Barbie

Plastic Citations: On the Gender Trouble of Barbie

Greta Gerwig's Barbie arrives wrapped in its own critique, which is either its cleverest gesture or its most efficient alibi. Here is a film that wants to be, simultaneously, a blockbuster advertisement for a doll, a satire of that doll's cultural afterlife, and a primer on contemporary feminism palatable enough to crack a billion dollars worldwide. That it nearly succeeds at all three is a testament less to its politics than to the particular way late capitalism has learned to metabolize the language of liberation. But if we set aside the question of whether the film is "really" feminist—a question that tends to produce sermons rather than thought—we can ask something more interesting: what does Barbie show us about how gender actually works?

The answer begins with the bodies. Every inhabitant of Barbieland is a citation. Margot Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie does not walk so much as quote walking; she does not drink so much as perform the gesture of drinking from an empty cup. The film's opening sequence—a plastic morning of floating showers and painted-on breakfasts—is not merely whimsy but an almost doctrinaire illustration of the idea that gendered life consists of stylized, repeated acts that conjure the illusion of a natural interior. Barbie has no interior, and this is the joke. She is all surface, all iteration, all "the way it's done." When she suddenly thinks of death, what has erupted is not a hidden depth but a failure in the repetition—a moment when the citation misfires, when the script glitches, and something like subjectivity flickers into being through the gap.

Ken is the film's richer subject precisely because his crisis makes the same point louder. Ryan Gosling's Ken does not possess masculinity; he is trying, with heartbreaking diligence, to qualify for it. He discovers "patriarchy" the way an exchange student discovers a foreign cuisine—as a set of props, poses, and phrases that promise to resolve the unbearable condition of being only contingently recognizable. His "Mojo Dojo Casa House," his sudden fixation on horses, his power ballad about being "just Ken": these are not deviations from masculinity but its purest expression, because masculinity, like any gender, is nothing but its compulsive restaging. The film understands, at least in its best scenes, that Ken is not failing to be a man. He is succeeding, in that he has grasped that being a man means continuously auditioning for the role in front of other men who are also auditioning. The horror he experiences when Barbie does not return his affection is the horror of a subject whose existence depends on recognition he cannot command—the ordinary horror of gendered life, rendered pink.

And yet, having staged this recognition so acutely, the film flinches. Barbieland's initial order is a mirror-image matriarchy in which Kens occupy the structural position of women: decorative, unemployed, emotionally overinvested, and tolerated. When Ken imports patriarchy from the real world, the film's climax involves restoring the original inversion, now tempered by a modest concession that Kens, too, deserve personhood. This is presented as progress. But the structure has not been undone; it has been rebalanced. The binary remains the organizing principle of the world, the heterosexual pairing remains the horizon of intelligibility (Allan, the film's only non-binary-adjacent figure, is acknowledged mostly as a punchline), and the question of whether one might refuse the whole choreography—of Barbie, of Ken, of the matrix that requires both—is deferred into Barbie's final, much-celebrated choice to become human and, in a closing gag, visit a gynecologist. The joke lands because it reads as emancipatory: she has claimed a body, a sex, a reality. But what has she actually claimed? Entry into another, more consequential system of citation, one whose failures to repeat correctly carry costs considerably steeper than an existential crisis during a choreographed dance number.

This is where America Ferrera's now-famous monologue deserves more scrutiny than it has received. As a piece of writing, it is a precise inventory of the double binds that structure contemporary womanhood: be thin but not too thin, be a boss but not bossy, be a mother but not defined by motherhood. As a piece of dramaturgy, it is the speech that breaks the Barbies out of their brainwashing and restores the proper order of Barbieland. Notice what this accomplishes. The contradictions of femininity are named, and in being named they become the content of a shared feminine identity—something women recognize, suffer under, and bond through. The speech does not dismantle the category "woman"; it fortifies it by offering its pain as proof of its reality. This is consciousness-raising in a register that sells T-shirts, and it is not nothing—recognition of structural harm is a real good—but it is also the mechanism by which the category reproduces itself. You leave the theater more certain that womanhood exists, and more certain that you have it or lack it, than when you entered. The monologue is a technology for producing the subject it claims merely to describe.

None of which is to say the film is a failure. Barbie is, in its own contradictions, an almost perfect artifact of the moment: a commodity that sells itself by diagnosing the conditions of its own sale, a feminist text produced by Mattel, a critique of beauty standards starring one of the most photographed women alive. The film cannot escape these contradictions because no cultural object can; what it can do is stage them with enough self-awareness that audiences mistake the staging for resolution. When Barbie walks out of the film and into the world of periods and pap smears, we are meant to feel that she has chosen the real over the plastic. But the real, in this film's imagination, is simply the next costume. There is no outside to the performance. There is only the question of which performances we are permitted to notice ourselves giving, and which we must continue to experience as nature.

What would it mean to take Barbie more seriously than it takes itself? It would mean lingering in the moments the film rushes past: Allan's quiet refusal to be a Ken; the Weird Barbie whose deviations have made her a kind of shaman; the brief, electric suggestion that the Kens might simply want something other than to dominate or be dominated. These are the film's unthought possibilities, its ungrieved losses. They point toward a version of the story in which the problem is not which gender gets to run Barbieland but whether the categories can bear the weight we have asked them to carry. Gerwig is too smart not to know this, and too commercially disciplined to pursue it. What we get instead is the most expensive and elegant demonstration in recent memory that gender is a performance—followed, in the final act, by a curtain call that asks us to applaud the performers as though we had seen something other than the show.

Still, the show was worth seeing. The glitch is in the film, even if the film cannot quite let itself be the glitch. And every viewer who laughed at Ken rehearsing his masculinity in the mirror has, for a moment, seen the rehearsal for what it is. That seeing is not nothing. It is, perhaps, where the undoing might begin, on the far side of the credits, in the parking lot, on the drive home, when the pink wears off and the citations resume.