self-righteous, rigid-minded jerks who are only happy when they get their way
and only like people who agree with them on everything.
Ken is simple
and dumb, but neither simplicity nor stupidity are vices; and he is also
honest, consistent, caring, and forgiving.
He does his best even though he doesn’t understand exactly what he’s
doing. I would argue that he is the only empathetic and likeable character in the movie.
Now, ignoring what the
movie says its message is, lets look at what it shows it message is. Ahem:
o Kens are treated as second-class citizens.
o A Ken discovers that life doesn’t have to be
this way, and so leads a revolt using the only models he has available to him:
how the Barbies act and what little he has managed to research about
the Real World.
o In response, the Barbies brutally emotionally
manipulate the simple Kens in order to prevent them from voting. Once victorious, Barbies trample Kens back down to their second-class citizen status, with a miniscule concession
to make it go down easier; although by the way Barbie treats Ken, this is
clearly lip-service only.
o The Kens, having lost, bow their heads and say
they’re okay with not being in charge and with returning to their second-class
citizen status with zero power, freedom, right to own property, or respect.
o This is presented as a happy ending.
Is the problem clear? If not,
replace “Kens” with “black people” and “Barbies” with “white people,” and see
how easily that message goes down.
The makers of the
movie are not saying, “patriarchy is bad”; they’re saying, “Instead of being
the HAVE-LESSes, we want to be the HAVE-ALLs and to have the current HAVE-MOREs
to be the HAVE-NOTHINGs.” It is vile,
selfish, spiteful, and vapid . . . exactly like the secretary and her daughter. Not a great message.
FIXING THE MESSAGE
Let’s assume that the film-makers weren’t actually despicable and
wanted their message to instead be, “women and men should be treated equally,
and here are the problematic areas we need to improve.” How could this have been done?
First, I think
making the movie a musical would’ve been a good move. It would’ve softened the secretary’s boring
rant frustration into something more palatable: as is done by Ken’s song when
he sings out his frustrations. It would’ve
also helped with the pacing, since the movie clearly didn’t have even enough material
for its short run-time.
Second, Barbie needs to actually recognize Ken’s worth at the
end in a way that’s more than lip-service.
Together, they need to acknowledge that one extreme is no happier than
the other, and that they need to work together to develop a social climate that
is healthy and beneficial for both Barbies and Kens.
Third, Stereotypical Barbie needs to
stay in Barbieland to help develop an improved social climate instead of
abandoning it for the Real World. Aside
from not working with any of her character development, personality, or world
setup, the fact is that Barbie abandoning Barbieland shows that her actual
objective is still selfish self-gratification: when things become unfavorable
in any way, she immediately either despairs or abandons the situation for greener
pastures.
IN CONCLUSION
I did enjoy 75% of the Barbie movie, and I’m not sorry I saw it. I do think some of the people working on it recognized
some of the problems with the message, since the voiceover tried to throw Kens
a bone at the end and Ryan Gosling’s superb acting as Ken showed the character's
true feelings regarding his unjust treatment, helping to undermine the toxic message
of the filmmakers. Overall, I think this
movie a great pity: there is a lot about it that is really good, and the movie
could have been a vastly enjoyable popcorn watch if not for the ugliness of its
true message.
Message is what you show, not what you say! So if you're writing a message, make sure it's what you intend . . . or at least acceptable to you.
