Sweet, energetic, and entertaining, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a delightfully camp blockbuster that I thoroughly enjoyed. The cinematography is excellent, the colour palette is perfect, and the actors are a treat. However, I did find its feminist thesis to be lacking. Although I acknowledge that the film is in itself a comedy which does not aim to solve social justice and functions primarily as entertainment, it still does construct a social, feminist commentary, which is why I found it fitting to utilise as a stimulus for analysing the deficiencies of pop-feminism culturally, as well as within myself.
Barbie offers its female characters the space and opportunity to muse on their condition and on the pains of being a woman, such as the contradictions of having to be extraordinary (attractive, successful, loving, kind, assertive) and yet contained, the ideal being achieving or conforming to a personal excellence that concomitantly is appeasing, controllable and tameable; yet never too much — not too powerful, nor too intimidating or destabilising.
A message of: Shine, but do not shine too much.
In my personal journey, I have recently been reflecting on my self-punishing tendencies and on my self-images of having to always be kind, never angered or envious, and, while watching Barbie, I was moved listening to the monologues of the female characters, and saw more clearly how much of my own ruptures in my identity are the legacy of having been conditioned and socialised as female growing up.
“I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie ourselves into knots so that people will like us.” America Ferrera as Gloria in Barbie.
Indeed, I have found that men are less likely to have intense hang-ups around emotions such as anger, as it is viewed as more acceptable for them to express it. However, this binary contracts all gendered expressions, as male conditioning stereotypically also rejects its own emotional range of vulnerability and openness.
The human condition is such that we all are continuously split and stretched within between who we think we should be and who we truly are. We perpetually hide, repress, contort, and harm ourselves to mould into ideals and images which we innocently construct by absorbing various messages from society, culture, history. The Barbies are given the chance to see through the mirage of constriction, the Kens are not (which, in part, saddened me), however, neither fully glimpse through into the ultimate bondage: that of the gendered self.
To successfully break through the suffering caused by female conditioning, a deconstruction of the very concept of femaleness as a rigid reality must ultimately occur — along with a deep dive into gender as a construct, both which are unfortunately glossed over in Barbie, and, on a greater scale, in pop-feminism. In my understanding, complete liberation cannot be achieved while still operating in the gender binary, which is to be dismantled within in order to open to freedom from all self-images, internal conflicts and constrictions.
Barbie both delighted me with its vibrancy, playfulness and beauty, and also reminded me that, as a woman myself, I must push through myself more for my liberation.
My arguments are based on the work of feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir (see: The Second Sex), as well as on the precepts of non-dual ‘Eastern’ philosophy.
amaryllis 