Dr Barbie or How I Learned to Love the Toy Commercial
Barbie was fun. The sets were fun, the songs were fun, and the jokes were fun. It had a cotton-candy colour palette with cotton-candy feminism to match. America Ferrera's speech reminded me of hashtag #feminism101 posts I reblogged on Tumblr in 2012. I didn’t have to enjoy watching Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster despite misogyny. I just enjoyed it as the light-hearted fare it was. It said the ‘P’ word - multiple times!
I didn’t write this essay because I don’t like Barbie. I wrote this essay because it’s clear many people felt Barbie with almost reverent fanaticism. They didn’t just like Barbie because it was fun to dress up and get drunk with the girls at. They didn’t like Barbie for its design or cinematography or direction. They attached to Barbie as a feminist symbol instead. In their eyes, the Academy’s “snub” of it from the categories of best director and best actress wasn’t disrespectful of good filmmaking or technical craft. It was a snub of feminism itself.
Hillary Clinton tweets her support
People on Twitter went viral for saying that “outrage was growing” because of Barbie’s “depressing” and “kind of fucked” snub. Media soon followed. Screenrant published an essay arguing that “Barbie’s 2 Shocking Oscars Snubs Prove the Movies Point (in the worst entire way)”. Glamour reported the snub as “maddening” “repressive” and “downright sexist”.
Other people argued that The Academy had snubbed Barbie because the male Oscar voters were mad women made a film about misogyny. The Hollywood Reporter considered the old male film guard had simply prioritised gravitas, dismissing Barbie as “a movie about a toy”. Mary McNamara, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, opined that perhaps too many women enjoyed Barbie for it to be considered important to Academy voters. “Was it just too pink?” she wrote. Marvel star Simu Liu wrote Gerwig and Robbie “started a movement”. Barbie, as one tweeter commented, is a “modern day feminist text”.
These reactions to it made me wonder if we’d watched the same movie. To me, Barbie is a fun and frilly film. But to its biggest fans, Barbie depicts the feminist struggle so deeply and accessibly that even light critique of it is seen as “elitist”. Unlike recent feminist masterpieces like Saint Omer or Never Rarely Sometimes, Barbie instigated a cultural feminist hysteria while having politics that could’ve been lifted from Cosmo. Mattel, a company notorious for abusing its low-income, mostly women workers, produced it. How did Barbie achieve its status as part of feminist cinema’s essential canon?
The answer can be found in how capitalism turns consumption into a political act while mass-producing only the most palatable products. Theodor Adorno wrote that when capitalism develops to a certain point, cultural artifacts become produced in a standardised way. Capitalism has always required its outputs to return maximum profitability. As a result, the profit motive shapes and determines the art we engage with.
Crucially, this means that only profitable art gets produced. But profitable art isn’t necessarily good art. Good art has to be more than what makes us feel good. Good art should be challenging, spontaneous and novel. Martin Scorsese infamously and correctly wrote that cinema is an art form as it brings you the unexpected. But profitability requires palatability. And what better way to guarantee your product’s consumable than to standardise profitable cultural outputs and create an assembly line of guaranteed moneymakers?
Barbie is essentially a toy advertisement. Its primary commercial purpose is to sell Barbie dolls and other merchandised goods - of which there are many. Mattel modeled itself after Marvel in this regard. Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards wrote in their book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios that Marvel made Israeli-born toy-maker Avi Arad chief executive of Marvel’s entertainment division in 1993 to make movies that would sell products. “Putting a toy designer in charge of Marvel Films,” the authors write, “made clear what Marvel wanted out of Hollywood: shows and movies that would help them sell more toys.” It heralded the rise of what writers Sam Adler-Bell and Becca Rothfeld describe as “toyetic” cinema, or cinema that exists as product advertisements. Toyetic movies can’t be too dark or discomforting. Adler-Bell writes that “Marvel IP yielded several successful films, but these, including the Blade movies starring Wesley Snipes and Bryan Singer’s X-Men franchise, were seen as needlessly dark and adult by Marvel’s toy-focused c-suite.” Marvel shifted to making its own films so it could “keep the on-screen tone toy-friendly and ensure that each movie starred whatever lineup of heroes would move the most action figures,” Robinson, Gonzales, and Edwards write.
