irrepressible thoughts of gender - on 'Barbie'

Greta Gerwig's tie-in takes bold swings at cultural institutions - gender, capitalism, patriarchy - by pointing out how absurd they are. (3K+ words)

I’ve spent my entire life looking to others for validation. Whether it’s people I respect on Letterboxd, my partner, my employer, friends, what have you, I live and thrive like a golden retriever. Praise, validation, attention. At my worst, I only feel myself when somebody else looks at me. I base things I do myself on what others might think about how I spend my free time. It results in one-sided relationships, empty friendships, and – above all – this sense that there’s something I just don’t “get” about myself. It cascades, constantly, to my gender, my creative process, anything, everything. A drive to be validated and approved of.

This drive compelled me to see Barbie, opening weekend, despite promising myself that I couldn’t dream of supporting a studio picture in the midst of a strike. Shouldn’t I feel bad about doing this? How will certain people I want to like me, to see me a certain way, feel about this movie? What will they think if I like it, don’t like it, even give it a dime? In some senses, this schism plagues me any time I watch a movie. Our culture is built around pre-conceived notions and sometimes, it feels like you’re supposed to have the “right” one to play with your friends. It’s especially prevalent on Letterboxd, where we evaluate each others worth based on our subjective opinions on make-believe played with cameras. This results in many bad faith, almost sociopathic reads on films that – in some cases – stem from this lonely, pathetic desire we have to relate to each other based on what we watch and how we watch it. I’m not alone in sometimes fostering this self-hating desire to want to enjoy something, unfettered, unabashed, and then seeing people you respect say that anyone who likes X thing is participant in the next cultural genocide.

Thing is, I’ve always wanted to participate in Barbie. Barbie was my own Aphrodite and Artemis in one, a wild woman found in wooded creeks and fuzzy pink-hued ‘90s girls’ rooms alike. An effigy of gender that defied logic and cohesive aesthetic, the thing I wanted to have, to become, to destroy, to possess. I was too young to understand what any of that meant, and it gave me a self-hating complex about not only my relationship to the unkillable Mattel doll, but my own gender. Every life-size Barbie I sat around dreaming about, taking out of the box, taking off her clothes to feel closer to something that made me feel safe… I hated myself for that. I’d hit myself and call myself names before anybody else caught me wanting, craving, needing the idealized feminine. I felt that if I could possess her, I could remake her into my own image, and through that, the dirt and haze on my grubby little boy’s face would become just a little clearer.

Greta Gerwig brings that exactly feeling into her Barbie – a candy-coated sugar rush that posits Barbie as a personalized aesthetic tulpa molded from plastic. Gerwig’s presentation and writing alike serve to remind us that Barbie is performative artifice that we collectively read the worst intentions into and project our desires onto at the same time. It codifies her as an important childhood memory, that ugly thing at the bottom of our toy bin, and a brain-dead singular minded stereotype in equal amounts. Every ugly thing we can call a woman is Barbie; every Goodwill Barbie, defaced by magic marker, is a discarded effigy that began life shiny, new, waiting to be loved in a pink window box. This process is a microcosm of dominant male sexual fantasy, albeit inadvertantly. To take, unwrap, desecrate, penetrate, mark, possess, and (eventually) discard women.

But Ken, too, gets the short end of the stick. Ken is considered an accessory to the Barbie the same way a hawk, tiger, or wolf might be for an old G.I. Joe. -- or that Allen might be considered to Ken. Like Barbie, he’s either a man whore or a faggot – to borrow hateful terms you’ve definitely heard used to describe him more than one. Women alternatively see him as the ideal boy toy or an effeminate gay stereotype with little room in between. It’s the sort of casual cruelty that speaks volumes to the sorts of roles we construct and the ways we force each other into them. Roles that blind men, numb them so successfully to the point that the idea they might be anything else upsets them – and us. How dare you be attractive to men? How dare that make you feel good?

