“I’m just [men]”—or, C’mon, Barbie (2023), let’s go (COMMUNIST!!!!) party

Arguably the centerpiece of the 2023 live-action Barbie movie is what the official “max” YouTube channel has presumptuously titled “America Ferrera’s Iconic Barbie Speech.” This is somewhat late in the film, when Ferrera’s human mother character and her estranged, Barbie-hating woke tween daughter have made the journey to Barbie Land alongside Margot Robbie’s titular doll to find the plastic-y paradise overrun with patriarchy, spread by Ryan Gosling’s love-sick, under-valued-feeling Ken. Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie,” whose only innate gifts have been related to her physical appearance and her baseline status as the doll from which all others may derive some fundamental essence of self, is at her lowest, which inspires Ferrera’s character to deliver a thesis on the challenges and contradictions of womanhood, for which the pace of the film slows to a crawl.

Otherwise quite stylistically lavish and even self-consciously Wacky, here it backs off to just let this woman express herself. This is one of a few moments of emotional realness that feel much more characteristic of Greta Gerwig’s and Noah Baumbach’s “typical” work. It’s one of the more Lady Bird (2017)- or Little Women (2019)-, or Marriage Story (2019)?-, esque bits. I associate these names (that is: “Gerwig” and “Baumbach”) with moving, adult drama, and that’s a big part of the “subversive” appeal of this whole project—and ultimately, probably a huge contributor to its success—the “unlikely” pairing of real creative forces with consumerist slop. (It’s to Gerwig’s credit as an artist that she doesn’t seem prepared to become a central pillar of a Mattel Cinematic Universe, or whatever.) There’s been a lot of talk over the years about the artistic merits of this type of IP-leveraging popular cinema, particularly with regard to the juggernautical modern Marvel superhero movies. The fervor with which these products have been defended against criticism has resulted in some outrageous comparisons to better or more obviously artistic films coming from even the creator side of things. However, that being said, I do believe there is art and merit here, with Barbie. Starting with an indulgently transparent 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) homage probably makes the movie appear stupider than it actually will be. It is ultimately better than any one referential goof, which is likely attributable to the skills of the aforementioned Gerwig and Baumbach. Yet, the question behind this whole enterprise and behind the previously mentioned specific (speech) scene is “Does any of this actually mean anything, though?” Barbie is not just a movie that leverages a familiar IP to a reasonably enjoyable degree like its superheroic spiritual siblings: It seems to have things to say and makes those things a critical part of itself. It presumes to function as both celebration and criticism of its subject and her attendant social issues.

I’m not enough of a historian to comprehensively trace capitalism’s ability to “critique” itself and sell the self-awareness, but it’s certainly recognizable in pop-cultural titan Disney’s modern, live-action remakes of its classic 2D animated films, where it will try to address some perceived flaw or problematic element in the original. Or, see the scene in that 3D animated Wreck-It Ralph movie I haven’t seen, with all the Disney Princesses^TM together in a room and acknowledging the clichés of Disney Princesshood. This is, of course, happening in a movie created by Disney and sold to their audience to make money. To quote video-essayist and novelist Lindsay Ellis’ video on the subject (and on the 2019 live-action Dumbo remake), “[T]hat’s not really why these films have meta-commentary, now is it? They aren’t woke to make the world better. They’re woke for you to buy stuff. . . . ‘Well, you can’t hate their corporate monopoly if they make fun of themselves. . . .’ It feels like commentary, but it’s commentary that does not say anything.” My own personal awareness of this tendency began with, I think, the 2016 video game Watch Dogs 2—which is all about the ethical quagmire of Silicon Valley/Big Tech companies (discriminatory profiling, invasions of privacy, meddling in politics, and so on) while being developed and distributed by a giant video game publisher with its own long list of ethical issues. Some sort of critique, on its face, but with this fundamental contradiction centered on its origin and arising from its nature as a product to be sold to as many people as possible. I realized that, despite what the game was ostensibly saying, its messaging couldn’t possibly have any real bite behind it because of its circumstances. It was just a pantomime of criticism that might, on one level, have a soporific effect on its audience: Your complacency is okay because the beast is self-aware, self-policing in some form. Or, here’s Ellis again: “After all, the company sees and hears your criticisms. It agrees with your ideals about inclusivity. So don’t worry about the fact that they’re well on their way to owning… everything.” A patina of progressivism as a cover for more capitalist grubbing!

