Between Plastic and Profound: Barbie’s Postfeminist Makeover in a Metamodern World
Article - Aleks Jenner
Dissecting Barbie's Metamodernist Journey: How Does Gerwig's Massive Commercial Success Engage with Postfeminist Neoliberalism, Consumerist Culture, and the Contradictions of a Capitalist Spectacle? Or How to Mansplain Barbie in 2000 Words.
Warning: Contains Spoilers
Illustration: Hanna Finstad / PRESSET.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
Ryan Gosling’s Ken suffers among the proletariat in a society ruled by mindless consumerism, not even aware of the wealth inequality that surrounds him. The capital owning Barbie’s live in mansions while the Ken worker class toils in menial and meaningless jobs (Beach). The gender hierarchy that puts Ken at the bottom is so ingrained in the cultural common sense that he’s totally blind to his own exploitation, living under false consciousness. With his sense of self tied to attention and validation from Margot Robbie’s stereotypical Barbie, he doggedly follows on her quest to regain the perfect beauty and eternal youth that characterises her race of toy metaphor mythical beings.
Barbie and Ken experience the culture shock of exploring the real world for the first time. Where Ken finds a newfound sense of self respect, Barbie develops only a generalised self anxiety. It’s clear that Barbieland is an allegorical mirror of western society, a Mattel-branded parody world where gender relations are swapped.
Stuff happens, the two get split up, and Ken takes the knowledge he learned from his time in the real world, and shares the counter-ideology back in Barbieland, mounting a successful revolution off-screen. As so often happens in history, the uprising only replaced one oppressive and unequal hierarchy with another.
During this coup, Barbie meets her creators to ask for more life, Bladerunner replicant style. After running through an endless Matrix corridor she has a decidedly more cottagecore meeting with the Oracle stand-in, reflecting on the complex and unpredictable nature of reality. Cue a Chevrolet commercial disguised as a car chase, and Barbie makes her way to the third act, to confront Ken and rescue her world from the frat-style patriarchy of brewski-beers, introduced to us for the first time through a version of Top Gun’s volleyball scene, except sanitised of the homoerotic undertone.
Metamodernism and other cultural sensibilities
If we’re to see Ken’s story through a lens of irony, then the opposite is true for Barbie. Her character development is entirely sincere, as she goes on a journey of self-discovery to explore the nature of an unknowable yet profoundly unfair world. Director Greta Gerwig treats this coming of age meta-narrative with sensitivity, and Robbie’s performance really humanises the doll character, and we can connect with her on a personal level, until we realise that Barbie is a part human chosen one, come to forgive the sins of her world and teach people how to live virtuously before finally ascending to a higher fucking plane of existence.
The godfather of metamodernism, cultural theorist Timotheus Vermeulen wrote an essay about the influence of author David Foster Wallace on post-postmodern storytelling. He uses the term “credulous metafiction” to describe the technique of using elements of postmodern form to reject postmodern content.
“Postmodern form here includes self-reflexivity, intertextuality, formal play, pastiche and a generalized irony. The rejection of postmodern content more often than not takes the shape of a return to pre-postmodern values and commitments.” (2021)
And wow, this movie has all that stuff: The narrator breaks the fourth wall to say “Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.”, the film opens with a not so subtle intertextual homage to 2001, and Barbie has to choose a literal Birkenstock branded matrix red pill to leave her artificial world for the real one, at the peak of intensity, the beach landing battle scene (filmed with a small shutter angle à la Saving Private Ryan) turns into a choreographed dance number on a soundstage, I mean, the entire premise of Barbieland is pastiche, and there is most definitely a pervasive irony permeating through the film, challenging and subverting traditional meanings, cultural values, and expectations.
So what of rejecting postmodern content then? Well, postmodernism rose in part as a critique of neoliberal consumerism, and Barbie is a toy commercial that made the studio $1,5 billion. Need I say more?
Another quotation from Vermeulen, "Metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naivety and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” (2010)
To negotiate doing both credulous metafiction and grand narrative Barbie moves back and forth between the two, giving each the space to breathe and develop without getting in the way of the other. The film oscillates between sincerity and irony, creating a tension that is both cynically funny and emotionally genuine. It’s the metamodern mixing of opposing attitudes that is at the centre of this film.
Crush the revolution
The third act of the film deals with Barbie rescuing everyone from the patriarchy that Ken brought with him from the real world. But since gendered power structures in Barbieland are mirrored, what we’re really seeing is revolution and cultural awakening from the side of the oppressor. When you understand that, you begin to feel a kind of anti-protest tone, where the Barbie government-in-exile uses methods of state terrorism to quell civil unrest. Drive-by abductions by boiler clad operatives for deprogramming is a little sinister, but exploiting their newfound sexuality and agency to lie and psychologically manipulate the Ken’s into infighting is less empowering than it is cynical.
Ken shares his feelings with Barbie in his first moment of true vulnerability, singing “And I don’t know if I’ve ever been really loved, by a hand that’s touched me” into the ironic chorus “I wanna push you down, well I will, well I will, I want to take you for granted, well I will, well I will,”
A narrator tells us “and at the peak of their happiness, take it all away.” And lo, having given him the validation and audience that he’s craved, Barbie diverts it to another Ken and creates sexual rivalry. Create an artificial scarcity of the social currency of attention and commodify affection for every Barbie-Ken pairing until you have two opposing factions: the Ken’s with, and the Ken’s without. Using selective benefit to sow division and create disorganisation is a classic strike-breaking technique, just saying.