I bring up Barbie and Ken not only because they’re the center leads, but because as a young boy, in the south, it didn’t matter which one of them I played with. If I wanted my friend’s Baywatch Barbie more than I wanted food, I got Action Man. If I wanted to play with my Allen doll at my grandmother’s, I got a new G.I. Joe. It wasn’t the fact that I wanted to play with a girl or a boy; it was that I wanted to play with a “girly man,” as my dad would often unironically pantomime to mask his own insecurity. Even if I wanted to be a boy, I had to be a boy in the “right” way. So much so that I carried pent-up animosity and hatred towards manhood my whole life that I turned into a hardline attempt to be a binary woman.

But I’m not a woman. I’m not a man, either. And that’s what made those experiences so painful as a child. On the rare occasion I could have a Barbie, I conscripted her and rewired her original purpose. Yes, yes, she was so cool as Dorothy… but what if I took my GI Joe’s cargo pants and gave her a ponytail? Then maybe the tanktop from my Action Man, to make her look like Lara Croft but a little different. Maybe she could get in my Max Steel jet. Ditto for Allen, who would alternatively become the sluttiest little twink my six-year-old brain could concoct or a ruggedly handsome boyfriend for GI Joe. And each time I’d get close to actualizing, this blend of gay and straight, femme and masc, I’d get shamed out of it by a friend, a family member, or a relative. I think a lot of younger users on here really, truly do not understand what it was like to exhibit a remotely gay trait in the late 90s or early 00s. Things were truly so much worse socially twenty years ago, as dire and scary as things feel these days. We just didn’t talk about this shit, and if we did, it was a punchline, a deviation, something wrong to be fixed. Especially in Georgia. Y’all weren’t born, so really - you do not get it.

This is why Gerwig’s Barbie feels important and – yes – as radical as a two-hour commercial for the concept of a branded doll can be. I’m old enough to remember early production rumors about this movie – the early Anne Hathaway concepts, the ill-advised Amy Schumer ideas, and everything in between. It’s one of those “snowball’s chance in hell” films that sounded worse and worse each time I heard an update on it. Whenever it did come out, I realized, it wouldn’t ever match my own complicated relationship with Barbie, Ken, Allen, Skipper, et al. It would just be a branded pinkwashed rom-com with a Mattel sticker slapped on it. One of many unremarkable movies made in the name of toy sales – Transformers 1-5, GI Joe 1 & 2, Battleship – but with a layer of pink paint and not much else.

(I didn’t lump Bratz in with these because it seems cute and – most importantly – I’ve never seen it.)

Instead, Gerwig X Barbie has become the new cultural battleground being fought out across all social media and content sharing platforms. It’s like one of those comic crossover events that takes over all of your favorite books for half a year and you can’t avoid being touched by, so you just give in and participate. But unlike a lot of those, there’s an extra weight to the ways we’re discussing Barbie in the midst of a strike, as Hollywood implodes, and as the future of franchise entertainment seems less and less tenable. Barbie comes after a decade-plus deluge of content that has reshaped the box office and altered our collective taste forever. It’s a perfect time for the precarious monocultural figure to get a movie, really, because many of the conversations we’re having about Barbie embody a lot of the bad faith and good faith reads we have of the doll herself. Elevated commercial filmmaking versus branded content sludge. Bad role model for girls versus a reminder of their endless potential.

But to approach Gerwig’s Barbie with this bad faith is the critical equivalent of calling Barbie a “fascist” in a huff. The film tacitly acknowledges that Barbie is an idealized creation from a male-dominated company packaged in simple, easy-to-grasp roles. It also tacitly acknowledges that the true cultural stock of these dolls is in the weight we place on these plastic tulpas as individuals. That our own perception of Barbie – as a movie, as a doll, as a cultural establishment – is largely of our own making right down to the production side of things. It’s a fascinating idea in a movie already rife with internal tension: the brand of the brand we’re being sold is only as much of a brand as we want it to be. No doubt, Gerwig’s rejected scene with the “off-brand” Barbies would’ve probably flirted with this more. As it stands, though, she and Baumbach do great work creating a movie that doesn’t actually offer easy answers to its own problems. On that front, it’s a stronger film than many of these, “social politics as corporate dictum” joints because – really – the identity politics here are actually radical in the context of mass culture. And to ignore the marked good that can derive from that is short-sighted, naive, and – sorry – air-headed. Sort of like the way you might stereotype people who like this movie!