In Barbie, Ferrera’s speech is obviously important (see, again, the way it is emphasized within the stylization—or absence thereof—of the film), and it is also plot-critical since the characters discover that her words will magically snap the brainwashed lady dolls out of the spell of patriarchy. They capture and deprogram every individual Barbie by having Ferrera lecture them and are then able to turn the Kens against one another and take back control of Barbie Land. Of course, the words are also supposed to resonate with the women and girls in the film’s audience, and they certainly have the heat and the rhetoric signifying some sort of revolutionary thought. I do imagine that there are men (and their traitorous women stooges) who have seen this film and come away horrified at how nakedly pro-woman it is. It’s dressed in the language of meaningful critique to a shockingly garish degree. It has a (genuinely!) naked fire behind it that I’d most closely associate with a 19-year-old communist’s 2:14 p.m. 12+-post Twitter thread from the site’s pre-Elon heyday. It may actually trigger some sort of new self- and social- awareness in some viewers, even if I personally find it to be incredibly trite, Feminism 101-type stuff, but I keep coming back to the conviction that it wouldn’t be here, in this Mattel-sanctioned film, if it had any real power. This is “safe” in a way that makes it not actually challenging to the status quo. And at the risk of belaboring a point that better, faster, and more female critics of Barbie have already made, this is because it presents feminism in its most raw, simple state only and does not pursue the more radical ideas that it only gestures at, at most.

Despite how we recently seem to be backsliding in shocking, even unexpected, ways (re. topics like vaccination, racism, and, yes, women’s rights), the idea that women should be “equal” to men is not powerful or novel. Barbie’s stance is in no small part just that there should also be women CEOs and women doctors and that women should be allowed to… own houses: “Women should be allowed to participate under capitalism just like men!” cries Barbie. It’s exhumed, dusty gender wars ordinance that ignores other, critical, sorts of inequality—those associated with race and class, for example, which, like gender-based discrimination, are reinforced by capitalism. Arguably, a feminism that ignores these complications/variations (that is not “intersectional”) presents an incomplete and ineffective counter to oppressive forces, only some which are obviously anti-woman anymore. To quote some kind of Business Boy from the film itself, and thus give it some credit for its messaging, “We’re doing [patriarchy] well. Yeah. We just, uh, hide it better now.” Especially today, there’s a tendency to hide behind a façade of supposedly egalitarian competitiveness, ostensive meritocratic tyranny. A woman might rise to the top of the suffocating heap. Yet capitalism is an inherently exploitative, violent system that can only create disparity of one kind or another. And that’s even if it’s not just pretending at equal representation and promoting meritorious candidates. That Mattel in the live-action Barbie film is still run exclusively by men is acknowledged, “critiqued,” and ultimately left alone. This is a thematic failing of the movie as a text with some revolutionary aspirations, but it is ultimately immaterial. It wouldn’t matter if the literal inner circle around Will Ferrell’s CEO character and/or perhaps metaphorically around the company’s IRL CEO was all women. It wouldn’t matter if those women were Black or Indigenous or trans or gay or ace. I used to be (vocally) amenable to the idea that women are superior to men back when I was at my most self-hating and even, ironically, incel-like, but that is just another form of objectification and dehumanization. Women are just human and just as capable of perpetrating harm; them holding positions of power does not automatically make the system less discriminatory or cruel. This is an idea that Barbie really just flirts with: There’s a joke in the end about the Kens still not having representation in the Barbie Land government and a really tantalizing question earlier about where they even live that goes nowhere.

