I dare to delve into “Barbie.” A round-up of other takes on the film. Some links on industrial policy, the managerial project, and the relationship between authoritarianism and philosophy.
Last week, I finally got to see Greta Gerwig’s new film, Barbie. Even though it was a 9:30 at night screening on a Thursday, there was still a small crowd in the theater (including a cluster of kids all under 10).
Barbie seems a quintessential example of a “scissor statement,” a term popularized by Scott Alexander for things that deeply divide people but also seem absolutely true to those on each side of the division. So it is a paragon of feminist filmmaking—or an incisive deconstruction of those themes. It embodies “wokeness”—or fundamentally undermines it.
Making sense of these opposed reactions requires thinking about the role of Barbie Land (the home of the Barbies) in the film. Barbie Land seems at first to fit neatly into contemporary cultural wars, but the greater arc of the film is about leaving Barbie Land behind. At its base, Barbie tells the story of a doll becoming human—more than feminism or gender relations, it’s about what defines humanity and our fears about being human.
Barbie Land is a world of plastic people and plastic thinking (that is, ideology). So everything is distorted in it. It starts as a stereotypical feminist utopia. From the presidency on down, women run everything and have absolutely no need of men. Every woman is strong, confident, and stylish. Of course, the residents of Barbie Land believe that they have rectified everything in the “real world.”
The thought of death causes a crack in this plastic façade for one Barbie (called “Stereotypical Barbie,” but whom I’ll call “Barbie” here). Her feet go flat, and she starts to develop cellulite. To escape that horrible fate, she has to go to the Real World to find her owner. This person ends up being a Mattel employee named Gloria, the mother of Sasha (a “woke” and somewhat alienated tween). Ken follows. Mattel wants to get her back to Barbie Land. Hijinks ensue.
Also of course, when both Barbie and Ken go to the real world, they see everything with plastic eyes—at least at first. If Barbie Land was the home of the empowered woman, the Real World is just as obviously the place of the patriarchy, where men have absolute rule. The film itself subtly undermines this claim of the patriarchy by having a woman doctor block Ken’s attempt to perform an appendectomy. But the not-too-observant Ken is oblivious to this detail.
With its combination of bro solidarity and objectification of women, Ken’s own attempt to form a patriarchy in Barbie Land is a satire of both “manosphere” and gender-theorist stereotypes of men. Ken’s obsession with horses is a send-up of the feminist trope that the legacy of the cowboy has somehow distorted American masculinity. And the insurgency effort to take back Barbie Land luxuriates in and pokes fun at the talking points of Internet feminism circa 2015. Have you heard about this thing called “mansplaining”?
The plastic nature of Barbie Land means that it is stuck in stereotypical binaries and remains fundamentally shallow. This shallowness also affects the portrayal of the Real World (at least as it intersects with the natives of Barbie Land) in the middle of the film. The all-male Mattel executive team—stripped of names and wearing anonymous blue suits—that tries to recapture Barbie is simultaneously a feminist satire of male corporate culture and a satire of that feminist satire. It is just too on the nose. When Sasha tears into Barbie as responsible for so many women’s psychological problems and as essentially a “fascist,” it’s hard not to imagine that the film is winking at us, at least a little; “social justice” rhetoric in the Real World can be just as reductive as the bromides of Barbie Land.
Yet Barbie also has glimpses of reality. Sitting at a bus stop, she starts to open herself to life. She sees hints of the fragility of life as well as children (the great abomination of Barbie Land). A tear runs down her face. This is sorrow, but a good kind—the fruit of being awake.
A line from Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, near the end of the movie reveals the way this film uses the tropes of cultural controversies to show the ultimate insufficiency of those controversies. She tells Barbie that to cope with the painful complexities of life people invent things like “patriarchy and Barbie.” The idea that the patriarchy was invented to help men deal with their own insecurities is vintage feminism, seen in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and elsewhere. But that’s not the only way of reading this line: The invention of the concept of patriarchy as a catch-all for what’s wrong with the world might itself be a way of trying to escape from the deeper demands of life. It’s the patriarchy, folx—that’s why we’re so miserable. Life under capitalism is just so awful. And the glib use of those ideological terms may be just like the mass-produced Barbie—distractions from, and distortions of, the mottled truths at the heart of our existence.
