Mom? Dad? Fogettaboutit.

"Barbie" and the job nobody wants

Towering Image: Margot Robbie engenders awe in Barbie.

I admire Greta Gerwig. Though I haven’t seen many of her acting performances—where she seems to meld warmth and wit with an air of melancholy—I think of her as a terrific director. I loved (and a number of times have taught) her 2017 film Lady Bird, and liked her shrewd metatextual version of the 1868 Louisa May Alcott classic Little Women (2019), both of which shimmered thanks to the performances of Saoirse Ronan. I find Gerwig’s work more compelling than that of her personal and professional partner Noah Baumbach; his take on Ron DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise was perhaps the worst movie I saw last year: stagy, pretentious, and soulless.

There’s a lot to like about Gerwig’s latest outing, Barbie, which of course has become quite the pop culture sensation, thanks in part to a huge publicity push months in the making. It’s gorgeous to look at, thanks to the production design of Sarah Greenwood. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are fabulous. And the acting is vibrant—it’s no small feat to animate the inner life of dolls. Presiding over it all is Gerwig, a director with a keen eye for visual storytelling.

So why is it that I find this movie so problematic?

Perhaps inevitably, Barbie has generated its fair share of detractors. This includes criticism of its political correctness (the film does indeed seem tedious in its manicured diversity, whether as a matter box-checking in a shot of a Barbie in a wheelchair or featuring a conspicuously virile Asian male played by Sumi Lui as a rival for Ryan Gosling’s Ken), which can seem every bit as precious as anything that comes out of a toy box. It has also been attacked for dialogue that can sound like it comes straight from a querulous feminist theory seminar. But Gerwig and Baumbach’s script is fairly self-aware, and they are careful to hedge their bets with ritual affirmations of motherhood, recognition of the strides women have in fact made in the workplace, and at least some of the challenges facing men. There’s also a clever joke voiced by narrator Helen Mirren to the effect that Margot Robbie—slyly intelligent as usual—is a very poor casting choice to play a character dogged by insecurity about her looks.

Of course, having it both ways is part of what’s going on here. Barbie is a movie made by very privileged people reveling in their power to call out the privilege of other privileged people. Like most movies that come out of Hollywood, this one has a poor grip on social class—one mustn’t forget it was made at the behest of the Mattel Corporation—and it’s hard to avoid a suspicion that its ideological showboating on other fronts is a way of obscuring its Achilles Heel on this one. (Any story whose idea of the real world consists of Venice Beach and Century City is spectacularly parochial at its core.) At one point a low-level corporate drone under the thumb of the gleefully maniacal CEO played by Will Ferrell—now there’s perfect casting—says, “I’m a man without power. Does that make me a woman?”

The underlying premise here, borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois’s famous concept of the wages of whiteness, posits that patriarchy—a word uttered repeatedly over the course of this movie—trumps all else. I’m sure there are a lot of nodding heads out there on this tenet of liberal feminism, and I would be a fool to flatly contradict it. But power comes in many forms and varying amounts—not just race, class, and gender, but also things like looks, intelligence, and talent. That’s what intersectionality is really about: different kinds of leverage that converge and diverge, not simply reinforced oppression. We work with what we’ve got, no form of which can single-handedly override all others. Whatever powers we do have are never as much as we want and never none at all. This is the essence of what it means to be human, whatever identity marker you want to tack on in front of that term.

What bothers me most about Barbie, though, is the hollowness of its carefully constructed and insistent message of autonomous individualism as the highest good and the proper goal of a successful life, the best way to confront the existential dread that is both the central joke and problem that edges into Barbie’s consciousness early in the movie. In its broadest outlines, you sense the ending from the start: the quest of these characters will be for Barbie and for Ken—not Barbie and Ken—to actualize their deepest longings. From this point of view, the imposition of roles, gendered or otherwise, can only get in the way of that quest. I think I understand the appeal of that argument (certainly it’s played a role in my own life), and can at least sense its power for women in particular, who have been confined to a degree that men historically have not. But it strikes me as problematic in two ways.

The first is that the notion of an unfettered choice to determine and realize an imagined destiny is an illusion—an imaginative vacuum that’s a prescription for ennui, if not paralysis. (The more flavors of ice cream, the greater the fear of missing out.) Only by playing roles that are not of one’s own design can one begin to imagine authentic possibilities. Does that impose limits? Of course! But we are not free agents: each of us is born in a set of circumstances not of our choosing—time, place, sex—with an indeterminate set of possibilities as well as limits. Figuring out what they are and fashioning a life in response to our imperfect understanding of them is the lifelong work of growing up. Some of which involves playing with dolls.

The more serious problem with Barbie falls under the category of sustainability—to invoke, but reframe, one of the buzzwords of our time. In more ways than one, neither Barbie nor Ken Land—nor, more pointedly, the real life posited here as the viable alternative—can reproduce itself. The first scene of the movie alludes to the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which begins with apes discovering tools—and the power of violence. In Barbie, the tools are dolls and the violence is directed at the idea of motherhood as the girls smash them once they discover the colossal power of Barbie—whose appeal is decidedly not maternal. There’s a stunning void of meaningful family life in the movie. (Which is odd, because the parents at the heart of Lady Bird, vividly portrayed by old pros Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts, were among the best parts of that movie.) The only family we see here involves a subplot with a mother (played by America Ferrera) and her worldly daughter (Ariana Greenblatt), whose cynicism about Barbie is both funny and desolating. In an odd inversion of responsibility, the child literally comes along for the ride to assist in her mother’s emotional emancipation. Dad, meanwhile, is utterly useless, frittering with his phone back home while his partner and daughter go on an odyssey, awkwardly stumbling into what the child explains is cultural appropriation when they return. For her, the sequel will likely involve years of therapy—and childlessness.

One minor character that surfaces a couple of times in the movie is “Pregnant Barbie,” who gets discontinued because “a pregnant doll is just too weird.” There was in fact such a doll. Maybe it’s an idea whose time may yet come back. While we’re at it, let’s introduce Grampa Ken to help raise the baby. Because there’s lots of work to do be done. Who do you imagine is going to do it?