The ever more extreme stratification of wealth, the competition for scraps that breeds jealousy and resentment, the fear of an ignominious and painful death… You could argue that masculine-coded violence is in the very bones of the system. It’s not just men as individual representatives of a gender that impose impossible beauty standards on women, for example. There are whole industries under capitalism dependent on the perpetuation of those standards—clothing, hair, nails, fitness, accessories, dieting, hygiene, body modification. As long as the profit motive remains, the degradation will as well. The Wikipedia page for this film estimates that it made something like 1.447 billion dollars. There are hints of a critique of capitalism at points, including the earlier quote (such as when the snarky tween daughter lambasts Barbie in the school cafeteria and mentions “sexualized capitalism”), but it is much less substantial than the men v. women stuff and I feel safe classifying it as “lip service” that offers a veneer of more comprehensive self-awareness that isn’t actually pushed for reasons that I, cynically, feel are quite obvious: This is the actual sore spot that Barbie’s feminism can’t touch. It is most certainly part of the Problem and is not the solution to anything, or at least offers no solutions. Even its Feminism 101-type razzle-dazzle has issues, beyond preserving in-film Mattel’s all-male leadership. I had to look up the cast list to even find out the name of Ferrera’s character (“Gloria,” which I don’t think is ever even said aloud—She’s just a mother, and is even identified simply as “[Sasha’s mother]” in the subtitles for her voiceover at one point), and her final… triumph in the narrative is to get Mattel to make her “Ordinary Barbie,” which is initially rejected by the CEO until one member of his Yes-Man entourage magically determines that it will be extremely profitable. If this is a deliberate frustration of the film’s themes, then it is still that: frustrating, and unadventurous. The real-world success of Barbie (the film) reveals a fundamental flaw in the classic Simpsons episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” (1994). There, the joke-moral is that a pro-woman doll would be easily upstaged by more of the same vacuous, sexist silliness with a new hat on top, but this movie proves that A) the feminist doll is profitable if B) that feminist thought has all the substance of a new hat.

Now that I’ve scared everyone off, here’s some of what I liked about Barbie—I like some of its stylistic excesses: I wasn’t necessarily sold on the 2001 homage, with a giant Barbie in place of Kubrick’s iconic ape-riling monolith, when I saw it in isolation a while back, but I do appreciate it now as part of the overall tapestry of excess; I even like Ferrera’s big speech and related moments of absurdly in-your-face faux-critique just for how much like Twitter they sound and for how the movie essentially pauses to make space for them, and for how they’ve undoubtedly genuinely terrified and pissed off certain contingents of morons; I like the dance number in a void that breaks out when the manipulated Kens are fighting each other and how Robbie’s Barbie has her own existentially liberating moment/transition to humanhood in a similar void; I also really enjoy just how hard the film commits to its central absurd conceit of Barbie Land and the real world as these interconnected but also separate planes of existence. It’s not “realistic” in the least and is somewhat mocked internally but ultimately is just kind of interesting. Like how the fantasy realm Barbies are these singular half-living entities that represent the mass-produced doll archetypes on our (human) side: There’s a single “Weird Barbie” that exists for all Weird Barbies out there, for example. The movie just rolls with this reality throughout, without excuses or attempted explanation (that’s meant to make any actual sense). If I have a complaint about this arrangement, it’s that I think the Mattel building and its human employees in the real world are too wacky in ways that undermine the fun and stability of the dichotomous realms. I think Ferrell is too goofy for a human in this universe. Maybe he should have been an escaped Ken?