Because to spend millions of dollars on a movie that normalizes positive homosociality, casual queerness, and centers asexual beings devoid of genitalia is actually radical, in context, sorry. Saying otherwise is not an opinion, it’s actually patently, provably wrong. To spend millions on something that introduces the idea of patriarchy as a joke defined by largely by symbols – symbols sure to upset stuffier viewers – is important. And to spend millions to ensure a trans Barbie shows up, looks stylish, supports her friends, and is sexually desired by Ryan Gosling is actually extremely important. Hari Nef is the first person – from what I’ve read, anyway – to shy away from doing identity politics in corporate cinema. But on some level, Nef must recognize how vital it is to show up for this. To show up for something that’s running opposite a child trafficking conspiracy thriller backed – largely – by the sorts that actually groom children and normalize herself. Normalize the idea of transitioning to be your prettiest, more desirable, but above all truest self. Whether or not they like it, a parent has to expose their child to queerness to see a Barbie movie. Not just queerness: transness, in a movie that already flirts so much with what gender even is to begin with.

It’s also easy to see why any performer averse to corporate art might want to show up for Barbie. Gerwig’s fever dream houses the most high-effort sets, costuming, and unifying aesthetic out of any big-budget film this year. Not even my favorite waste of corporate money this year – the gleefully uncanny, uncouth, unhinged Flash – holds a candle to the audacity of how Gerwig et al spent Warner cash. Garish, painful pink sets tinged with loud screams of green and streaks of shrieking yellow. This is how you go big. Superhero renders chunking against each other can be cool, and it’s always nice to watch Tommy C get chucked out of a plane and hope he’ll eat it, but really, this is what I hope for when a director with a vision gets charged with making one of these joints. Not that it feels like a capitulation of everything else on the market with an extra spice or two, but that the brand itself feels bent around the director’s vision. That the quintessential idea of Barbie is being stretched around an idea too big for it to hold thanks to a director willing to make a mess and not clean it up. And this mess is a hot mess, a big mess, a beautiful disaster that defies all known laws of what cinema is. Films like Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, Josie and the Pussycats, loud garish practical disasterpieces, misunderstood in their time, now see their vindication through the constructed cheese of Barbie. A director with clear vision and filmic knowledge demonstrates that the most logical way to adapt a toy is to make something as big and silly as toys are. Because to take them in earnest is to respect them, and respect is the cornerstone of any adaptation. Not love, not adoration – respect. Respect for why something resonates with so many and commitment to using that recognition to do something truly creative instead of regurgitating corporate lines and sticking to a script versus making a film.

But Barbie is a film, and a tremendous one at that. The kind of achievement in practical setwork, costuming, choreography you hope to see taking up screen economy at your local multiplex versus faith-based swill or Disney uhh swill! It demonstrates a clear and obvious artistry sorely lacking in its contemporaries. Like Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling – another Warner picture partly preoccupied with white woman marginalization – it evokes the best parts of 50s and 60s Hollywood with glitzy sets, intentional and commanding camerawork, lavish costumes, larger than life choreography and performances. Only James Gunn’s Guardians 3 can stand up to it on a technical and production level this year in terms of scale, and even it can’t offer an installment without a number attached. Nor can John Wick 4 or Mission: Impossible Whatever. There will – of course – be more Barbie pictures. But there will never be this Barbie picture, this standalone burst of exuberance and craftwork that works on its own and offers a distinct three-act story laced with acerbic wit and brought to life with this level of commitment and care. In 2023, that alone is refreshing in the face of not only cinematic drought, but an era of film where even independent American film feels commodified at this point, and a future where films like Barbie might just be untenable. It brings me a strange degree of joy to see this movie being taken this way, accepted as a cultural event, packing theaters. Seeing dozens of people at our multiplex, decked out in Barbie, Ken, Allen, Skipper regalia filled me with the type of joy I don’t know I’ve felt at a theater since… fuck, man, ever? A few years ago it seemed difficult to conceptualize going to a movie ever again, and even before that, the joy of big ticket moviegoing became greatly diminished by how worthless it felt to see big ticket movies in theaters. Now, Hollywood is in a deserved weakened state, so much so that faith-based conspiracy thrillers can strike – like Eve’s snake – and poison the already odiferous well.

