Deconstructing Barbie

By Uditha Devapriya

The sheer popularity of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie should tell us that people are no longer swayed by superheroes flying in spaceships and jumping from one skyscraper to another. That era is long gone, and as Francis Ford Coppola pointed out recently, that is a positive development. Like Oppenheimer, Gerwig’s film is important, yet more so than Oppenheimer, it has polarised opinion. The reviews are almost uniformly positive, save a few dissenting judgments. In Sri Lanka Barbie has fared exceptionally well, judging from the pink shirts and skirts and whatever else people are wearing at screenings. But popular success tends to lull one into thinking that everyone has taken to its message.

As Regi Siriwardena observed in his review of Sunil Ariyaratne’s Sarungale, the most valuable piece of writing that can be done in relation to such a film is not a review, but “a survey of responses to it” by the Sri Lankan mass audience. At the outset it must be admitted that the Sri Lankan mass audience, despite its relative insignificance compared to the Indian or US market, is highly complex and hardly monolithic. To them a film operates on many levels and they tend to judge it from many perspectives. This is true not just across demographics but within them too: I know two males who liked Barbie, and three who did not. The three who did not found it cumbersomely feminist. One of the two who liked it remains a fervent critic of feminism and wokeness. Yet he still found Gerwig’s message to his liking.

What’s going on here? I think our perceptions of Gerwig’s film have been coloured, or I should say diluted, by our assumptions about what it is trying to tell us. In the US there has been a severe right-wing backlash against Barbie, with commentators like Ben Shapiro tearing it to shreds. The religious right has objected to what they assume to be a pro-gay rights message in the plot, despite there not being any such overt message there. I know one or two people who believe that Ken is ultimately brought to heel by all the Barbies in Barbieland at the expense of his masculinity. This is probably what has ruffled feathers elsewhere too. And it is probably what has compelled many Sri Lankan males to go watch it also: they have been ranting against feminism for so long, they want to see a movie which validates their feelings about that ideology. Yet in this, as with the US religious right’s fatwas, they seem to have treated the film as a straw man – or woman.

At the outset I must admit that I enjoyed Barbie, its humour, its message. I think it’s wrong to call it feminist, or rather limit it to specific ideological frames, because like all good films it transcends them. Of course, there are feminist undertones – one can hardly expect anything else from the director of Lady Bird and Little Women – but these are cleverly coupled with other themes, not all of which can be squared with the feminism that Sri Lankan males who pride themselves on knowing what feminism is criticise every day. The feminism in Barbie is also not WASP – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – because the protagonist is ultimately saved by two working class Hispanic women. The film also does not affirm corporate culture and in fact goes to great lengths to satire that culture, though admittedly towards the end, it makes a great hue and cry about the creator of Barbie.

A scene from Barbie

Taken together, these represent the three most common objections to Gerwig’s film: the male critique of its supposed feminism, the progressive critique of its all-white female empowerment message, and the Left critique of its affirmation of corporate capitalism. Of these three the one that seems to have resonated most with Sri Lankan males, and even certain females, is the first. I think much of that critique has been focused on the last 30 or so minutes of the film, when nearly all the males in Barbieland realise the futility of their campaign against the Barbies and accept defeat. For the typical Sri Lankan male that would be unforgivable, but what is more unforgivable is that, even at the moment of defeat, when Ryan Gosling’s character is absolved by Margot Robbie and the latter accepts that she took him for granted, she still resists his attempts to woo her, to the point where he begins to sob and cry. At this point, I heard some barely muffled boos behind me.

The most common objection to the sequence is that it turned Ken from a “chad” – an alpha male – to a “simp” – obeisant to women. Sri Lankan men tend to be influenced by gender categories and stereotypes perpetuated not so much by the feminists they oppose as by the right-wing commentators they listen to, which is probably why they perceived this scene as yet another dreaded instance of woke objet d’art emasculating a man.

Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Yet there is nothing of the sort suggested in this episode. What we see here is not Barbie turning Ken into a simp or figuratively castrating him, but rather Barbie telling Ken that he does not have to depend on her, that he has a life and a character beyond her. At this point, all the women in Barbieland realise they have been as wrong to the men in their realm as the men in our world have been, and are, to their women: they have managed to exclude them from every position and post, and kept everything to themselves. Yet this too Gerwig satirises rather effectively: when one man asks if he can join the all-female Supreme Court in Barbieland, he is told he cannot, but that he can try a lower court.

The Sri Lankan teenage or adolescent male critique of Barbie should not, of course, hinder us from enjoying its delights, or from pointing out to this demographic, a not inconsiderable section of which found Gerwig’s film to their liking, that their reading of Barbie does not really square with what the film is trying to tell us. Yes, it is “feminist” in the sense that it objects to the phallicism of corporate culture. But that is a valid objection, and it stands true of almost every society, Sri Lanka included. On the other hand, it subjects a whole lot of other ways of thinking to criticism, which those tearing it to shreds appear to have missed out. In that sense I think Barbie is more provocative than Oppenheimer.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.