Barbie and Utopia

WARNING: In case you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen the movie yet, this post contains spoilers for Barbie.

Barbie ends with Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie, henceforth just “Barbie”), having become human, being delivered to an appointment of some sort by Gloria (America Ferrera) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the human mother and daughter who have befriended her. They wish her good luck, and she gets out of the car, entering a nondescript building.

My assumption, at this point, was that she was either starting her first day of a new job or arriving at a job interview. I figured it was decent odds the job would actually be at Mattel™. But after almost two hours of watching Greta Gerwig’s exceptionally smart film, I should have known better; I should have been better prepared for Barbie telling the receptionist that she was there to see her gynecologist.

A simple job or job interview would have been pedestrian; a job at Mattel™ would have been too neat, too much of an obvious endorsement of the naïve utopianism embodied by the Barbie brand. Perhaps more significantly, such an ending would provide a sense of continuity undermining the film’s more shrewdly subversive elements. By contrast, meeting with an OBGYN is a rather more startling note on which to end, though of course it shouldn’t be—for someone suddenly endowed with a functioning reproductive system where none had been before, it makes perfect sense.

And while gynecologists cover a wide range of care not necessarily specifically related to childbirth or conception, the obvious implication is that Barbie is either pregnant or seriously considering it.

[EDIT: Got a lot of pushback on this assertion, which is fair: whatever my qualifier, it’s not necessarily “the” obvious implication that Barbie’s in baby-making mode. I should say rather that it’s a possible implication, or even just go with the indefinite article and say it’s an obvious implication. But yeah, my own lack of any necessary interaction with a gynecologist makes me a wee bit myopic here. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any Ken-based puns about male obtuseness about obstetric care.]

There are a few ways to read this ending. A less charitable reading might see it as a betrayal of the feminist messages otherwise powerfully conveyed in the previous two hours of cinema—seeing it, in other words, as a normative gesture suggesting that, once human, Barbie is compelled to submit to a biologically determined destiny of motherhood.

That is one way to read it. I would disagree, however. Quite emphatically. (To be clear, I have not seen this interpretation anywhere. So far as I know, it’s a straw man of my own creation.) Another tack would be to see Barbie’s prospective procreation as consonant with the way the film explores the theme of mothers and daughters: the characters of Gloria and Sasha comprise the story’s moral and emotional core, with Barbie and her various other iterations providing a comic but poignant symbolic counterpoint to the fraught and complex question(s) of how to be a woman in the world. Barbie’s transformation into a human, after all, happens when she meets her creator and symbolic mother Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), whose last name she assumes.

There’s a lot going on in this movie, and I’ll be getting to a fraction of it in this post. I would never have imagined a film about Barbie, which was made under the auspices of Mattel™, would or could contain multitudes. But here we are. A friend and colleague of mine posted to Facebook that he’d never have imagined that he’d emerge from the theatre thinking about all the ways he’s now planning to reference Barbie in his literary theory class this fall. I had an identical reaction: given that I’m teaching an introduction to popular culture this fall and a seminar on postmodernism in the winter, there’s going to be a lot of Barbie popping up in my lectures.

I might write posts along those lines in the future, but at the moment it’s my upcoming utopias/dystopias course with which the film is really resonating. (I actually just emailed all my currently enrolled students that their summer homework is to go see Barbie. Given that it’s a reasonably good chance most of them already have, it’s not really much of an ask.)

This will be the second time I’ve taught the course, though it will be the first time I’ve done it in a physical classroom. I last taught it in the winter term of 2021, while we were all still on lockdown and all teaching was being done remotely (and yes, teaching a course on utopias and dystopias in literature during a global pandemic is a bit on the nose—or it would have been if my other class that term hadn’t been a graduate seminar on post-apocalyptic literature. I suppose you could say I was leaning in.) What became immediately apparent then, and what I’m working through again now, is the fundamental asymmetry one finds in utopias vs. dystopias. Which is to say: while we don’t lack for utopian literature stretching back to Plato’s Republic, two things leap out: (1) aside from Plato, Thomas More’s genre-defining novel Utopia, and such novels as Erewhon and Herland, there aren’t many titles that will be familiar; (2) the volume of utopian literature is dwarfed by a magnitude by dystopias. In fact, the entirety of the list of utopian works on Wikipedia is matched by just the YA dystopian fiction from just the past twenty years.

Which, to be fair, is hardly surprising. Perfect, idyllic societies don’t tend to be fodder for gripping narratives; by contrast, everything going to shit, where everyone either needs to grab a shotgun to kill zombies or flee from omniscient authoritarians, makes for exciting reading. Hence dystopia’s claim to the vast amount of market share.

But that asymmetry of market share is balanced conceptually, by which I mean that where dystopia is straightforward and easy to understand, utopia is far more complex and fraught. It is one of those concepts that fractures and expands and grows more elusive the more you examine it. It is both an impulse and a goal, a collective ideal and profoundly idiosyncratic. There comes a point where it can become simply too broad to be a tenable concept, given that it can be applied to any and all endeavours seeking to improve the human condition. Not least of which are works of creative imagination like filmmaking or fiction-writing: Northrop Frye characterized literature as “collective utopian dreaming,” in which even the bleakest and most nihilistic dystopian ideation is, in the act of its creation, a utopian gesture.

Or to put my point more succinctly: utopian thought is a necessary precondition for dystopian dreaming.

But what does this have to do with Barbie? You might well ask.

Or perhaps not: the utopian elements of Barbie are quite straightforward. Or they start out that way, at any rate. Barbie lives in Barbieland with all the other Barbies who have been iterations of the original doll: Barbies of every race and ethnicity, Barbies of every body type, Barbies of every profession. Barbie is the embodiment of capable, competent, accomplished womanhood. This enviable state of being is of course reflective of Barbie’s evolution, as she kept pace with societal change—or, more accurately, as feminist inroads in mainstream culture made it profitable for Mattel™ to create a far more diverse range of Barbies.

