Teacup Kingdom

For many women, Barbie is little more than a symbol of misogyny and impossible beauty standards. An insidious reminder to little girls everywhere that their looks will always be more important than their intellect. 

Director Greta Gerwig was given an almost impossible task in making this film – a glass cliff, as they call it in the corporate world. To rehabilitate Barbie’s image for a feminist audience, while acknowledging the doll’s problematic past. Yet she has negotiated this precarious tightrope without toppling over the edge, performing a feat almost unheard of – a billion dollar phenomenon that is also critically acclaimed.

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Selling Matriarchal Dreams 

The film starts by showing life in Barbieland, where the dolls live alone in their own houses and hold all the top jobs in the land – President, Judge, Astronaut etc. Men, or Kens, live in this world of Barbies (but no one knows where) and hold no power professionally or domestically. 

Anyone who has played with Barbies knows there is rarely a Ken on the scene, and very few girls would even own a Ken doll. For many years, Mattel attested that their relationship was purely platonic, too. His superfluity is a running joke, hence the film’s tagline ‘Barbie is everything, he’s just Ken.’

We start to see that in a way, Barbie is a feminist icon. She can have any career she wants, and gets to the top. She has no domestic responsibilities for children or men. Female friendship and community are her main focus, while Kens are an afterthought left on the sidelines. 

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Who Runs The World?

You might almost find yourself thinking – a world run by one gender, what a crazy idea! But Gerwig says wake up sheeple, this is already happening. Disturbed by sudden thoughts of death and cellulite, Barbie accidentally triggers a portal into the ‘real world’. Barbie (and Ken) discover the Patriarchy, where men have all the top jobs and hold all the power. Sadly, the dreams Barbie sold to us were never real. Even Barbie’s parent company Mattel has only had three female CEOs in its nearly 80-year history – perhaps they faced glass cliffs of their own?

As Barbie looks for the source of her discontent, a high schooler tells her that she has achieved nothing for women today and even held the feminist movement back.

‘Men hate women and women hate women – it’s the one thing we can all agree on.’ 

While Barbie is horrified, Ken can’t wait to bring Patriarchy to Barbieland and quickly gets to work reversing the world order.  Barbie’s Dream House is now Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, a Western style saloon crossed with a children’s gaming arcade. Horses are everywhere too, as simple-minded Ken is endearingly confused about their role in the patriarchal system. 

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What Was She Made For?

So far the film has exceeded expectations in its subversive questioning of the misogyny Barbie has come to represent. Gerwig struggles to deliver a satisfying ending however, leaving us with some mixed messages.

Barbie has reclaimed Barbieland, telling Ken that he needs to focus on himself (because she doesn’t need him financially or emotionally). But for some inexplicable reason, Barbie then decides she wants to leave Barbieland to be a real woman in the real world. 

In a somewhat drawn out epiphany scene, a dreamy montage shows what seems to be a romanticised mother-daughter relationship. Billie Eilish’s haunting What Was I Made For? swells in the background. Then in the last scene, Barbie arrives back in the real world, and her first order of business is.. a trip to the gynaecologist. 

For all her career aspirations, rejection of men and domestic servitude, is Barbie’s final goal actually motherhood? Maybe that’s the joke. After all, it’s the one job she hasn’t tried yet.