On its face, this story feels kind of BIG for Gerwig and Baumbach, but the conflict is ultimately very personal in a way that suits them both. While the Mattel boys are an antagonistic faction of sorts for a chunk of the film, they’re not really serious contenders outside of the comparatively brief sequence where Barbie is nearly in their clutches and has to flee. The main antagonist is, instead, Ken (the Gosling variant, primarily), and part of what makes him such an interesting villain is how he doesn’t start out as one, despite his eventual antagonistic role being a clear evolution of who he is earlier in the story. I genuinely love how he and Barbie have these divergent experiences with the real world and how sensical it all feels with Ken in particular, how it shapes him: We first see how he feels neglected back in their fantasy homeland, so he comes along on Barbie’s journey to try to distinguish himself from the other Kens who he is otherwise interchangeable with; he and Barbie feel the judgmental gazes of the humans on arrival, and he immediately starts to sense how empowered and respected he is even in the pair’s ridiculous rollerblading get-up; he progresses from vague feelings to a concrete understanding that men run this world, which motivates him to try to join in, but he is rebuked for not having the credentials, so he returns to Barbie Land to take it over because he knows he can get in on the ground floor of the system there and become a figure of respect despite his lack of qualification. It is genuinely a lot of fun to watch this evolution happen. Barbie has her own growing awareness and arc, but it’s her supposed boyfriend that drives the plot in the back half and who is even more interesting for it.

Ken Gosling’s big song (“I’m Just Ken”) is another bit I saw early and in isolation, and I was initially unmoved by it. Similar to the monolith scene, I think I found the absurd, specific imagery that accompanies it (the Kens’ beach battle) silly at first but more enjoyable within the context of the full movie. My feelings about the song most significantly changed pre-viewing when I saw the performance from the 2024 Oscars: I liked the staging better (thought it was more coherently splashy: appreciate-able even if you haven’t seen the movie) but also found Gosling a lot more charismatic there. Certain elements of his physical performance just struck me as extremely magnetic, particularly later in the number as he comes back down to the front row of the audience—the blasé way that he blows a kiss to his co-stars and Gerwig after offering them the mic, the way he takes a cameraman’s hand to lead him on-stage as he sings “Put that manly hand in mine.” It’s very attractive, to be frank! Arguably much better than what’s in the movie, though I do have a fondness now for how unmoored from realistic violence the Kens’ fight mostly is. Still, I’d probably go so far as to say that I was thinking of the Oscars performance as I was watching the film and that that other version of “I’m Just Ken” greatly enhanced my appreciation of the original. What my assessment would have been without that outside influence, I can’t say.

In my initial sketch for the above visual, I wrote that I should use “[a]n image of the Kens’ beach assault alongside one of those uncanny side-on 300 shots.” As I established already, I first encountered this sequence from Barbie when I watched an official “I’m Just Ken” video on its own, and I think the surreal qualities of the imagery certainly contributed to my mixed-to-negative opinion of the song. While I’m not sure of the actual practicality of the sets, my impression at the time was of the aforementioned 300 shots where you get the creep- y/ing feeling that no one is physically where they ostensibly are. Of course, I ultimately came to appreciate the weirder elements, visual or otherwise, in Barbie, including the Kens’ big “beach off.” Its hypermasculine epic war imagery is 300-like, though obviously parodic, with noogies and hobby horses in place of real violence and violence-adjacent accoutrements. The way the two alpha Kens ultimately face off by all but forcefully pressing their sculpted chests together, which results in a spiritual clash that seemingly teleports everyone in the vicinity into the dance-off dimension, is a great subversion of the 300-ian ’rone rage brand of male violence in Barbie. It’s like they’re simply too manly to engage in something as pedestrian as a physical dust-up, which results in a tone that is kind-of gay and fun rather than kind-of gay and po-faced. This is potentially meant as a deliberate contrast to the gawky, effeminate, and normally ineffectual Allan’s much more (surprisingly) credible violence against some Ken construction workers that we see earlier.

