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Spoiler Alert: This text incorporates spoilers for the Barbie film.
Observe the Juicy Subtext
Greta Gerwig checks all of the bins wanted to earn a California liberal’s endorsement of Barbie: a various solid which features a black girl President and a trans girl (with out fanfare and as a matter in fact); an ironic critique of Barbie as a software of capitalist consumerism and sexist stereotypes; the defeat of the Massive Unhealthy Patriarchy which proves to be not a lot evil as inept and immature; and a climactic feminist protest of sheer exasperation that made many a white-collar working mom attain for the tissues. Gerwig proved her liberal bona fides, and plenty of conservatives have pegged Barbie as a piece of misandry, Woke eye sweet, and LibFem agitprop.
However all of this in-your-face signaling of Hollywood dogma can simply obscure a way more attention-grabbing and subversive that means (and no, speaking about “the patriarchy” isn’t subversive anymore, it’s the brand new orthodoxy). Relating to woman speak—and Barbie is nothing if not nostalgic woman speak—there’s textual content and there’s subtext. Subtext is the place the actual motion is: we girls are masters of claiming one factor whereas that means an entire lot extra. Beneath Barbie’s scorching pink textual content of (a reasonably drained) third-wave feminism, there’s a juicy subtext that values feminine embodied expertise—a Pinocchio-like story wherein a plastic doll turns into an actual girl. Barbie not solely embraces cellulite, learns to cry, smiles at previous age, and accepts the truth of loss of life: she will get a vagina. Sorrow and a sexed physique go hand in hand for “Barbara” (as she is later christened), when she turns into in actual life the grownup human feminine daughter of Ruth Handler, the maker of the primary Barbie Doll.
The film begins with a scene of little women dashing their child dolls’ heads to smithereens upon a rock in favor of the glowing promise of Barbie, however it ends with Barbara heading breathlessly to the gynecologist’s workplace for a primary examination of her sexual and reproductive organs—now not sterile plastic however stuffed with procreative potential. Barbie has wearied of infinite women’ nights in Femtopia and decides {that a} imaginative and prescient of a fleshy life, with all of its inherent struggling, is definitely what she is made for. She is now not content material to exist as a completely high-heeled simulacrum.
Barbie is a plastic doll that holds all of the projections and goals of girlhood about womanhood. . . . What Barbie most decidedly is not (till the ultimate scene) is an avatar of intercourse.
If the ultimate scene proves the theme, then plastic is passé and actual feminine anatomy with its maternal potential seems promising (with Barbara now in Birkenstocks in fact, as a result of she’s bought each ft solidly on the bottom). What would these little women of the opening sequence assume if they may see Barbie now? Each woman who as soon as wished she could possibly be Barbie in all of her superb, accessorized perfection can be shocked to be taught that Barbie desires to be similar to you. Or reasonably, similar to your mother.
Barbie’s Finest Joke
Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives in Barbieland, a seeming utopia of bottomless wardrobes, girlboss careers, seaside days, women’ nights, a authorities of, by, and for The Women, and a cadre of superfluous Kens. However when Barbie’s dream life is disturbed by ideas of loss of life, the legal guidelines of physics, and indicators of getting older, she visits Bizarre Barbie (Kate McKinnon) within the hopes of discovering aid and steerage.
As an alternative, she is obtainable the selection between going again to her common life or studying the reality concerning the universe by coming into “the Actual World.” She instantly picks the life she is aware of, the paradise of the puella aeterna. “No, let’s do a redo,” Bizarre Barbie insists, like several good mom would to a scared daughter. “You have to need to know, okay? Do it once more.” And so, Barbie’s altering physique—with its bumbling flat ft and rising gravity—drags her ahead into her personal heroine’s journey. “You’re gonna begin getting unhappy and mushy and complex,” Bizarre Barbie warns her (in a reasonably first rate description of feminine puberty). So Barbie drives her pink Corvette off into the sundown with a codependent Ken (Ryan Gosling) hiding within the backseat.
Everybody is aware of that the perfect grown-up joke about Barbie and Ken is that they don’t have any genitals, only a formless and functionless plastic hump between their legs. The Barbie film takes this joke and runs with it (or reasonably, rollerblades with it) in one among its smartest scenes. Barbie and Ken have entered the Actual World and are skating their manner down Venice Seashore when a gaggle of male building employees begins cat-calling. With a straight face, Barbie tells them that she doesn’t have a vagina and Ken doesn’t have a penis—clearly assuming that after the lads notice they’re genital-free, the harassment will cease, as a result of sexlessness means you’re secure (proper?).
