this barbie is not sincere, or, alternatively, feminism is when you consume things.
I first found out Greta Gerwig was making a Barbie movie in her 73 questions video with Vogue back in 2020. Her mentions of Virginia Woolf in that video only made me love her more. I've been Greta’s fan for a while now. I've watched so many of her interviews cause I've been obsessed with how her mind works, hearing her talk and explain her art process has always felt like such a delight. Obviously, now she is hugely known as THE FEMINIST™ filmmaker, but I've known her before she made films about feminism. I remember falling in love with her acting and her writing in Frances Ha. I have yet to see a movie that captures what it's like to be an awkward twenty-something with no direction in life. Her presence in every movie is so raw that even when you hate her character, you love her for her vulnerability (as I definitely did in Mistress America). When she took the leap and started directing, I was impressed by how her essence could be felt even though you don’t physically see her. Lady Bird and Little Women are proof of that.
So when I saw Greta was making a Barbie movie, I was intrigued. I mean by 2020, everyone was already talking about the old Barbie movies, so I thought the chances of a Barbiessance were definitely possible. Being Greta, I thought, she could pull it off, but I wasn’t necessarily excited. When I saw the memes and the marketing earlier this year, I definitely became a bit more intrigued, but I was still confused about what the film was all about. Later, I heard Greta saying she had a talk with Peter Weir and discussed how he filmed The Truman Show, and boy I was hyped. In my mind, the movie was going to be postmodern, not in a David Lynch Mulholland Drive sort-of-way, but, I mean, this is Greta and Noah we are talking about right? right? To its own credit, it was postmodern, but in a non-intentional way.
In his 1993 essay, “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction”, David Foster Wallace says that Americans aren’t so much held together by common feelings as much as common images. Barbie is one of the instant images that comes to anyone’s mind when the word “womanhood” is evoked. It’s a cornerstone of pop culture. It's both an insult and a compliment, it’s a metonym of plasticity and bimboness1 and the epitome of white beauty. In spite of her slogan being “You Can Be Anything” when most people think of Barbie they don’t think of her multiple careers as much as her multiple accessories and her Barbie dreamhouse. As a little girl, I didn't even know that Barbie was supposed to be a career woman, I just wanted to cut her hair and dress her up (which tbh is why I rathered play with Bratz because imo they had way better clothing). Prior to this movie, I doubt that anyone thought of feminism when Barbie was mentioned (in spite of Mattel’s claims that Barbie has always been a feminist)2. But now the goal of the new Mattel movie seems to be precisely making everyone think of feminism when you think of Barbie. Charlie Squire from Evil Female recognized before the film was out that “the feminist backlash against Barbie to be more inclusive, more empowered, more “real,” recognizes and actively creates a cultural truth: Barbie’s job is to teach girls how to be women.” The new Barbie movie is actively trying to keep Barbie as a relevant semiotic sign in the rise of liberal feminism, a sign in the literal sense of the word: as an image devoid of any actual depth.
One of the main problems of the movie is that all of a sudden Barbie wants to go to the “real” world because apparently being in a patriarchal, capitalist, and white supremacist world is better than being in Barbieland. Dr. Devon Price states it perfectly “real world is struggle, and sexism and loss and pain and capitalism and death and we must accept all of it but it's worth it…”. Sure, part of the reasoning is that outside, Barbie gets to have flaws and be human instead of the perfect construct she is inside of Barbieland. But what the movie doesn’t get to acknowledge is that women in the “real” world are also constructs, that the “real” world isn’t really “real” but full of superfluous ideologies that dictate most of our decisions and desires. Obviously, gender has always been a construct, and capitalism has been around for centuries, but we have reached a stage called postmodernism (you may have heard of it? ) where we cannot tell what is a representation of what. We may ask ourselves who is more real? the girls who emulate Barbie or Barbie who is constantly modified to reflect the advertisement desires of the “real” world? It’s an endless loop of simulacra, full of zesty aesthetics and sharp metareferences that no longer point at anything remotely real.
