GRETA GERWIG’S BARBIE IS FAR FROM FEMINIST
She might have undergone a glamorous Hollywood rebrand, but THIS faux feminist Barbie is still damaging.
“She’s everything. He’s just Ken,” reads the Barbie tagline. Greta Gerwig’s new film opens in a matriarchy in which Barbies shrug off the powerless Kens and control courts, juries and government free of criticism. It’s the ultimate feminist dream-world, right?!
But is Barbie really such a revelatory feminist masterpiece?
The film’s smart marketing campaign has certainly pushed for the narrative that Barbies have always been defined by contradictions.
Barbie could indeed be cast as an inspiring role model, depicting a female home-owner before women had achieved the legal right vote in America. Gerwig has described the doll as existing in “the ‘both/and,’ not the ‘either/or.’ She’s not [either] good or bad,” instead, rather conveniently, she’s just “complex.”
But ever since its invention, Mattel’s long-legged, wasp-waisted doll has undoubtedly done far more bad than good. Barbie dolls perpetuated a sexualised and unrealistic beauty standard for women, and promoted ‘perfect’ gleaming appearance as the key aspirational facet of femininity. They were, as Gloria Steinem maintained in 2018, “everything the feminist movement was trying to escape [from]”.
In 2018 Mattel created a Frida Kahlo Barbie: a slender, sanitised version of the artist’s image which eliminated her facial hair, confining it to her distinctive brow, which had been refashioned and slimmed. Kahlo’s family took Mattel to court over the doll, and eventually sales were halted in Mexico.
This morphing of Kahlo’s image to fit a ‘perfect,’ sexualised (and male) version of femininity is symbolic of Mattel’s explicitly damaging patriarchal principles, and sadly it seeps into Gerwig’s film.
There’s a confused message throughout Barbie about the importance and value of appearance alongside inner life, which is never resolved.
In the satirical matriarchy version of Barbieland that opens the film, Gerwig playfully mocks the plastic perfection of the Barbies with their shiny smiles, devoid of inner life. So it’s clear that when Barbie shrieks at the emergence of cellulite on her legs, it’s part of wider on-the-nose satire.
Barbie ultimately discovers the falsehoods of both her superficial existence in Barbieland and the depressing patriarchal powers of the real human world (the film also acknowledges the male bias behind Barbie through the comical all-male room of bosses at Mattel).
But even after this ark, towards the end of the film, Barbie’s attitude towards her appearance still hasn’t changed. Despairing her new circumstances, she suddenly cries that on top of everything that’s going wrong in Barbieland, “I’m not [even] pretty anymore!”
Oh no!!
America Ferrera’s Gloria immediately consoles her, “No! You are so pretty”, later declaring that “we all are!”
It’s an odd and unexpected moment that seems to suggest that Barbie’s looks and' ‘beauty’ are still considered to be important to her overall fulfilment and self worth.
It’s not helped when followed by a seemingly throwaway gag in which the narrator (Helen Mirren) jokes that “Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point,” implying that Robbie is so attractive that no audience would believe that she might doubt it.
What seems to be a cheekily self-aware quip only serves to further reveal the confused messaging of the film.
Why is Margot Robbie’s physical appearance important here? Why is anyone’s? Why is being beautiful being held up as something worth worrying about? That’s hardly a feminist message.
It reveals the falsities of this ‘plastic feminism’ that permeates the film, which Guardian critic Natasha Walter similarly describes as a reminder of “just how hard it still is even for successful and experienced women to be valued if they don’t also show doll-like qualities”. Once again, we’re implicitly told that physical appearance is a valid metric of female worth, a principle rarely applied to men.
By the end of Barbie there is an unshakeable sense that to be like those judge, doctor, and dancer dolls, you must look like them, too - shiny, slender, smiling. And there’s nothing revolutionary about that.