Women’ Worst Nightmare
It’s unimaginable on this present second to see this scene wherein Barbie is sexually harassed verbally and bodily and never acknowledge in it the tempting escape hatch from femaleness exemplified within the transgender medicalization of tween and teenage women. We will’t say what was going by way of Gerwig’s thoughts when she wrote that scene, however we positive know the way it landed. Based on gender researcher Eliza Mondegreen, “If you’re feminine, you reside your complete life within the shadow of your reproductive potentiality,” a potentiality which comes with a set of vulnerabilities—not solely to male harassment and sexual violence, however to the rise in adverse emotion related to pubertal maturation, and to the dangers of being pregnant and the dependency concerned in childbearing.
“You possibly can’t damage me—I’m not actually a lady even in case you assume I appear like one,” is a Barbie-like fantasy that some younger girls are understandably drawn to. “I used to be so validated at first after I turned mutilated, and boys and males stopped touching me,” writes Prisha, a younger lesbian with a historical past of sexual abuse and a number of psychological well being issues who deeply regrets her transition and feels betrayed by her healthcare suppliers who facilitated the fantasy escape. Changing into a boy or a person isn’t a real choice for a lady feeling sexually threatened, insufficient to the calls for of maturation, objectified by our porn-saturated tradition, or uncomfortable along with her sexual orientation.
Such a lady can try and de-sex herself, to un-woman herself, to alter her outfits and hair and equipment, to surgically take away her breasts, to develop some facial hair, to look a bit extra like Ken and rather less like Barbie, however it’s nonetheless taking part in a expensive recreation of dress-up as an alternative of rising up into a actuality that generally hurts. When a lady grows up, she stops taking part in with dolls—she doesn’t make herself into one, and the adults chargeable for her ought to belief their instincts and shield her from self-harm.
Barbie Is an Concept, However Barbara Is a Girl
Barbie is a plastic doll that holds all of the projections and goals of girlhood about womanhood. She is an idea, an imagined stereotype of intercourse, fairly actually dubbed “Stereotypical Barbie.” She isn’t a person (every doll has the identical title) however reasonably an iteration on a desexualized (however nonetheless female) gender ultimate. Barbie’s femininity is each without end and trendy—she’s all the time fairly, however her profession goals are all the time shattering the most recent glass ceiling. Barbie is thus whoever we want her to be; she’s a dependable and aspirational avatar of gender (intercourse distinction in tradition), created lengthy earlier than academia reformulated gender as a aspect of non-public identification and social media insisted everybody underneath thirty choose a gender and an identical set of pronouns.
What Barbie most decidedly is not (till the ultimate scene) is an avatar of intercourse. Intercourse means genitals, genitals imply era, and era occurs as a result of we as people die, whereas Life carries on. There’s a straight line from intercourse and procreation to mortality—from beginning to loss of life. Intercourse additionally means particularity and individuality: this actual girl has these particular genes, which she bought from her dad and mom who had intercourse and conceived her, as did their dad and mom, and on and on again by way of an entire household tree of specific pairs of women and men. Intercourse is generative, and it embeds individuals in a family tree, in a time and a spot.
However “gender,” as it’s so typically used immediately, loosely and nigh-indefinably, floats far above all these fleshy and time-bound limitations. “Gender” is unmoored from intercourse, a pure idea to be performed with in Barbieland by women too younger to think about precise sexual activity, and performed with on Tumblr by just-barely-sexually-awakened women too sickened by early porn publicity to think about womanhood as a cheerful ending. What higher technique to fend off existential dread and the calls for of maturation than to dam the event of these pesky intercourse organs with a lifetime of their very own, all the time threatening to power you into an identification that’s not an thought however a really fleshy truth?
“People solely have one type of ending, however concepts reside without end.” The trailer highlights this line from the movie as if it was apparent that Barbie would select to stay an everlasting thought within the minds of little women and the ladies they develop into. However that’s not what the film itself reveals. Barbie chooses the human ending: sexual maturity, adopted by getting older and loss of life. The Barbie film is the reverse of that Salvador Dali-esque portrait of the un-woman above. She begins out as a neutered, plastic, non-sexed female stereotype that’s purely conceptual, and by the top she features actual functioning feminine genitalia.
The film symbolizes this transformation by exhibiting that Barbie’s unique existence is dry and lacks the “water of life.” In Barbieland, the ocean is faux, the cups and milk cartons are empty, no water comes out of the bathe, and Barbie by no means cries. However Barbie will get more and more “juicy” because the story progresses. She spills water on herself, learns to drink tea, learns to cry (“First I bought one tear after which I bought an entire bunch.”), and she or he ultimately accepts the entire interior wet-works of embodied womanhood.