In reality, a deep source of pain is our own human condition. And the paradox of life is that the openness to pain is intertwined with great potential for joy. Barbie Land is fundamentally childish and childless. There’s no heartbreak, but also no love. Ideology tells us that in this life we can somehow have the joys of the human condition without the sorrows. But reality is otherwise.
In the end, Barbie chooses reality. When Ruth gives her a taste of what real life means, the screen is flooded with footage of family and children (some of which comes from home movies of the actors themselves). Parenthood requires the collaboration of both sexes. None of the iterations of gender relations in Barbie Land work. They are sterile, stripped of the erotic, and essentially diminished. In the plastic world, there can be no “right” ordering of the genders. Instead, building real relationships between men and women demands leaving that world behind.
There’s a bigger historical legacy for this argument. Gerwig’s last film was an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and the major American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller was a friend of the Alcott family. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller argued that empowering women also worked to the advantage of men; the complementary nature of sexes meant that they either flourished or withered together.
These scenes of children are also the complement to the contemplation of death that helps draw Barbie out of Barbie Land in the first place. Few things awaken us to our own mortality as much as children do. Raising a child, you nurture a being who (you devoutly hope) will outlast you on this earth. Hitting one “milestone” after the next, a child reminds you of how fleeting life is. A mother herself, Greta Gerwig no doubt knows what nearly all parents know: that parenthood has moments of sublime agony and profound joy. The sweetness of this mortal life is intermixed with its sorrow.
In the final scene of the film, Barbie has become Barbara Handler and goes to the gynecologist. She chooses the radical vulnerability of life in order to accept its deep wonder. Becoming human means death—and love—and children. It means complexity, imperfection, and agency.
The real thing for Barbie to escape is not cellulite or the patriarchy but the plastic mode of being.
In the spirit of this newsletter’s title, here are some other Barbie takes:
Kay Hymowitz reflects on the role of irony for the film.
Jack Butler argues that Barbie is fundamentally esoteric: “Plato had a city in speech; Gerwig has given us a city in plastic.”
Luana Marques on Barbie and cognitive dissonance.
Ross Douthat investigates some of the tensions of the film: “Amid all their conflicts, how can men and women reunite?”
Grace Segers: At Barbie’s “core it is a coming of age story, a bildungsroman in shades of pink.”
James Duesterberg on Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Related: My three-minute CenterClip on Oppenheimer.
And some other links:
Reka Juhasz, Nathan J. Lane, and Dani Rodrik have a new survey of contemporary approaches to industrial policy. I haven’t gotten a chance to dig into it yet, but it looks interesting.
Michael Strain raises doubts about industrial policy.
Brad Setser thinks that industrial policy can sometimes work.
The Economist on the economic interconnections of the USA and the PRC: “Yet despite extensive efforts, and the reshaping of trade seemingly evident in headline statistics, much of the apparent de-risking is not what it appears.”
Javier Milei came in first in Argentina’s presidential primary. In 2022, Nick Burns profiled the political upstart.
What happened to the Tories? John O’Sullivan has some thoughts.
A mammoth post by N.S. Lyons on the tensions between managerialism and democratic self-governance. The middle features a discussion of how psychology was used in the post-World War II era as a weapon in the culture wars: “Before the war was even over, the US government began to fund and facilitate a new wave of psychological research, guided by refugee European psychoanalysts. The War Department, for instance, conducted studies on discharged soldiers, outsourcing this research to psychanalysts who blamed psychological breakdowns in combat not on acute stress but on the repressions of their conservative childhood family life. By far the most influential work, however, would be conducted by the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno, who produced a new model for psychological assessment called the ‘F-Scale’ (the F stands for Fascist).”
Via Wisdom of Crowds, David Polansky reflects on the stakes of philosophy for despotism: “Philosophy is always a threat to authoritarian regimes because philosophy is about interrogating first principles.”
Sohrab Ahmari joins The Realignment to discuss his new book, Tyranny, Inc.
Alexandra DeSanctis on the renewal of classical education.
Thanks for reading! I thought doing a more culture-oriented issue could be a nice bit of variety for this newsletter. If you’re interested in keeping up with this experiment, please subscribe.