Robbie is good in the movie, but Gosling absolutely (fittingly, given the themes and plot?) steals the show with his more dramatic transformation, from beginning to middle to end, and the comedic tone that’s generally associated with him. I saw some debate in the wake of the film’s release about whether the way that Ken has been so beloved by audiences or was perhaps privileged by the film itself may undermine the pro-woman messaging, but I think this is ultimately a moot point since the messaging amounts to as good as nothing remarkable anyway, even without this consideration. At best, if I’m kind, his prominence might be seen as an attempt to show how “men’s rights” and female liberation are not mutually exclusive, wildly divergent concepts—and instead, like every reasonable feminist knows, that men’s oppression of women only hurts them as well. Patriarchy, like capitalism, can only create stratification and alienation. It creates rules and standards that exclude a lot of men from feeling like they are… “Kenough,” but it still turns them into willing defenders of its status quo by identifying women as an acceptable target for the anger and pain of exclusion, by making those disenfranchised “beta” or “soy” (etc.) men still feel superior to someone as they’re being trod upon. All men get a bit of privilege (complicated by aspects such as race or class…) while a precious few make out like bandit kings as the wealth—monetary and concrete, spiritual and abstract—trickles ever upwards. This is a cage we all have to escape together. In the film, instituting patriarchy doesn’t ultimately make Ken happy. It just leads to him and the other Kens hurting each other since their non-stop, toxic, super-masculine posturing makes them jealous and easily manipulable. The “I’m Just Ken” song/sequence in the larger context of the film is very interesting in this regard, as it’s initially about Ken’s individual sense of inferiority set against the on-screen conflict between the Ken factions but then progresses to self- and group- affirmation (lyrically and visually) as the men resolve their differences. The ironic Thing is that “I’m just Ken, and I’m enough” and “My name’s ‘Ken,’ and so am I” sounds revelatory and uplifting, but it’s just them rallying unproductively again as a gender. (“Men” and “Ken” conveniently rhyme, and we see a “Ken Working” sign at one point, but it’s not just wordplay and is instead a synonym for all intents and purposes, in Barbie Land where every man is “Ken,” give or take Allan.) Not so much achieving any actual growth as just putting aside their Barbie-orchestrated feud. The true revelation is later, after their final defeat by the women which comes with the push to discover their individual identities, not simply as men or lovers of Barbies. In his climactic conversation with “Stereotypical Barbie,” Gosling’s Ken haltingly utters the inverse of “I’m just Ken”: “Ken… is… me?” The self emerging from the group, no longer settling for “just”… Of course, there are problems with this reading of the film: For one (gigantic) thing, as previously mentioned, the Kens still being second-class citizens in Barbie Land undermines any attempted messaging about mutually beneficial feminist liberation since the Kens are not freed, so we end up with a shallow Women Rule “funny” inversion of the real world instead. And you could argue that that’s all this is meant to be—simple catharsis, heavy-handed satire. Women get to have their complaints voiced on the big screen and then get to vicariously live in a matriarchy, before then leaving the theater to face the reverse of the inverse once more.

Another obvious question would be “Why is it okay for the Barbies (and, by extension, women in general) to rally around their gender identity but it isn’t okay for the men?” The thorny, real-world, answer is that only one of these groups has been able to parlay that shared identity into long-running, systemic oppression of other people. It’s why I put “men’s rights” in quotation marks before (and again, now)—The only ones denying men any so-called “rights” that matter are other men, in a system they still overwhelmingly control, but there’s this nasty implication behind the phrase that someone else (read: women) has been denying them some fundamental thing they’re owed (read: sex, and absolute fealty). Barbie ultimately perpetuating an unequal fantasy status quo as a mirror of the real-world inequality torpedoes any actual progressive messaging since it’s just doing the equivalent of sticking out its tongue and sneering that “Turnabout is fair play.” I’m not above savoring the kind of rage or panic this might instill in the more conspiratorial of pro-men ding-dongs by rendering their nightmare Red Pill Truth Matrix Rabbit Hole in loud, proud, high-quality, 114-minute detail. Yet it is kind of deeply depressing to me as a broadly disillusioned radical who knows better: this sense that we can’t actually change things and must instead settle for endlessly “Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider”-ing our way through adult life, and that has to be enough apparently, as far as Barbie is concerned! In a fantasy, I think we could do better, be more radical, actually finish the critique. It’s like a takedown of Disney/Pixar I saw in passing once: about how they may have a tendency to take fun, weird things like emotions or monsters and give them jobs. Even in our dream worlds, we can only imagine more capitalism—the same old hierarchies—with all the old limitations. We can only hope for our shackles to be a color of our choice and that we might be exploited using our preferred pronouns and without so many slurs…