Barbie had to remain an aesthetic, it's a fool’s errand to think that it had to be done in any other way. Mattel had to sell their merch. If Barbie would have had depth, it would have ruined their marketing strategy. As Jessica DeFino reports in her latest article, the official Barbie merch includes: “Barbie x Truly Skincare Brightening Serum, a Barbie x NYX makeup collection, “Gloss your lips to perfection,” the Barbie Butter Lip Gloss product copy coos, a Barbie Bikini Serum promising “smooth skin like Barbie” […] and an anti-cellulite body lotion, $39, promising to “boost collagen and plump out creases” while “providing visible lift.” The last one is moon-level ironic, which is perhaps why the whole aging theme of the movie fell flat to me. Aging is fine, but not really, you must keep buying products in order to remain a hot piece of ass. But no worries, girls can still feel like feminists3 while buying the official Barbie anti-cellulite body lotion and keep on hating themselves in the process. The Barbie logo will become an instant synonym for feminism, and girls can think that being a feminist is all about buying things with the Barbie logo and aesthetic and not about the real values and ideas behind feminism. In a postmodern world, barren of communal values4, identity becomes something that can be purchased instead of built from collective morals. This is entirely similar to when Forever 21 sold girlboss t-shirts in 2016 and everyone thought they were feminists. In my Amber Heard essay, I disscuss why I think that in spite of the gigantic sale of those t-shirts, few people actually are. The Barbie soundtrack includes Billie Eilish's song “what was I made for”. Now, the internet unequivocally adores her, but I vividly recall a few months earlier, when her breakup with Jesse Rutherford was announced, a lot of self-proclaimed feminists bashed her for dating someone older (and for her Halloween costume). As if she wasn’t the victim and grooming wasn't an actual phenomenon that includes psychological manipulation and isolation. Super feminist of them to victim-blame a woman. I wonder how many of those self-proclaimed feminists love Billie5 once again after the Barbie movie. I’ve said this a lot of times already but I can't stress this enough: feminism is just an aesthetics for these people, the moment we have to organize and defend women against the most horrifying waves of misogyny, their lack of values becomes transparent.
In his TV essay, David Foster Wallace critiques the counter-rebellion of the 60s as something that became an aesthetic comprised of punk jackets and jeans, and a tongue-in-cheek ironic attitude that soon enough became co-opted by pop culture. He says “rebellious art have become mere gestures, shticks”. That behavior is so poignantly recognizable in Gen Z’s sarcastic and nonchalant etiquette. They are too cool to live, laugh, and love like millennials do, so they say, they are raging anti-capitalists, but they are also so deeply apathetic as to try to change anything beyond just pointing things out while feeling so smart about it. So when corporations get into the joke and use it as an advertisement, they just feel so clever for getting it in the first place. Wallace describes a perfect example of Pepsi doing an ad about how viewers are so stupid for falling for ads, and surprise surprise, it was a hit. He asks “what do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution?”. The Barbie movie toys with this irony, it calls Barbie a “fascist”, it jokes about colonization, and it pokes at Mattel (but don't worry they are not evil! they are just cartoonishly evil, just silly little guys!). It demonstrates that it is aware of all the online discourse, and one cannot help but feel so woke for getting it. And here’s the thing, everyone wants to be woke. David Foster Wallace's verdict predicted it in the 90s: "the crime is naiveté”. Not surprisingly then, the movie emphasizes that all you need to destruct the patriarchy is to be wokish. Somehow all the Barbies got hypnotized by the Kens, and all they need to break free is America Ferrera’s corny Taylor Swift-like girlboss speech.