What some younger girls in our tradition are fleeing from, Barbie consciously chooses to step into, with tears, with no illusions, and with an acceptance of her personal mortality. As an alternative of a flight from being feminine, as an alternative of a rejection of the physique, Barbie says “sure” to actual life that’s sexed, all the way in which down. That’s why Barbie turns into “Barbara,” a selected particular person girl as an alternative of an idea. That’s why she will get a final title, “Handler,” inserting her in a household tree with dad and mom. That’s why she will get a vagina and a uterus, as she enters the stream of moms previous to her, embracing her personal maternal potential.
Barbara’s selection turns into apparent within the film’s mic drop remaining second: “I’m right here to see my gynecologist.”
However Barbie was solely capable of stroll into this concrete embodied womanhood with the assistance of three mom figures. For a doll that seems to “have all of it,” the one factor she lacks is a mom, somebody to information her out of her static immaturity and right into a altering future.
Fairly Uncomfortable, and But Marvelous
The primary mom determine Stereotypical Barbie encounters is Bizarre Barbie, who principally forces her out into the Actual World despite the fact that she’s anxious about it. When Barbie begins to really feel overwhelmed by rejection and confusion, she encounters an previous girl on a park bench. Gerwig considers this temporary scene between them to be the guts of the film: when the powers that be requested her to chop it, she stated, “If I reduce the scene, I don’t know what this film is about.” A tearful Barbie sees an aged girl for the primary time in her life (since everybody in Barbieland is without end younger). Surprisingly, she’s not horrified by previous age or afraid of it. “You’re stunning,” Barbie gasps with gentleness and tears, because the previous girl laughs, “I do know it.”
She is previous and joyful, which suggests she is sensible, which suggests she has cultivated advantage. Barbie is given a imaginative and prescient of a womanly future that’s self-accepting with out being self-consumed, that’s stunning with wrinkles and grey hair and sagging pores and skin, reasonably than “stunning” by way of Botox, cosmetic surgery, and hair dye (which is the Barbiefication of actual girls). Having been pushed into the Actual World by Bizarre Barbie’s insistence, she’s now lured additional in by seeing up-close the fruits of the human life cycle and discovering it (discovering her) pretty in any case.
Barbie finds her most transformative mom determine within the Mattel constructing as she’s fleeing male executives keen to place her again into her field. She stumbles throughout a room—a comfy kitchen—wherein the ghost of the unique Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), resides. Ruth offers Barbie a cup of tea, a listening ear, and good recommendation. “Being a human will be fairly uncomfortable,” Ruth says with a wrinkly and realizing smile, “and isn’t that marvelous?”
Ruth reappears close to the movie’s shut, to supply Barbie as soon as once more the selection between fantasy and actuality, between plastic and flesh, between childhood and maturity, between innocence and sexual information. Ruth says, “take my fingers, shut your eyes, now really feel.” She offers Barbie a imaginative and prescient of what it’s to be human: it’s all about relationships, with girls, with males, together with your kids. It’s residing, laughing, taking part in, crying. It’s household and mates and getting older and, ultimately, loss of life. It’s feeling—however not feeling as self-directed, identitarian, hopelessly politicized navel-gazing: it’s feeling as an embodied, relational existence. The pains are actual however so are the thrill. Barbara’s selection turns into apparent within the film’s mic drop remaining second: “I’m right here to see my gynecologist.”
Scorching Advantage: The Which means of the Pleasure and Prejudice Easter Egg
Whereas a lot of the film’s romantic stress surrounds Barbie and Ken as “Boyfriend-Girlfriend,” we predict the film nods to the truth of what the overwhelming majority of girls actually need by flashing a scene from the 1995 BBC model of Pleasure and Prejudice (starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle) onto the display screen because the characters think about what an “Atypical Barbie” is likely to be like. Amongst different hilarious dolls within the new line-up, there’s “Chronically Depressed Barbie,” who not solely cries on a regular basis, however stays in mattress watching Pleasure and Prejudice on repeat. This thirty-second Easter Egg is loaded with that means: it’s a large flag planted within the title of heterosexual marriage, the perfect mate-choice state of affairs, wherein a girl is wooed and gained into marriage and sexual union within the context of admiration, loyalty, love, and sacrificial devotion. It’s a narrative of “scorching advantage,” wherein a mutual confession of sin (his pleasure and her prejudice) precedes a mutual confession of affection. It’s advantage because the prerequisite for intimacy.