Something else I have found myself thinking about that is adjacent to the gender stuff but also closely intertwined with the intrigue of the fantasy world is the “original sin” of Barbie. A key conceit is that because the living dolls and their inanimate doppelgangers in the human world are connected, one can potentially influence the other. (“Weird Barbie” was birthed by this process—a sentient being in another world brought into existence because human girls played too rough with their toys.) Gloria’s depressing Barbie designs and thoughts while playing with the dolls may have corrupted “Stereotypical Barbie,” kicking everything off, though the option is also left open that Barbie may have been somewhat responsible herself.

I was coincidentally reading Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938/1946) when I first watched Barbie, and I felt a certain… echo, particularly with what in the novella is called “the great Transgression of Preference.” In Rand’s dystopian society where individual achievement and identity are crimes, no one is meant to prefer a school subject or career or even a person over another. Characters are named for abstract concepts like “Equality” and “International” and “Liberty” followed by a number and a hyphen and four other numbers. Presumably, these numbers differentiate, say, one “Union” from another. The necessary differentiation required to tell one person from another is, however, rendered as impersonal and unappealing as possible. Sex is seemingly strictly procreative and ritualistically limited to specific occasions. This, of course, prevents preference and de-human-izes the populace. In much the same way, the society of Barbie Land is all sterile and equal (and sex-less). Everyone is one “Barbie” or “Ken” or the other (mostly), without even the number designations.

Any human-like differences (of race, hair color, fitness, etc.) are seemingly not acknowledged or even recognized, though “Weird Barbie” is a thing and the dolls are aware of their individual professions/branding. The Barbies and Kens may be paired off, but my impression on watching the film was that Gosling’s Ken’s obsession, pre-Ken takeover, with being the only Ken in his particular Barbie’s life is a sort of Transgression of Preference. He’s running too hot in a world of cool. He wants “real” love, but they’re supposed to only go through the motions of having social and romantic lives, breezily. Similarly, one Barbie isn’t meant to be better or worse than any other. They all do their various pre-assigned tasks and support one another as peers. There’s (broadly) no dissatisfaction with the roles they’ve been given or any deviation from them. It’s “Stereotypical Barbie’s” fear of death that starts to differentiate her in a cascading way: Her initial goal is to break the link with the real world that is corrupting her and to restore her sameness, but she ultimately comes to see herself as fundamentally different from and inferior to the other Barbies at her lowest point. There’s the sense in the end that neither this Barbie nor her Ken can fully return to who they used to be. Ken literally passes what amounts to his mantle of leadership to another Ken in the crowd; Barbie chooses to become human. In the Biblical sense, they’ve both acquired too much knowledge/experience to stay in what is supposed to be a paradise of ignorance. Similarly, the Rand novella’s protagonist Equality (one among many) and his lady, Liberty (among many), must ultimately leave the ostensibly civilized, ordered world for the scary, obviously symbolic forest. But it’s a “fortunate fall,” in both cases. In Barbie, the characters can presumably now grow into individuals separate from their restrictive branding as “Barbie and Ken.” Sort of like Rand’s “monster of ‘We,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.” (LOL!) What they need is “[t]his god, this one word: ‘I.’” Which Equality rediscovers in the wilderness and that solidifies his plan to rebuild a society of individuals. Rand’s critique, even early in the novella, is about as subtle as a brick through glass, and it doesn’t take much effort to see in this theoretical world without “preference” the creepy shadow of COMMUNISM, and eventually the plot just kind of… stops and she drops the act of pretending to try to tell a compelling story.