If the movie would actually create awareness of power structures, then I wouldn't necessarily say that being woke, or deconstructed, is bad at all. It has to be the first step to take before an actual revolution happens. But the type of wokeness that capitalism sells back at you can never have any actual power to change anything at all. It's a half-baked wokeness, one that points at a problem, but never at the root or at the solution of it. The solution to the problem merely ends up being recognizing that Ken and Barbie are their own people, so it literally just comes down to individualism. This just led to a crazy amount of Twitter users claiming that the patriarchy is all about guys feeling insecure about themselves:
And sure, the movie didn’t have to be deep if it didn’t want to. If it wanted to be full camp (like Ken installing the patriarchy just because he loved horses), I wouldn't have a single problem with it. The problem is that it’s camp at times, and then tries to be super deep out of nowhere. For me, one of those fake moments of depth is when America Ferrera’s character says her “great” speech. “You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas.” It literally sounds like Taylor Swift's The Man. Even Swifties recognize this. It's peak girlboss feminism. I thought we moved on from conversations about leadership and women and actually moved to analyze how power affects those less privileged. Most people say this movie was supposed to be a 101 on feminism (yet at the same time they claim it's a feminist masterpiece, pls pick a side), so that’s why they couldn't be intersectional. That is a lazy argument cause why on earth would neoliberal feminism be introductory, its shallowness leads to nowhere. Intersectionality shouldn't be too complicated to explain, they had America Ferrera right there, they could have explained how those ideas don't apply to her. The worse part of this speech is that I’ve seen too many people using it as an excuse to defend Greta’s white feminism, which tells on how “deep” this speech really was.
There’s a difference between holding women to high expectations in positions of victimhood vs. when they are in positions of power, and liberal feminists, ironically only defend women when it comes to the latter (which is what the speech did when it started rambling about leadership). In my Amber Heard essay, I talk about how society holds women to unrealistic standards when it comes to victimhood. I am not a fan of Amber Heard’s celebrity liberal feminism but I don’t think that women have to be perfect for their victimhood to be recognized. If I believed her, I could not understand why the group of feminists who think that everything a woman does is empowering couldn’t believe her at all. This was my conclusion: “Their lack of intersectionality shows why they don’t understand the dynamics of abuse. Obviously, women are not girlbosses, and obviously, not everything they do is empowering, women harm other women, especially if they have some privilege over them, and yes, there are situations where I would believe a man, but in order to do that I would have to analyze the power dynamics in a relationship because abuse is by definition about an imbalance of power of control (this is why all psychology, sociology, and DV experts agree that mutual abuse does not exist). This is the great failing of liberal modern-day feminism: a mindblowing inability to analyze structures of power.” A branch of feminism that merely teaches women about personal empowerment without teaching them about intersecting power structures is weak and prone to nitpicking. I used to be more optimistic about feminism before 2022, I used to think that it was better for some girls to be liberal feminists than not to be feminists at all, but the amount of rage and pain I felt at the collective wave of misogyny directed against Amber destroyed all of my faith in liberal feminism. So when the internet says that this movie is going to introduce a lot of girls to feminism, I just don't buy it. I don’t believe feminism is something you can passively consume, especially if it is one that is not directing its energy anywhere beyond making you consume Barbie’s latest anti-cellulite products.
p.s: posting soon a follow-up article and collab that explores the movie's content more deeply. stay-up-to-date by subscribing <3
In no way I am saying that Barbie is dumb, I am saying that it has been used in that context.
Surely when it was created, it was bold for being the first doll that wasn’t supposed to inspire girls to be mothers, but as Jessica DeFino explains in her article, marketing attractiveness was the price women had to pay to be able to work. Think of jobs like stewardess, nurse, or secretary and what they exactly demand of women.
Not that I believe that feminism is entirely about personal actions. In this society, women have to fit in by using make-up and anti-aging products, so I wouldn't necessarily judge anyone for using make-up or serums. But corporations should definitely be held accountable for insisting on setting those unattainable beauty standards and profiting of women's insecurities.
To understand this a bit better, we may think about how before modernism and postmodernism (a.k.a 1920s) the world had a shared value system: Christianity. With the rise of atheism, the advances in science, and the destruction of WWI and WWII relativism became the new chic. Obviously, there are some advantages in this freeing up of thinking and embracement of plurarlity, postmodernism isn't necessarily bad, the problem is that is deeply intricated with late-stage capitalism.
This is not me saying that I am a Billie Eilish fan. I don’t even care for her music, and I know she has done her fair amount of problematic things, but the moment I see the internet unleashing crazy amounts of vitriolic hate towards a woman in a DV situation, I become their biggest defender.