Or, Feminism is Plastic, So Fantastic

Okay first off, Hari Nef is super pretty and I am jealous.

With that out of the way, I recently saw the new popular movie (And no, I’m not doing the Barbenheimer, unless my friends invite me and we grab dinner too). I think people maligning the movie for being funded and produced by a capitalist company under capitalism are not wrong, that is an accurate description of the movie and its context but it’s like, super ultra pro max paranoid reading and I think coming at it with a reparative lens is Cooler.

Recapping Rapidly – Reparative Readings

So yes, the tl;dr is that Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick saw traditional media criticism as built on paranoia and suspicion, searching for reasons to tear art down rather than consider art as something to enjoy and find the good in. To this end, taking a reparative lens and finding its potential for social change, for innovation is the inverse and potentially more productive. In one word, it’s love (of art). So there you go, reparative reading recapped rapidly.

Barbie: Into the Barbie-Land

Let’s start with a summary of the story of the film. Spoilers ahead, duh.

The movie starts off with a girls playing with dolls version of the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey which is pretty funny, then cuts to the perfect world of Barbie-Land and a musical number that does not mean this movie is or intends to be a musical, despite Ryan Gosling’s presence perhaps suggesting otherwise. We learn that the Barbie-land is essentially a matriarchy with every position of power being a woman. There are men, but “it’s always girl’s night, every night. forever”.

But then, shock! horror! Barbie starts to have thoughts of death, her feet go flat (and of course we need copious footage of Margot Robbie’s feet), and she gets cellulite! This sparks a trip to Weird Barbie (who’s fuckin based) who says “ah yes you must go to the real world and fix this”. So Barbie, with Ken as a stowaway, head to the Real World through a pretty funny montage of switching between different vehicles and outfits until they end up in LA, because America! Fuck Yeah!

In the real world, Barbie finds the mother-daughter duo who owns her in the real world, the Mattel CEO finds out Barbie made it to the real world and tries to catch her, and Ken gets redpilled (which is the funniest shit ever, thanks to Gosling playing it so well). Ken heads back first, then Barbie takes the mother-daughter duo back with her to the perfect matriarchal world… or so she thought! Ken shares the redpilling with the other Kens and Barbie wants to give up when she sees everyone brainwashed into supporting a patriarchy (like the real world questionmark), which means mother-daughter duo need to wake her up and save da world.

And now we enter the final act, where Weird Barbie, Barbie, and the mother-daughter duo start deprogramming the barbies by… telling them that womanhood is contradictory. They slowly bring back everyone then “win” by breaking the Kens’ fragile redpilled egos and voting to take back Barbie-land. Then there’s some stuff about Barbie becoming a real woman by talking to the Barbie creator in a weird scene but we’re gonna just pretend it ended with everyone figuring out that patriarchy AND matriarchy are bad.

Wait, hierarchical societies based around gender… bad??

The main criticism is that the feminist ideology of the film isn’t anything more than a façade to hide Mattel’s crimes. And uh, babe we’re in capitalism, there isn’t any company that’s ethical. That’s kinda maybe a major issue with the amoral system predicated on ever-increasing profits. We can’t opt out of Society™️, but we can try and find the good wherever it’s hiding.

And in Barbie (2023), it’s not hiding very hard hey? The main premise of the story is that the patriarchy of the real world is a contradictory mess, shoved onto people and doesn’t even actually benefit all men, as we learn from Ken talking to the business dude, but matriarchy then marginalises men and has the same issues at the end of the day, with the resolution being that men get some more positions in the running of Barbie-land. Unless you’re a TERF or other flavour of RF, this is a good message to send – we don’t need to reverse the roles in society, because the hierarchy priviliging one gender above another is the problem. I think it’s evident that this was thought about by Greta Gerwig, the writer and director of the film, because of the multiple callbacks to The Matrix, a movie created by two trans women that questions the way things are. And Gerwig gets it in her homage to the blue pill/red pill scene, where Weird Barbie literally says “there is no choice, you have to want to know the truth”. Lana Wachowski spells this out in Matrix: Resurrections with her own callback to that famous scene, so either Gerwig’s watched M:R or she understood the meaning behind the choice in the first film. Also the fact that Gerwig wrote in the office scene and the oracle scene in a Barbie-fied version is pretty neat and shows that she’s at least watched the OG matrix.

Another key piece of feminism in the movie is with the deprogramming stuff near the end, where the mother of the mother-daughter duo manages to wake up one of the barbies by just going on a big rant about how contradictory the patriarchal demands on womanhood really are. Guiding people to question why gender is like that is a net positive, not everyone is steeped in the Butlers and hooks of the world and understands the functioning of patriarchy on that intimate level. It doesn’t need to go deeper, it just needs to get people questioning whether the way things are is the way things should be. Heck, the fact that Bent Sharpie and friends are making such a fuss over it is maybe not the most concrete proof, but it’s an indicator that at least there are themes here that are dangerous to those who wish to uphold the patriarchy.

The part where we all go into the white light

Barbie is not perfect, it’s not The Most Feminist Movie of All Time. But it’s a big-budget film that just casually has a trans woman on-screen, talking, and doesn’t make her the butt of any jokes!! It openly and unavoidably has feminist themes!! It’s actually an enjoyable film!! Letting perfect be the enemy of good, the enemy of starting a conversation that needs to be had, is so fucking online leftist it hurts. As I’ve said before elsewhere, too many leftists take the bad parts of Christianity into their weltanschauung while dismissing the actual good bit. Stop pulling in the purity testing, and bring in the love. Being human is pain and joy and sadness and love and loss and so many things, and yet we still choose to continue on, to continue being human.

And yeah I guess Barbie chooses to be human too.