I’m not saying Barbie is problematic (read: “bad”) the exact way that Rand’s work can be, re. individualism and capitalism and so forth, though it would be kind of fitting given what I said before about the reasons the film fails at saying anything truly, meaningfully subversive. It is, I’ve argued, despite its protestations (or posturing?), pro-capitalism, in its omissions and/or concessions, as much or perhaps more than it is pro-woman, if I’m feeling spicy. This is a wildly coincidental connection with Rand, but also one more thing that I thought enhanced my viewing of the film and made me enjoy thinking and writing about it. Whatever I have to say quasi-academically about failed messaging, I enjoyed the performances and visuals and music and the fantasy world depicted. It’s the latter heavy-handed commitment to nonsense that I found most appealing during and after my first viewing. And that feeling has not changed now, on rewatch, and I would also be lying if I said Barbie’s surreal, emotional transformation into a human set to a Billie Eilish song didn’t Get Me, even on a second viewing. And how the profundity is strategically deflated by the mundanity (the vulgarity, even) of the last scene/joke about Barbie going to see a gynecologist, and how that hurls us straight into the profane Ice Spice/Nicki Minaj “Barbie World” rap over the credits. I still do not think this will stand the test of time as one of Greta Gerwig’s better projects on its own merits, but it is interesting as a blip in her larger career. It is perhaps—in and of its self-contained self and as a project undertaken in a world of the material—some level of idiosyncratic, fraught or even complicated or problematic. And this holistic… unevenness does also endear it to me personally, despite my critical and political misgivings…

One difficulty of being a progressive-minded person and/or ally that I won’t oversell is the interrogation that comes with mean-spirited humor, lest we produce something as problematic as what we’d otherwise oppose. What I had tried to hack together above, originally, was a visual critique of Ayn Rand’s Anthem which was in its roughness also a representation of my own awkwardly-melded discussion of the literature and the Barbie movie. So, what I wanted to communicate was the ugliness of the ideas (Rand’s and mine) using some of the design language of Barbie: namely distinctive font and colors. The end-result, however, could have been interpreted as me, of all people, insulting Rand’s physical appearance, so I decided not to use the image—but still wanted to use it since this essay “needs” more visuals and since I’d put in the work, despite being very dissatisfied with my inability to Windows Paint 3D reproduce the particular shade of blue from Barbie. It’s clearly turquoise instead in my image! So, in the end: Here’s my ironic, self-aware repurposing, also perhaps in the spirit of the film.

For what it’s worth, I also noticed that The Simpsons edit at the beginning of this piece could be read as transphobic since I’ve got a female figure declaring “I’m just Ken!” But I decided to take that risk since I felt that it also funnily, attractively communicates an important critique, if not an outright fact, of Barbie, the film: that Ken (a man) threatens to overshadow Barbie (a woman) in her movie which happens to have a layer of supposed feminism to it. As described above, this seeming conflict of messaging could have been potentially resolved by actually following through on the liberatory, radical stuff, but what we’re left with is something spiritually not so different from my Ayn Rand image but with men as the uncomplimentary figure. Our creator’s motives that led us both astray might not even have been so different as well.

