Barbie: Smashing The Keniarchy
For a change going to try and avoid spoilers as there is so much to this movie’s plot… Essentially the Barbie movie is not for kids — we are smashing the patriarchy as established by the Kens in Barbieland or overthrowing the Barbie matriarchal alleged dreamy democracy…. Or perhaps it is as this is very much a movie about gender and how stereotypical Barbie learns to be less stereotypical, and how Ken finds out who he is.
I can’t work out if Mattel are shown as good or bad guys literally here as their entire board is male. But this is very much Ken’s movie — love-lorn and feeling taken for granted, Ken becomes a reader and educates the other Kens in horses, guitars, neglecting their girlfriends, beer, guitar serenades and Barbieland CEO takeovers. (More deeply what does it mean to be a man or a woman in Barbie’s world? and what if Barbie does not love her assigned Ken?)
However, there is much for the moviegoers to love here — the Barbie disco dance-off; the driving; the double hand waving; America Ferrera; the travel sequences; that banner; the dream dance sequence; putting Barbie back in her giant box; Alan, and Ryan Gosling throughout, as well as the innocence of their characterisations when Barbies and Kens become overwhelmed and run away and cry in child-like ways. Simu Liu’s Kenfrontation…Ultimately Barbie discovers liberation through emotions, and pointedly (hot topically too) sexual and maternal health; and Ken discovers his inner Kenergy by being himself, rather than in Barbie’s shadow as a ‘just’.
The look, styling and imagination of this movie is fantastic as is the plotting throughout. Helen Mirren makes a terrific sardonic narrator. All the same I can’t work out which is more disturbing — small girls smashing up their china baby dolls in favour of Barbie liberation or the restored Barbie world at the end where there still isn’t gender or anything equality; Kens are still politically and economically second class citizens. Whilst the film throughout challenges female gender stereotyping, I’m not sure it fights back as fiercely for Ken’s liberation to rescue him from Andrew Tate-esque moments.
Be that as it may, it’s a lot of fun, Margot Robbie is terrific in her meetings with Weird Barbie, portraying her Barbie’s fear of the Birkenstock and self-knowledge/cellulite, as well as experiencing human emotions in the real world, plus being arrested.. a lot.
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