Real Life Barbie
Exiting the shared fantasy of Barbie Land, Barbie self-actualizes in the real world
~Spoiler alerts below~
Released this weekend, Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, directed by Greta Gerwig, offers a nuanced, contemporary take on the confusing multi-faceted identities of Barbie from a stereotypical blonde hair/blue eyed beautiful woman to an empowered woman in a man's world. The film does a competent and entertaining job of taking on the complex social roles of women and men today.
The film opens in Barbie Land, a matriarchy, run by and for women. Ken, Barbie’s counterpart is, as she puts it,"superfluous". Ken is hardly noticed by Barbie, and he longs to be seen through her gaze that animates him; in essence, he wouldn't exist but for her and only has meaning or purpose in relation to her, not unlike, as an aside, a run-of-the-mill end-stage narcissistic abuse victim. The character of Ken functions as a study in contrast and acts as a character foil to women's traditional and stereotypical roles, and their attendant feelings of objectification and being reduced to merely arm candy for men.
Barbie has occasion through a weak plot device to leave plastic Barbie Land on her adventure to reality in the real world, in order to restore from her newfound flat-footed horror, her tippy toes Barbie feet which were previously molded to conform to high heels even without wearing high heels. She also endeavors not to get cellulite. In her quest to preserve her beauty and mute some creeping thoughts of death, she has a reckoning with reality at her Los Angeles headquarters, manufacturer Mattel. When she arrives at Mattel, she sees that all of the executives are middle-aged white men, which offends her women-empowered matriarchy sensibilities. Hapless Will Ferrell, as Mattel’s CEO, attempts to literally put Barbie back in her box, replete with plastic wrist ties, a not so subtle metaphor for confining her to her traditional social role. Barbie resists, and a wild goose chase commences.
Eventually, Barbie makes it back to Barbie Land where after some other interludes and escapades, she apologizes to Ken, rightfully so, for taking him for granted, which had pushed him into embracing the patriarchy in retaliation. By contrast, Barbie was able to see that the matriarchy was also oppressive to Ken. After both mellowed, a quality of easefulness ensues.
Rather than remaining in Barbie Land, which is similar to the perfect "reality" depicted in the movie Pleasantville, Barbie ends up ultimately choosing to live with the complexities and challenges of the real world rather than the simulacrum (or shared fantasy) of Barbie Land. Her happily ever after ending comes in the form of having real life functioning genitals that she celebrates by visiting the gynecologist.
As a viewer, I was happy to see that this film addressed that Barbie was meant to be a feminist icon whose image was reduced and trampled into some sort of sex object, who later compensated by becoming an astronaut and assuming other traditional men's roles. That Barbie’s image has taken so many twists and turns over the years speaks to the roller coaster of women’s identity since her inception in 1959. First and foremost, Barbie was pioneering in that she was the first doll created for children who had breasts. For the first time, when playing with a Barbie doll, girls could conceive of and play-act not being a mother, but being a woman. All these historical developments and more are chronicled in the excellent series on Netflix, Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse.
From a narcissism perspective, this film, while chiefly concerned with the gender wars, also emphasizes coming into one's own. Narcissistic abuse endeavors to strip one of one's identity, voice, and agency. Barbie in this movie is not in love with Ken because as she puts it, Ken doesn't even know who he is, if not in relation to her. She encourages him to go find himself. Enter shades of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, which shares the same theme of finding oneself, except in this 1879 play, the theme is inspired by a wife finding her voice to escape the confines of the oppressive social roles of marriage.
In this day and age of the stalled revolution, where women have changed their sexual scripts and gender roles, and men haven't adjusted accordingly, by and large, not just from the 1950s, but going all the way back to Victorian times, it's no wonder society is experiencing friction between the sexes.
This film, Barbie, is evenhanded in distributing blame and solutions for the gender wars. Thematically, the bottom line takeaway is an encouragement of facilitating an internal locus of control, which is also a foremost antidote to narcissistic abuse and narcissism, in general. The film advocates drawing upon one's own inner resources and own sense of agency, command and control, rather than outsourcing these ego functions to others to shore up one's identity in a world that always conspires to make you someone other than who you truly are.