Barbie’s incarnational message exhibits the goodness of being feminine and the great thing about rising previous.
We count on that the majority girls within the theater watching with us have seen Pleasure and Prejudice sooner or later, maybe a number of instances (we actually have)—and never out of despair however out of want and delight. That temporary clip was shorthand for conventional “heteronormativity” (cue mass Barbie gag for the coining of this pointless phrase), which has develop into more and more suspect in a tradition desperate to affirm kinks of every kind and anxious that marriage perpetuates feminine oppression. Barbie thus nods to the Prince Charming story that little women love, and that the majority girls nonetheless love too, despite the fact that third-wave feminism scolds us for being so “backwards.”
And as a lot as we have been initially hoping that Barbie and Ken may find yourself collectively, it’s clear why Barbie has to depart him behind: she desires to be an actual girl with all of the components, whereas Ken—although “Kenough” on his personal—is merely a toy. He nonetheless acts like a bit boy and lacks (ahem) manhood. Whereas Ken is cute, he’s neither virtuous nor scorching. Ladies don’t need to be the Lengthy Time period, Lengthy Distance, Low Dedication, Informal Girlfriend of a Ken. Most actual girls would reasonably be the spouse of an actual man.
Grey Is the New Pink
We realized within the automobile on our manner house from the theater that the Barbie film is one big center finger to transhumanism. It’s about how it’s so significantly better to have sexual want and sexual operate than the alternative, regardless of the prices. Barbie reveals that intercourse isn’t an thought, it’s a bodily truth with far-reaching implications, and that it’s finally naive to deal with the human physique like an thought, like a doll. So no, Virginia, it’s not higher to be a beautiful, sexless, ageless doll with a clean backside line than it’s to be a fleshy feminine in a finite world with a life cycle and a menstrual cycle, sure by the legal guidelines of gravity and the inevitable pressures, disappointments, and limits of being human.
We realized within the automobile on our manner house from the theater that the Barbie film is one big center finger to transhumanism.
We expect Barbie is essentially the most pro-life, pro-vagina, pro-embodiment film to return out of Hollywood in fairly a while. And that is despite its over-the-top Hollywood trappings and the lame facet story about “the patriarchy”—a narrative which quantities to, we really feel, little greater than the infantile criticism that “boys have cooties.” It’s the type of sneer one expects from little women who play with dolls, who neither like nor perceive boys. Barbie satirizes each the matriarchy and the patriarchy as juvenile fantasies. Males shouldn’t waste their time being offended by it, as a result of it’s a sense, a prejudice, a caricature—not an argument. (No Actual Males have been impugned within the filming of this film.)
Barbie is the story of a girl “leaning in”—to not the perfect {of professional} success, however to the actual of relational embodiment that’s expensive. It’s an incarnation story. The Messiah “had no type or majesty that we should always take a look at him, and no magnificence that we should always want him. He was despised and rejected by males, a person of sorrows and acquainted with grief . . . Certainly he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:2-3). Barbie’s eventual willingness to embrace the lack of bodily magnificence, the chance of not being preferred, the inevitability of tears, and the ache that comes from loving others and bearing their burdens—that’s not simply female (neither is it simply human): it’s divine.
Barbie’s incarnational message exhibits the goodness of being feminine and the great thing about rising previous. It’s made by and for middle-aged girls who want fun, and who want a reminder that life is nice, that the trade-offs of motherhood are price it, and that it’s okay to look previous when in reality you are previous. Grey is the brand new pink.
And in case you’re anyplace upwards of thirty or forty or extra (like we’re), then it’s on us to present youthful girls a imaginative and prescient of seasoned interior magnificence and contentment, and to supply these crucial nudges that assist them face the actual world. Such mothering, whereas it will possibly embrace making house for the articulation of feminine frustrations (like Gloria’s monologue), ought to encourage girls to re-examine the logic of the pain-fueled protest that “it’s actually unimaginable to be a girl.” Sure, being a girl can really feel unhappy, mushy, difficult, and uncomfortable, however to name it unimaginable is to present in to a view of womanhood as an achievement or a efficiency. However womanhood is neither: it’s an embodied given.
Younger girls want hope simply as a lot as they want sympathy; we consider that hope will be kindled by witnessing fashions of braveness, advantage, connection, and private company in a world of inevitable struggling and limitations. Younger girls need assistance to see, like Barbie ultimately did, what they’re made for, and that even when life is tragic, it’s nonetheless superb.
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