Barbieland as presented in the film, it is immediately apparent, is an idealized space of play. It is where Barbie and all the other Barbies exist in the imaginations of the little girls for whom they’re made.[1] It is also, crucially, a space of stasis: Gerwig communicates as much in our introduction to Barbieland, which features Barbie going through her routine of rising, dressing, “eating,” and driving around her sun-drenched pink environs in which all the different Barbies live their similarly perfect Barbie lives.

The discordant note entering this perfect harmony is change, which seeps in from the Real World. Barbie suddenly has thoughts of death, courtesy of her real-world owner—whom we learn isn’t the daughter Sasha but the mother Gloria, who has taken to playing with the Barbie doll out of a sort of sad nostalgia as Sasha grows out of her childhood innocence into the fiercely cynical and sarcastic adolescent intelligence that all adults fear. Thoughts of mortality precipitate change for Barbie: her feet, previously perfectly shaped to her high heels, flatten out; her breakfast “milk” goes sour; and, horror of horrors, she develops a scintilla of cellulite.

On learning that these changes are the result of Real World problems intruding on the Barbieland reality, Barbie is puzzled. We fixed the Real World, she says—the proliferation of Barbies of all races and professions showed that women can be and do anything, and thus resolved all those pesky issues.

This moment, which seems at first glance a comic expression of Barbie’s naivety, is key to the film’s utopian critique. For one thing, it skewers the naïve utopianism—the idea that making the Barbie line inclusive and aspirational substantively effects women’s empowerment—that animates the Barbie brand.

At the same time however it more subtly recognizes the utopian impulse of play and imagination. The point isn’t that an inspirational doll can effect systemic change, but that it opens a conceptual space in which to do so imaginatively. Fredric Jameson refined Northrop Frye’s assertion about art and literature as collective utopian dreaming, stating that it functions to resolve—symbolically and imaginatively—unresolvable real-world contradictions. Gerwig’s film is very aware of its corporate and consumerist framework; no amount of irony or satire changes the fact that Mattel™ signed off on it, and that, for all its subversive tweaks, it still functions as an extended advertisement for a doll that started as an idealization of white, blonde femininity (and no matter how lacerating Sasha’s speech was about Barbie’s pernicious effects on women’s body images, she’s still wearing a pink dress by the end). These, indeed, are the contradictions at the heart of Barbie; Gerwig, to her great credit, makes no attempt to resolve them in a facile manner or otherwise paper over them. As I said at the outset, Barbie ending the movie working for Mattel™ would have been just such a facile resolution.

Instead, Barbie contrasts the brittle fragility of naïve utopianism with the more complex utopian impulse: Gloria’s nostalgic play with the Barbie doll which precipitates the action proceeds from sadness and loss. Perhaps this is why it intrudes on Barbie’s perfect world—not the sort of play that imagines an ideal future, but which mourns the passing of an ephemeral past. One imagines however that for Gloria it is, for lack of a better word, therapeutic. It symbolically resolves the contradiction of what she wishes for her daughter’s future and what she misses from her past.

Nor is there any delusion on Gloria’s part that she can freeze that past in time. When Barbie later tells her that she just didn’t want anything to change, America Ferrera’s expression—sad, fond, wistful—and her intonation of “Oh, honey” articulates the film’s thematic crux. The naïve utopianism of Barbieland is naïve specifically because it imagines its stasis to be the ideal. The pernicious element in utopian thought lies in seeing it as an achievable end and that end as eternal and unchanging. Complicating the distinction between utopia and dystopia is how each contains the seed of the other. How many dystopian narratives begin in what initially seems like a perfect society? How many dystopian narratives are thinly-veiled fantasies about collapsing our arid and trivial modernity and replacing it with something authentic and primal?

It makes sense that Barbieland will continue on, restored from the Kens’ abortive experiment with patriarchy, continuing to be a space of fantasy and utopia and populated with whatever new Barbies Mattel™ creates. That Barbie herself leaves it behind to be human makes narrative sense—she’s not about to be satisfied with her old life—but also thematic sense. The film establishes Barbieland’s utopianism not just as an imagined space, but a space of creation in which fantasy takes physical form. The ending in this respect allegorizes growth and change. Possibly Barbie will have a child of her own, possibly not, but one way or another she will age and die, with each day being different from the previous.

KENDNOTES

1. “But what about Ken?” There’s a whole lot that could be said about the way the film depicts Ken (Ryan Gosling et al), but the principal point is that Ken was created to be ancillary to Barbie, and therefore that is what he is in Barbieland.He was always a concession to heteronormativity, a necessary male partner, but one who could never (a) overshadow Barbie, (b) be anything but bland and asexual, and (c) therefore have nothing approaching a real personality. Ken’s existential ennui proceeds from this indeterminate status that doesn’t allow him to have any real purpose and precludes any possibility that he may consummate his “relationship” with Barbie.

As our narrator (Helen Mirren) tells us in the opening sequence, Ken exists solely for Barbie; his only purpose is to be noticed by Barbie. This, of course, along with Ken’s ruinous (and hilarious) importation of patriarchy into Barbieland in the film’s second half, has not unpredictably gotten under the skin of the usual suspects in the culture wars. For all their sturm und drang (e.g. Ben Shapiro burning a stack of Barbies, dudebros losing their shit over Justin Trudeau and his son posing in pink at the theatre), I suspect that much of the angst proceeds from indignation over Ken’s relegation, seeing it as the film’s wholesale dismissal of men as useless rather than an astute observation about Ken’s literal role in the Barbie mythos.