What's All the Fuss About Barbie?

A summer blockbuster reveals a hunger for its seemingly obvious message

I’ve never been a fan of pink; my favorite color has been blue since I was in nursery school. I’ve never been a fan of Barbie; my sister and I didn’t have Barbies, though sometimes, hidden in closets, we helped our friends Mary and Catherine torture theirs by burning their extremities. Don’t judge me — it’s apparently a thing kids do, perhaps in rebellion against the doll’s “perfection.” Anyway, it wasn’t my idea, though I always viewed Barbies with disdain.

But while Barbie hasn’t loomed large in my life, the buzz over this summer’s Barbie movie intrigued me. By early September, Barbie had grossed $1.38 billion worldwide. Sure, the movie benefited from a massive marketing campaign, but viewers genuinely loved it. Everyone was talking about it. Although I wasn’t expecting much from the movie, once it was available online I thought it was time to check out this cultural phenomenon.

Did I love Barbie? No. Did I appreciate it and find it entertaining? Yes. Did I feel exhilarated and uplifted watching it? No.

Did I see its value? Well, yes.

That’s despite the fact that although it’s entertaining, well made, and clever, I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie. My opinion of Barbie comes from my own unique Flower Child perspective, which includes anti-materialistic values that don’t endear the doll to me. I don’t like plastic or stuff that looks fake. I’m not into either Barbie the doll or glossy, mainstream Hollywood — though Hollywood is actually well suited to the plastic-perfect world of Barbie. So my opinion is colored by the fact that Barbie isn’t really my kind of movie.

Still, it’s a lot of other people’s kind of movie. And it’s a movie with a message that I consider important and that, as a Flower Child, I agree with. I prefer my messages with more subtlety and nuance, but the fact that so many people resonated with Barbie’s message is significant.

What’s the movie’s message? Some right-wingers have taken Barbie to be a put-down of men, but nothing could be farther from the truth — though the men in Barbie are a sad lot. The movie is about the problems with the patriarchy, not with men. I’m down with that. Barbie makes it crystal-clear that the patriarchy is good for no one, women or men.

That it does so with platitudes and preachiness is its weakness. Barbie doesn’t always seem to know whether it’s a fun romp for children or a political statement for adults. It’s at its best (Steve Gorman, that one’s for you!) when indulging in colorful fantasies like the ability of toys and humans to enter one another’s worlds, when being goofy and funny, or when putting on zany, well-orchestrated musical numbers like “I’m Just Ken.”

The production values are high, and the acting is good. The movie is full of enjoyable humor: Barbie having dark thoughts of death and cellulite, the Kens serenading the Barbies for hours and eagerly explaining The Godfather to them, the antics of Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, Barbie letting a group of construction workers know that neither she nor Ken have genitals, Mattel’s CEO suggesting that the company’s “gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” make up for its all-male executive team, and Ken discovering the wonders of the patriarchy — and horses.

But the sermonizing didn’t quite do it for me, though apparently this speech about the contradictory and impossible expectations of women had everyone crying on set:

I mean, it isn’t bad, but it’s also pretty obvious and not exactly revolutionary in 2023, despite Barbie’s stunned expression. You can read the whole thing here.

Maybe people still need to hear this message, as obvious as it is. That would seem to be the case, given the strong reactions elicited by the movie and by this speech in particular.

But aren’t we always told to show, not tell? What’s stuck with me since seeing Barbie a couple days ago is the more visceral impact of Ken’s experiences. He goes from being a second-class citizen, even an afterthought, to realizing that he and the other Kens could enjoy a central role in society and do all the things that Barbies do. The way he turns the tables by transforming Barbie Land into Kendom is a joke, one that doesn’t reflect well on men. But it’s a comment on the absurdity of men’s roles in the patriarchy, not an indictment of men themselves.

In flipping the patriarchy’s business-as-usual, Barbie effectively — if a bit blandly, simplistically, and exaggeratedly — shows how nuts it is to subjugate either gender, as well as how absurd our notions of masculinity are. That’s worth doing, even if it takes a mainstream Hollywood summer blockbuster to do it.

It’s ironic that the anti-patriarchy message is relayed by a doll who herself represents a highly problematic part of the patriarchy. Barbie may have been intended to show girls that they had choices, with dolls like Astronaut Barbie, Scientist Barbie, and Doctor Barbie that were ahead of their time. But the doll has been deservedly critiqued for perpetuating a toxic, highly unhealthy body image with impossible standards of beauty and youth. As Sasha, the girl who once played with her, says to Barbie in the movie, “You represent everything wrong with our culture: sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals… You set the feminist movement back 50 years. You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth, and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.”

Is Barbie really the right spokesperson for dismantling the patriarchy? Maybe we can think of her as a sort of Trojan horse. The movie didn’t speak to me the way it would to someone more immersed in the world of Barbie, but I’m apparently in a small minority; over 90% of American girls aged 3–12 have owned a Barbie. That’s a good entry point for getting a message across and also helps explain the film’s wide appeal.

My favorite line in Barbie is “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to live under the patriarchy, you’ve robbed it of its power!” That’s a fantasy, just like the rest of the movie. If only it were that easy.

Still, it’s a nice fantasy to indulge in. And it does contain a kernel of truth. Awareness is the first step toward making a change; if the awareness of audiences worldwide was increased even a bit by this movie, I’d say it was worth making.

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Coda: Barbie as the Hero’s Journey

Like many other movies with broad appeal, Barbie follows the typical pattern of a Hero’s Journey:

1. Departure: The call to adventure, refusal of the call, and crossing the threshold into the adventure.

2. Initiation: A series of trials, assistance from one or more guides, overcoming temptations, and fulfilling the call.

3. Return: Escaping — sometimes with difficulty — with the object of the quest, and returning to regular life with new knowledge.

Barbie’s call to adventure takes the form of things starting to go wrong in her world — most notably, her feet going flat. She goes through a pretty funny refusal of the call with assistance from a wise guide, Weird Barbie:

Weird Barbie convinces her to cross the threshold, in this case the “portal” to the real world. There, Barbie undergoes a number of trials, like being ogled by construction workers, something she’s never experienced; a frustrating encounter with Sasha; and attempts by Mattel executives to put her back in a box. She acquires two new guides: Gloria, the Mattel executive assistant and mother of Sasha, and Ruth Handler, the ghost of the woman who created her. And she gains new knowledge. She learns that the real world doesn’t center women but instead props up the damaging patriarchy — and eventually, she learns how her own unbalanced system, which she’d considered perfect, has limited Ken and kept him from developing fully.

Barbie escapes from the real world with difficulty to return, with her newfound understanding, to her regular life — a life that can never go back to what it was, and that never should. With the help of her guides, and the other Barbies, Barbie uses the knowledge she’s gained to transform, improve, and finally transcend her world. Nothing will ever be as it was.