Studios make toyetic cinema because it’s profitable. Since 2008, Marvel earned over 30 billion dollars for its 33 movies. After Barbie’s release, Mattel saw a 27% jump in toy sales.
But - toyetic movies can’t really be art. They’re not allowed to truly challenge, surprise, or discomfort audiences. They can only incorporate critiques of patriarchy or racism insofar as those critiques don’t challenge sales. Gerwig does this in Barbie: Vox critic Alissa Wilkinson writes that it’s “just about as subversive as a movie can be while still being produced by one of its targets.” But this isn’t really “subversion” so much as what Adorno described as “pseudo-individuation,” or a process through which mass cultural products are endowed with the illusion of individuality. Gerwig winking at capitalism’s existence permits consumers to forget that what they’re watching is ultimately a standardised product, or, per Adorno, “pre-digested.” You can only make audiences think until it makes them question whether they want to buy Marvel or Mattel’s plastic junk.
This becomes clear in Gerwig’s non-materialist depiction of patriarchy. She typifies the patriarchy in Barbie with low commitment casual girlfriendom, cat-calling and male executives. Characters destroy patriarchy through grand speeches about the nuances of womanhood and female CEOs. In Barbie, the patriarchy isn’t located in the denial of personhood within the confines of the nuclear family. It’s not an oppressive force that defines women’s lives by the performance of thousands of hours of unpaid reproductive labour. Instead, patriarchy is something women can fight through individual choice and empowerment within existing institutions. The smartest part of Barbie was Gerwig positioning the Barbies to realise they’d been oppressing Kens.
Most damningly, Barbie sees the patriarchy as a system that hurts all women equally, pitting all women against all men. The patriarchy isn’t filtered through prisms of racialisation, colonisation and imperialism. In reality, these forces lead to even greater gendered violence against both racialised women and men. Powerful white women like Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright often order this violence themselves. This blind spot around pseudo-individuation leads to Barbieland’s feminist utopia having a female Mt. Rushmore: a structure carved in the real world by a Ku Klux Klan member on a sacred Native American site to break their spirits. The real issue with Mount Rushmore isn’t that it left out the women colonists.
Pseudo-individualisation is only half the picture. As the reaction to its ‘snub’ shows, Barbie became a symbol of feminist resistance to many upper middle class white women in the imperial core. This is because consumption has replaced production in the first world as the dominant political battleground. Neoliberalism sees traditional forms of collective organising eschewed by “voting with your dollar.” As far back as 1996, critic Daniel Mendelsohn argued neoliberalism reduced gay identity to little more than a selection of product choices. This neoliberal swell has encompassed feminist storytelling as well.
Barbie’s advertisers marketed it as a feminist film. They established it as a product you can express a feminist politic through by simply consuming and evangelizing it. And how lucky we are that its offerings are so mild. We don’t need to think too hard or question our complicity in the systems of oppression that we benefit from. We don’t have to take to the street to demand better. We definitely don’t have to think about how, as we debate this, the rate of miscarriages in Gaza have skyrocketed by 300%. Gerwig pre-digested our critique and refracts it back to us as something readily consumable. All we have to do to be politically righteous is eat it.
Filmmakers and actors gave us much more interesting work about patriarchy this year, like Killers of the Flower Moon or Anatomy of a Fall. But those films’ directors and marketers did not market their works as movies you can express your feminism through by buying a ticket to. Maybe seeing a film about a women-led revolutionary third worldist militia leading an attack on the White House is too much to expect from a blockbuster. But doesn’t feminism deserve better than a glorified toy commercial?
Lucy Birds is a Marxist feminist based in Tāmaki Makaurau who hates it when people enjoy things