Far, far later than intended, I finally saw Barbie. It’s always really annoying to see a cultural touchstone movie months after everyone else, because it means it was impossible for me to form my opinion in a vacuum as I prefer. Obviously it touched some nerves and was important, but it bugs me that now my review has to at least in part be about that, instead of solely about what I thought of the movie independently.

Oh well.

So it’s like this. A bunch of people named Barbie, a smaller but still significant number of people named Ken, a few people named Skipper, and one or two other folks all live in Barbieland, where Barbie is capable of doing anything and certainly does. But when generic Margot Robbie Barbie[1] starts to have weird feelings about death, she learns that the only way to keep her perfect life is to travel to The Real World[2] and meet up with the girl who owns her-as-a-doll to get that girl back into a good headspace. But when Ken[3] decides to tag along, the movie veers in wildly unpredictable directions, and soon the fates of both Barbieland and the real world are at stake.

Alright, I guess everything past here (and the footnotes I will leave above the break) are spoilers. Because you simply cannot talk about this movie without spoiling it. There would be no point.

[1] ie not an astronaut not a president not a McDonald’s employee, just Barbie
[2] There’s a map and everything. I remember people making a stink about the way the brief blip of a kid’s map of the earth was drawn because it betrayed some kind of woke agenda, and I just… I suppose I was going to have to deal with months of baggage about this movie in my review if I had watched it on opening day, wasn’t I?
[3] who the movie helpfully tells us in the first five minutes lives only for the brief moments when Barbie’s gaze falls upon him

Alright, here come the spoilers. Last chance to turn away!

I was prepared to be unhappy with this movie, because of the possibility of Ken being portrayed as purely villainous. And I don’t mean that in a “not all men” kind of way, because obviously there are tons of people who would do exactly what he did with purely ill intent. And of course the patriarchy is apparently (and actually?) great news for him in general and especially in this specific situation.

But here’s what the movie shied away from fully embracing, even though it acknowledged that Barbie had perpetrated some harm upon him: Ken was not behaving like a men’s right advocate who believed he deserved Barbie and since she wouldn’t give herself over, he was going to tear down the world. No, wait, I’m wrong, he absolutely was acting like that. But he had the exceptionally good excuse that he was literally made to be Barbie’s boyfriend. Is it great that Barbie can be anything she wants to be and doesn’t need Ken? It is so great. Is it great that Ken is now left behind with no purpose except to exist for someone who has better things going on? I would posit that it is not.

And so the problem I have, in a nutshell, is one that I don’t know how Greta Gerwig was supposed to solve differently. The villain of the piece is the millennia of deeply entrenched patriarchy affecting the real world and now leaking into Barbieland. And the movie does a great job of showing the damage it does to women, and the expectations placed upon women, with a conciseness cannot be overstated. A+ job. But by putting Ken in the role of a reverse Prometheus, bringing darkness into a world full of light, she harms the message she is bringing across.

But then again, it wasn’t really a world full of light in the first place, was it? If you want to argue that Barbie (the toy) isn’t the right place to bring complete equity, because the importance of giving girls an outlet to believe in their ability to accomplish literally anything is the overriding factor, I will nod and raise a glass and toast you back with a hearty “fuck yeah!” But somewhere, sometime, we need to make our way to a place where everyone truly is Kenough. Will the Barbieland of the future of that movie be that place? I mean, it won’t, because Barbies will always be for girls, from a motivational standpoint. Will our world be that place? Not while the victims of the patriarchy, whether male or female, are cast as the villain. And then there’s all the other “X is better than Y” that we humans need to get over ourselves about.

In conclusion, we have a long way to go.

All that said: it’s a great movie! It’s hilarious, has maybe the best final line a movie has ever had, and I will bet you quite a bit that it’s better than Oppenheimer, over the long term especially. Maybe the acting wasn’t better, maybe even the directing wasn’t better, but the script and movie as a movie? Come on, she was robbed.

I won’t be arguing (in dialogue, to be clear, not in rejection) with the thesis of Oppenheimer for weeks or months after I watch it, if indeed I ever do watch it. Whereas I was always going to see Barbie, even if it took way too long before I did, and that Socratic dialogue with it is going to bounce around in my head for, yep, quite some time.