On Barbie

I saw Barbie, and it was fun, particularly for those of us who love a good choreographed dance number, life-size Barbie decor, and tons of costume changes and hairstyles. The details were amazing - how she moves and how she fits in her house and opens her closet. It's very fun for those bits, and there are lots of silly jokes along the way.

It's also nice to fantasize about an ideal simple life for a while without any air pollution or illness.

But, the patriarchy-storyline didn't sit well with me. I watched writer/director Greta Gerwig in a few interviews explaining her choices, which helped understand it all a bit, but not entirely.

Gerwig said, 

"It's a humanist film. The humanity around Barbie and Ken is what's paramount. Ken has no status in the world, it's a reversed world, and the person without status is in an untenable place. . . . The existence of the film is pretty incredible. It's amazing that its made the way it is. . . . It's feminist in a way that includes everyone.. . . Barbie is an icon. She exists in the both/and, not either/or, diving into complexity and not running away from it, looking into thorniness and stepping into it, negotiating what women need to be. . . . The human character of Gloria articulates what the negotiation is: allowing things to fit as one and not cutting something out because it doesn't fit."

So many thoughts on this! I know I'm way overthinking this, but here it is.

First, about it being so amazing that they were able to do this movie in this way makes it seem that she's never heard of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, in which it was made clear, back in 1963, how women feel being stuck at home, powerless, and how the gender dichotomy power structure is self-reinforced. Or maybe it just makes it feel like Friedan's work has been erased, as if she never existed. It could just be that we need a reminder, but this doesn't really do it justice.

The alternative is that things have gotten so much worse since the 1960s, so it's amazing we can say these things out loud. I don't think that's the case in our age of Handmaid's Tale, She Said, Tar, Women Talking and so many others making the gender power dynamic overt. So, as an homage to a doll that many kids loved to play with, it's great. As an homage to feminism, it falls short. 

***SPOILER ALERT***

Secondly, about that "humanist" bit: Whenever that term is used in that way (i.e. not to mean the psychotherapy movement started by Carl Rogers), it feels like a cop out, as if they want to be feminist and raise women's right to the same status as men's, but they don't want to upset anybody. But that's impossible. We can't shift power dynamics without upsetting people along the way. 

It gets close to making headway for us, but just misses. They pulled their punches. 

I listened to a CBC call-in show about it, and one person complained about movies being so political these days. Honey, movies have always been political. Every story has some kind of message. It's what they teach us that we have to scrutinize. And I'm not entirely sure what this movie is saying.

In the story, the power dynamic is flipped with Barbie in charge and Ken is just there for eye candy. Barbie explains, "Basically everything men do in your world, women do in ours." That's a great start with lots of interesting places it could go. Barbie left to the real world, and Ken took over, turning the entire world into a bros paradise: beer, big trucks, and women in sexy outfits serving them. The women in this universe were somehow brainwashed to "like being helpful decoration" instead of making all those decisions that come with being a brain surgeon or neurophysicist. It's a good call-out of the reality that lots of Barbie professions are far out of reach of most of us, and a little too much. Gloria says, "We have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong." But now we've jarringly moved away from the flipped parallels with our world. When women reacted to having too little power in the world in the second wave, they didn't become super feminine; they became more masculine and the pantsuit was born as women tried to do it all, and men got mad they were being usurped in the job market. 

Okay, so it's not a history lesson. That's fine.

But is it what she thinks men would do in this situation? If so, that's pretty bleak. 

None of the men wanted to become doctors or nurses or mechanics or to learn anything. They just wanted to get drunk and exploit women and sing "I wanna push you around and drag you down" to their love interests over and over. Ken read a few books about men and horses to figure out what being a man is about, but imagine if, instead, he took a page from Friedan and searched for his own personal interests and took swimming lessons instead of complaining that it would be too hard. 

Then the Kens reveal they're pushing through legislation that will give them full control over their world, which would be a huge disaster, and Barbie and Gloria have to save the day. 

Wait. . . . are the Kens supposed to be Republicans??? 

First Barbie and Gloria de-program all the women so they can realize that they like being scientists, and then they fight the Kens by denying their right to vote through a massive distraction technique that plays on their fragile egos. The time to vote elapses, and Barbie announces their big win - they're still in charge and everything goes back to the way it was!! They apologize to Ken for taking them for granted, but it still feels like a flipped patriarchy with an all woman Supreme Court (Kens can be in lesser courts). They say, "It's Barbie and it's Ken; nobody in the shadows," but I'm dubious. Nothing they did remotely resolved the power imbalance, and their techniques to try to fix things were manipulative and underhanded.  

But if it's about fixing Republicans and the class issue, then, okay, maybe we need to deprogram all the supporters of the party, all those making little money but who are pretty sure they'll get rich if they keep supporting tax cuts and privatization. Get to them one at a time. Then distract the billionaires on the day of the vote enough to actually pass some good legislation, maybe even guaranteed basic income and public health care and drug plans, so that their brainwashed supporters realize how much they've been duped when it's suddenly much easier to feed their family and get the medical support they need. 

Maybe (??) that makes sense?? But if it's about the patriarchy, it all falls apart.

The 13-year-old in the movie was just a bystander to it all, mainly nonplussed, so maybe this is all middle-aged baggage that isn't affecting the younger generation because it's better or because they're just too young to notice all the power issues yet.

And I'm not even going to get into "weird" Barbie. I cut my Barbie's hair too, but she was "Punk Rock Barbie"! None of this weird bullshit. 

(Also check out Jessica Defino's takedown and Anne McKenzie's very clear explanation of why "You need Indigenous and Native writers if you want to deliver jokes about Indigenous and Native Peoples.")

ETA: Okay, 2/3 of women who see the film now notice patriarchal dynamics in their workplace. Apparently it's the best thing we've got to popularizing Betty Friedan! I had no idea how far we have gotten from the education brought to us by the second wave feminists.