Barbie has plenty of pink but pales in progressive promise

While Greta Gerwig's Barbie has been hailed as a win for feminism, its message becomes derailed and ultimately dumbs down the feminist struggle, writes Elena Piakis.

BARBIE, a film that director Greta Gerwig herself has described as “completely bananas”, has been mistaken for a feminist masterpiece. It took me a little while to figure out why the Barbie narrative wasn’t sitting quite right with me.

I was eager to hop on the bandwagon of the “feminist fable” that is Barbie. Like everyone else, I was grabbed by the film’s sugary aesthetic and witty commentary on the Barbie world and the real world. The first half of the film humorously demolishes the idea that Barbieland is a feminist utopia. It drove home the message of superficial feminism, of female dolls wearing adorable outfits representing different careers but without the “real world” skills and intellect to back them.

The film derides Barbie, not just because she is a sexualised doll but because she is a purported representation of all women from diverse backgrounds. But Barbie is not “so much more” than what she really is. The pink-washed “feminism” of Barbieland is a farce. At the beginning of the film, it seems Gerwig is making this point very clear. At the end of the movie, you’re not so sure. All the good stuff that the film seemed to be leading up to in the first half deteriorates in the second half.

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Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) is ridiculed for thinking she is a representation of women. When Barbie meets Sasha (played by Ariana Greenblatt), she is confronted with a rude awakening. Sasha condemns her as having set the feminist movement back 50 years. Sasha, starkly aware of her reality, is rightfully angry that a doll has the audacity to assume that she has “fixed” gender equality.

Sasha is rightfully cynical about the trajectory of gender issues, and her attitude is reflective of those that prevailed in the feminist movements of the 20th Century and beyond. Her stance is empowering and real; her sense of self shines when she delivers her angry lecture to Barbie.

Sasha’s mum, Gloria (America Ferrera), on the other hand, is engulfed in nostalgia, wishing to bond with her daughter as they once did when Sasha was younger. For whatever reason, their once-bonded relationship revolved around playing with (stereotypical, not “representative”) Barbie, and Gloria, as a result, starts drawing images of “Irrepressible Thoughts of Death” and “Depression” Barbies.

Unlike her daughter, Gloria’s perception of Barbie isn’t politically loaded; it’s nostalgic. She doesn’t seem affected by the gendered issues that Sasha expresses about Barbie and she comes across as naïve. Sasha is frustrated by her mum’s naivety, shouting at her that “everybody hates women” and to “wake up”.

Just when you think the film is going somewhere, it falls off a cliff. Following the high-speed chase from the Mattel cronies and the re-entry into Barbieland in reverse order only to discover Barbieland is now the patriarchal-equine “Kendom”, the film devolves into a Barbie rescue mission. Sasha and Gloria commit to saving Barbieland from the clutches of the macho Kens. Mother and daughter bond over their mission to un-brainwash the Barbies and to restore Barbieland to the other gendered stereotype.

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Suddenly, Sasha, who was so opposed to what Barbie symbolised, becomes fully committed to saving a doll. Her sudden commitment to Barbie is reflected in the styling choices at this juncture — by the end of the film she is wearing obvious makeup and dressed in more femme clothing. Sasha’s transformation is an offence to everything she stood for when she gave Barbie a piece of her mind.

Sasha’s new pink-washed identity can’t be said to be reclaiming femininity, or reappropriating it, because she is no longer the strong, self-assured character she was when she first met and condemned Barbie. Rather, she becomes compliant, agreeable and an object of the male gaze. When Barbieland is finally reclaimed by the Barbies, the film ultimately reinforces the female stereotype. Not only is feminism conflated with femininity, but femininity is portrayed as pretty, pink and fluffy.

Barbie’s ending is rife with contradictions. Gloria’s compelling monologue accurately captures how many women feel. The line that stands out – “It is literally impossible to be a woman” – resonates with many women whose everyday struggle can be felt in the statement. However, Gloria is simultaneously nostalgic about a doll that revolves around how women look and has historically sexualised the female form to be marketed to little girls.

As much as the “imaginative” aspects of playing with Barbie are referenced, Gloria’s nostalgic adoration of Barbieland cannot be reconciled with the poignant reality of her monologue. The fact that the film attempts to do this anyway is an active dumbing down of the feminist struggle.

Despite all the little digs at Mattel and the cronies running the company in the name of profit, in reality, Barbie serves as little more than a promo for the capitalist likes of Mattel. Barbie’s box office will guarantee that more Barbies will fly off the shelf and Mattel will profit off the sales. Little girls will continue playing with dolls that purport to now represent them.

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Mattel will continue to create dolls under the guise that Barbie dolls now “look like real women”, even though Barbie is in fact still a doll; she is not a “representation of a woman”, as Gloria says to stereotypical Barbie. Nonetheless, Barbie’s final encounter with her maker, Ruth Handler, humanises the doll and gives her “agency”, despite everything wrong with what she represents and encourages.

At the end of the day, Barbie doesn’t add much to what feminists have been decrying since Mary Wollstonecraft: that women are yet to achieve substantial gender equality, that women are still forced from a young age to obsess about their appearance, that not only have women inherited a men’s world but that women are still influenced by how men perceive them.

I worry about all the girls who will watch Barbie and overlook the nuanced critique that was dabbled in throughout the first half of the film, only to assume that the antithesis of patriarchy is Barbieland. I wonder about what message Greta Gerwig was trying to convey through Barbie, if any. Because as much as the film purports to poke a bit of fun and is “completely bananas” as Gerwig says, it does toe territory that is more political. But then it self-sabotages by mixing its messages, delegitimises the critiques it secured earlier in the film and lands on a simplistic note.

Any promise that the film was crafted as a conversation starter about gender was completely supplanted by the glorified resurrection of a doll which has been a hindrance to the progress of women.