The psyop worked, and the stilettoed boot stomped the Marxist revolution. The radical reshaping of culture was undone, and as the populist champion of the common woman, reactionary Barbie returns Barbieland to the traditional social and relational values of an earlier golden age. Class uprising couldn’t be allowed to threaten national unity. Barbie, you may not control the railways, but you’re still a fascist.
And of course everyone learned something along the way! President Barbie declared “I don’t think that things should go back to the way they were. No barbie or ken should be living in the shadows.” It’s a nice sentiment, except that nobody actually learned anything. Traditional power structures were reinstated, the Ken’s were evicted onto the streets, and when they asked for representation on the Supreme Court that request is denied.
Rather than criticise this as mixed messaging, I actually see it as an elegant meta commentary on how groups seeking equal representation invariably get pushed into a deal shitty enough to not make meaningful differences. At least the Ken’s got the consolation prize of being encouraged to discover who they are, which is…wait, where else did addressing systemic inequalities become obfuscated by a narrative of individualism and personal responsibility? The last 50 years of America, that’s where. This is some real galaxy brained stuff from director/writer Gerwig.
Consumerist Reels and Neoliberal Ideals
Remember though, that this film is a Hollywood studio’s $300million investment, and the requirement of mainstream appeal demands content to be advertiser friendly and broadly inline with the values of corporate partners trying to sell toys. It’s branded entertainment, a fun celebration of consumerist culture, and I love it for that, even if I hadn’t expected that I’d now be spending so much time thinking about it.
But since I am thinking about it, I’ll think about how the pressures and influences of the studio system influenced certain creative choices, and where there might be moments of compromise. The impassioned speech by America Ferrara’s character about life's many contradictions, for example. What it does is use rhetorical enumeration to illustrate women’s societal pressures, making reference to body image, motherhood, career, etc., which is cool, but it also uses superficial cliché’s and surface level generalisations, which simplifies the issues and the complex emotions that stem from them. Maybe it had to be kept simple, without room for counter-narrative or intersectional perspective to complicate things with subtlety or nuance.
What’s the point of highlighting women’s challenges without also discussing the broader structures that create those very challenges? Why does it feel so individualistic? Where are the collective solutions? It reminds me of neoliberalism, only gendered. Hmm, gendered neoliberalism, I wonder if there’s a name for that?
Yes, of course there is, it’s called postfeminism you fool.
“these core features of postfeminism… include the emphasis upon individualism, choice and agency; the disappearance – or at least muting – of vocabularies for talking about both structural inequalities and cultural influence.” Sociologist Rosalind Gill (2017)
If you want to criticise unrealistic beauty standards, then you’d better also criticise the consumerist culture that creates that societal expectation. The need to appear and the commodification of self worth is the cause, and these are manifestations of the neoliberal common sense. Resilience and self-actualisation won’t solve systemic problems. A for description, C- for prescription.
Overall, It’s pretty good. much better than oppenheimer
Barbie, then, is a cinematic paradox. On the one hand, it deconstructs societal power structures and examines gender dynamics, but on the other it remains firmly tethered to the capitalist culture that spawned it. It’s in line with the postfeminist and neoliberal sensibility that avoids challenging the capitalist structures that benefit from the consumerism the movie perpetuates. But it’s fun and colourful and has relatable jokes so I don’t really care.
And that seems to be the consensus, that the film is smart, funny, and creative. The acting, set design, costumes, and soundtrack deserve special mention. Ken’s story is a self aware and culturally relevant metaphor for young men confused and disillusioned by the contradictions of society becoming seduced by patriarchal ideology. It would be poignant, except that if “Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point”, then so is Ryan Gosling.
For me, that self-aware masterstroke of a casting choice represents the big irony of the film. Ken isn’t just a pastiche of the oft misinterpreted Hollywood anti-hero, but a fully realised incarnation. Behind the films jokes is the story of a man grappling with his identity, seeking validation not just from Barbie, but also from an indifferent society that doesn’t care about his internal struggles. Gosling plays Ken like in Drive or Bladerunner 2049, where a deep longing and lie beneath an assured and stoic exterior that leads him down the path of becomming literally me.
Constrained by the studio system, Greta Gerwig couldn’t have been expected to achieve profound critique with Barbie, but she did a damn fine job of threading the needle of expectation. That’s the inherent limitation of broad appeal, but it’s also precisely what lies at the heart of Barbie, as a product and as a cultural icon. The brand is a blank slate that allows room for a myriad of interpretations and meaning making to take place. It’s a film truly of the moment, and undoubtedly the film of 2023.
References
Akker, R. V. D., & Vermeulen, T. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2, 1-14.
Gill, R. (2017). The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: A postfeminist sensibility 10 years on. European journal of cultural studies, 20(6), 606-626.
Vermeulen, T. (2021). Wallace After Postmodernism (Again): Metamodernism, Tone, Tennis. English Literature, 105.