Barbie is what sort of film can be made if performers are invested, if a crew is treated well (which from all accounts I’ve heard seems the case,) if the person behind the camera has a vision beyond rote adaptation of a script. If a director can override corporate storytelling decisions to “speed up the plot” and actually show the things they want to show, convey the feelings they want to convey, craft real things and not just greenscreen fascimiles of everything but the bare minimum. And if actors are allowed to go far, far outside their comfort zones to deliver star-making performances which defy rote studio typecasting that’s allowed multi-tools like Chris Pratt to thrive in same-ish roles. If more things got to be as free, big, risky-feeling as Barbie – regardless of whether they’re attached to a property or not – more people might turn up to see them. More people might talk about them at every bar or restaurant I went to this weekend instead of just existing as some fucking meaningless total net gross on a constantly dwindling box office tabulus.

Because ultimately what films mean to me is what Barbie means to me now. The sort of interpretative, emotional experience that transcends ages and histories to tell a universal story Kate Bush wrote a hit song about. Our conception of gender, how easily it can be broken, and how much of an apparatus for agency it is as it can be a tool to bind us. It helped me understand how I relate to my own gender and my own sexual attraction beyond my own limited understanding of it by understanding that – in a society of sexless beings – gender is projected aesthetic and artifice. Gender is what people put on me, never something I’ve ever agreed to participate in. So much pain in my transition thus far has been my constant dissatisfaction with my ability to feel convinced that I am what I’ve said I am. What I am goes beyond man or woman, it’s both, it’s neither, it’s an endless paradox. I’m not a man because I’m a woman, but I’m not a woman because I’m a man.

This morning some idiot said that a Star Trek episode I found cathartis in, as a trans person, was “fictional like trans ideology.” I wanted to tell him to suck a bullet, but on some level, even this hateful little idget is halfway there. Because the only universal truth is that we fuck each other and make other people come out of each other. What we call that, how we demonstrate that, the methods through which we codify and inscribe it – these are all fictions. Lores we construct to keep certain social orders in check.

“Trans ideology” isn’t the fiction – gender itself is. The idea that we even need to call ourselves men, or women, or non-binary, or agender, or whatever. Because of messy, eternal struggle that comes with being sexual beings, we will always try to find new ways of rationalizing and justifying the ways we come up to with to govern ourselves and one another. Those methods will change as empires rise and fall, as ideologies bubble up and sputter out. A game of house nations get buried for. And on their ashes – Barbie. A plastic effigy to the ideal of the American feminine.

An ideal that children take on as a mantle and build their conception of gender around, comrade or foe. Whatever we make of her is ours, and whatever we choose for us – for us – is ours as well. Woman, man, both, neither, whatever claim we stake is worth holding onto and fighting for and believing in. Because we need to live for our shadow selves, those dolls in Barbie Land, built around our every thought and feeling and desire. If we fail to believe in us, they fail to be. With no self, they are nothing, We, too, are nothing without the self – whether we conceputalize ourselves as having selves or not, our sense of lived reality is ultimately something that we construct. Constructed by the world around us, the things we learn, and – yes – even the dolls we play with.

I am every Barbie ever played with and wanted. Allen in my grandmother’s cupboard. Francie in the closet next to the room I got molested in. The discarded Barbie in the woods in the creek, a virgin sacrifice to Thalassa and her many channels. And – of course – the Dorothy my grandfather got me. Because it wasn’t a Barbie, see. It was Dorothy. But I knew Dorothy was Barbie – it was just a costume. Barbie was Barbie. And Barbie could be whatever they wanted to be.

So can a movie about a doll. And so can we. 

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