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Capitalism subsumes all critiques of itself.
That’s one of the many quotable lines of dialogue in Disco Elysium, one of the most un-Barbie games you can find in the visual novel world. It’s a heartfelt letter to the human spirit, a battle cry against the establishment, and an IP that’s currently signed with Amazon for a TV series adaptation.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was a direct, easy-to-digest 101 for every idea it introduced. In that same spirit, let’s cut to the chase: Barbie can never be a true criticism of all the issues it tries to grapple with because of what she is. A mass-marketed, mass-produced doll with a movie that had a $150 million marketing budget talking about how the patriarchy is so unfair to women and how the engines of society are controlled by men who only pay lip service to the virtues of feminism, all while coming from a company with a mostly male upper leadership is the furthest thing from subversive.
What it is is a genius marketing move that re-brands Barbie as a self-aware doll and company, all while raking in millions of dollars at the box office and selling untold amounts of merchandise. Not to mention, benefitting from feminists who want to advertise their feminism with a “This Barbie is a [insert profession]” sticker. In one clever stroke, Barbie has entered a new age where she is a feminist, not people like Sasha.
Again, capitalism subsumes all critiques of itself. It’s not a subversive message, but rather, the peak of irony. Considering how often shows, movies, games, and even companies have co-opted ideas and language we’ve come to understand, in common parlance, as “woke”, it’s really no longer a surprise that Barbie has profited off criticism against itself.
What makes it odd is how it still works.
Feminism 101 in more ways than one
To say that Barbie is nothing more than a cash grab for a now-adult audience of women who loved her as a child is as much an oversimplification as saying that Barbie is a subversive film. The former assumes that there are no people involved in the making of the movie who genuinely connect with Barbie‘s feminist and self-aware-of-Mattel’s-own-failings message. The latter assumes that profit was never a factor when it certainly was.
The inherently contradictory nature of the Barbie movie is, in a way, a reminder of how hard it is to exist outside the confines of a system. Everywhere you turn, it catches up to you. In Gloria’s monologue towards the end of the film, she rambles about how hard it is to simply exist as a woman. She must be beautiful and confident without admitting awareness of her beauty. She must contain a multitude of traits that exist in direct opposition to each other, all while each of them is held up as a feminine ideal. She can’t be too different or unfeminine or she’ll be a not-like-other-girls girl who hates women and herself.
The same is true for the Barbie movie. Without mass market appeal, a watered-down and dumbed-down Feminism 101, and the magnetism of something as recognizable as Barbie, whatever it was Greta Gerwig was trying to convey wouldn’t have reached the audiences it was meant to reach. Out there is some little girl or old grandmother born in the Paleolithic era who is understanding what feminism means for the first time and how it’s probably not fair that some things happen to her just because of her gender.
Nor would the movie be made if it wasn’t guaranteed to line the pockets of Mattel’s shareholders and executives.
By the way!
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As Margaret Atwood puts it in her book, The Robber Bride, a woman is her own voyeur. She judges her life by the standards of the world that have taught her what standards to judge herself by. Whether she ignores them or yields to them, the end result is the same. She watches herself constantly, in reference to them.
The Barbie movie can’t escape this contradiction between its existence and capitalism any more than real women can escape the patriarchy. Girl bossing your way out is an admission that a masculine-coded response is the only valid response. Making a blockbuster movie about a pseudo-feminist icon is only saying that feminism is an okay belief to have if it makes money.
Why do we love it anyway? Or more specifically, why do we keep acting like it’s that deep?
No, the irony is not lost on us that this article is participating in the spectacle that is Barbie. More on that later.
If it’s so obvious that the Barbie movie cannot be any real or substantial criticism of the bad things it presents itself to be against, why does everybody and their dog keep calling it subversive and oh so feminist anyway?
For one, it’s in. No matter our personal feelings and beliefs on the matter, the fact is that presenting oneself as subversive has been profitable. An earlier iteration of the Barbie movie was meant to be an anti-Barbie/hyper-femininity narrative (now only represented by Sasha, Gloria’s daughter) that featured a Barbie that could serve as a de-womanized strong female protagonist as was popular during the mid-2010s.
In recent years, however, there’s been a shift to a more ‘feminine’ flavor of feminism that holds up Legally Blonde as the prime example of feminist media and embraces ‘bimbohood’ as a subversive rejection of the idea that a woman must be unfeminine (a.k.a closer to masculinity) to be strong.
If Mattel had run with the earlier ideas for the movie, we would call it bland now. Had this version been released years ago, it would have been too bimbofied. Neither would be a fashionable way to play feminist.
On that matter, it’s worth noting that the Barbie movie never gets offensive. Even when it’s poking fun at Mattel, it lets the fictional Mattel CEO be depicted as this super good guy who wouldn’t leave Barbieland under the control of the Kens because he wants to inspire little girls. It even gives the Kens a benefit of the doubt with Barbie saying sorry to Ken for hurting his feelings without acknowledging how insane it is that he thought re-creating The Handmaiden’s Tale was a valid response. But of course, women get shot in real life for rejecting men, so it’s really not so surprising.
Another is that, frankly, a lot of our hyper-sanitized corporate-controlled media does not take a stance that can be anywhere close to ideological. It makes Barbie feel like the second coming of Virginia Woolf even if her stance is about as subversive as saying that guys can wear pink too. Controversial enough to feel risky, but mild enough that everyone with a vaguely centrist position will agree and have the opportunity to label anyone who disagrees as narrow-minded.
The Barbie movie is as much a sanitized caricature of the ideologies she represents as the doll herself is a sanitized version of real women.
Moving on.
If the movie isn’t that deep, but also kind of deep in a weird way that the movie doesn’t show us, why do we keep acting like it is? Why does everyone with a Twitter account, a WordPress blog, or a YouTube video essay keep talking about it like it’s the best thing to happen to feminism and capitalist critique?
The Barbie movie is safe. It doesn’t require us to think too deeply, it’s easily digestible, and everyone knows about it so anyone talking about it will generate clicks (this is the part where we are self-aware). Barbie lets us all play at armchair philosophy without having to read Hegel or Žižek because that’s boring and who cares?
To discuss Barbie is an extension of consuming products to show off how anti-The Man you are.
TLDR: Barbie’s mirror isn’t real.
Now, pink “This Barbie is a feminist” stickers, anyone?