And that was where I thought about leaving things, until an additional impression occurred to me: During Gosling’s big number, as the Kens are having their beach battle, we at one point cut to the Barbies and their allies observing from a distance. The planned distraction having worked, Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” says, “You know what I think? I think we should put our frickin’ Constitution back.” The line always bothered me, I vaguely thought because of some combination of the writing and delivery, but during the interval where this piece was initially written and I was letting it sit to work on other things, I started to realize that my reaction might have something to do with the real-world implications/associations of that line. One advantage of being “late” to movies like this, as opposed to just reviewing them when they’re hot, is getting to see how they age and how time might draw out additional aspects worth commenting on. In the case of Barbie, one might now question how it looks in a post-Joe Biden United States of America. Roe v. Wade was overturned the year before the movie released, a major step backward for abortion rights and which makes Barbie’s meat-and-potatoes-of-feminism angle feel more urgent, but we’re now also a few months into the second Trump administration, having watched, among other indignities, an unelected billionaire and his child army tear through federal agencies and departments, upending lives and livelihoods, with the threat of even more losses (of various sorts) to come. In the broadest possible sense, the usual Republican program of austerity and pocket-stuffing is underway, but this feels like acceleration and a smidge more apocalyptic, especially seeing as this isn’t just some other Republican president: It’s Donald Trump, who was “defeated” back in 2020 in what felt like a resounding Liberal repudiation of the (then) past four years. The unearned smugness of that victory is arguably what led straight to Trump 2, however, as Democrats (the party and its most hardheaded, hardline proponents) refused to, if nothing else, understand that Joe Biden was in no way capable of winning re-election. I’m not going to re-litigate the 2024 American presidential election—Don’t got the time nor knowledge!—but I think McKinnon’s smugness annoys me because of this extratextual awareness. Because God only knows what will be left of our real government, liberties, society, and lives (female or otherwise) when/if there’s ever a different president from a different party again.

A sentiment I’ve seen at least a couple times online in the past is that some things we take for granted, like libraries, only exist because they already did and that such a service in the interest of public good, rather than profit, could never be made from scratch again. It seems very likely given that (very valid, I feel) feeling that what we lose now may never be regained, at least not in our lifetimes. We cannot, in fact, “put our frickin’ Constitution back,” so to speak, and the line just feels so undeservedly self-congratulatory and extra audacious/implausible from here in the future of 2025. This 2023 film’s depiction of patriarchal oppression as easily defeated by flummoxing its representative himbos (the Kens and Ferrell’s character) is not so entertaining when you keep in mind their real-world counterparts and the harm they enact (not exclusively under Trump, mind—while Joe was asleep at the wheel, even, when he wasn’t actively steering us toward the rocks. Elsewhere in the world too!). The lack of real malice and killing intent is fun in isolation but has no instructive value or true weight, not so unlike Ferrera’s speech with its platitudes. If this movie was frustrating in its messaging before Trump 2, it feels especially galling now that it might become some sort of… relic of the… Before Times. Its easy-going smugness might make of it, in the even more distant future, a sort of Pussy-Hat Pink accidental “Ozymandias” in retrospect. Look uponst the ruin of the liberal capitalist dream of nominally equal exploitation and consumption! It died as it lived: smugly and stupidly!

I do actually ask myself if I’m not coming across as too mad about The Stupid Toy Movie, that I actually “like,” even as just a thought exercise, but I think there’s something about the half-measure of its messaging that gets under my skin (got under it, when these ideas were fresh and I hadn’t re-read them to death). I know that the politics of a “feminist” Barbie movie could never be anything more than milquetoast, but the temerity of suggesting otherwise (and, yes, the thought that other people could see it that way, as either a positive or negative) really pisses me off. And not just because I’m a pretentious bore. Rath-er, at a time when we hear rumors about even the at one point progressive softball of environmentalist messaging in a kids’ movie being treated as a risk while the real world heats up in more ways than one, our collective circumstances feel more desperate than ever, and I’ve long run out of patience for capitalism’s self-congratulatory, pandering “critique” of itself, and of pointless rhetorical victories, which is why I spent so much time on this post, which will most assuredly move the needle on the pressure gauge of our world not one solitary micrometer southward of EXPLOSION IMMINENT.