The Barbie movie is fun, feminine, and very very pink. But its portrayal of feminism is shallow and unsatisfying. The movie has many great jokes but they are only funny in the moment and not in the greater constructed context of the movie universe. The Barbie movie definitely has its moments but it is definitely not politically coherent.
The Barbies live a perfect life in the matriarchal fantasy land called Barbieland. But one day, Stereotypical Barbie starts thinking about death and experiences hardship for the first time (in the form of cold showers and flat feet). So under advice from the other Barbies, Stereotypical Barbie seeks advice from Weird Barbie who then advises her to seek out the girl playing with her in the Real World. Stereotypical Barbie ventures out into the Real World (with Ken tagging along) and discovers that imperfection is beautiful, that it’s not a girl playing with her but an adult imagining complexity into a doll. Stereotypical Barbie, filled with new and complex feelings, slowly develops from doll to fully fleshed woman with the blessing of Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler.
The writing is tight, filled with jokes and callbacks. But I also don’t think that the writing was as thought out as it could be. Barbieland, the matriarchal world, is a naive form of feminism, one that is born out of girls’ imaginations, and the Real World, the patriarchal world, is where women get to be fully fleshed out human beings. Though I know that thematically, the journey from Barbieland to the Real World is one of understanding the complexities of womanhood and the impossibility of being everything, the text implies that Barbieland (matriarchy) is childish and incomplete while the Real World (patriarchy) is where people get to be people. I understand that the intended tension is between impotence vs. agency, but there is also the underlying implication that “perfect” feminism is childish and that “true” feminism only exists in a patriarchal world.
But the Barbie movie clearly states that women can’t truly be perfectly everything as one person, so should we expect that a movie can truly be a perfect message of feminism? These days, there are more than one type of feminism, with many different viewpoints and important distinctions. Can one movie accurately represent them all and in debate with one another? That’s what a documentary could aspire to, but even those films require editorializing. So is it fair to be so critical of the Barbie movie when it is just trying to say one thing?
No work of art is perfect, and I may be asking too much of a movie about a doll. But I feel that the art isn’t satisfying. The movie ended on a bioessentialist note: Barbie excitedly goes to the gynecologist’s office as a Real Woman, and thus implying that womanhood means having a vagina. After all this discussion of what makes a woman, reducing womanhood to genitalia is disappointing, and tells me that the real intent of the movie is the funny, not the thoughtful. Not all movies need to be great feminist works of art, but there were enough misses to leave a questionable taste in my mouth.
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