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Barbie & The Mirror of Feminist Storytelling
It shows us how we are, rather than tells us how to be
Crystal Andrews
July 26, 2023
As was highly requested by subscribers and readers, this is a feminist analysis of the Barbie movie. It’s long, but if I was going to do this at all I wanted to do it right and well. Before you dive in, some quick housekeeping notes:
Zee Feed is 110% in support of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (story coming soon). I’m about to spend 2500 words talking about art, so I hope it goes without saying that the people who make it deserve to be paid & protected.
You don’t have to watch the movie before reading this, but it probably works best if you do. If you plan to see Barbie but haven’t yet, save this email and come back to it. Spoilers from about the ¼ mark.
This is an analysis of the feminist ideas presented in the movie, not a movie review. I’m not saying whether Barbie is good or bad as a movie or whether you should see it. I liked it, but it’s up to you!
The Barbie movie as a story is independent from the marketing machine around the movie. I’m focusing on the story alone, but this essay on The Unpublishable is excellent commentary about how the marketing campaign undercuts the movie’s message.
Alright, that’s all – here’s the piece.
The Reflective Feminism of Barbie Shows Us How We Are
Stories are the most powerful political tool in human history. I’m not joking or exaggerating about that. We use stories to entertain, sure, but also to preserve our own history, to teach lessons, find solutions to problems, or make our experience of reality more easily understood. When it comes to feminist storytelling I think there are essentially two categories: teaching us how to be or showing us how we are.
So I watched Barbie, thought about it a bunch, and then listened to heaps of women talk about why they either loved the movie or felt let down by it. The determining factor seems to be what you expected, or wanted, the narrative purpose of this story to be.
Those who were frustrated or disliked the movie seemed to think that stories should show us how to navigate problems. It’s a view of storytelling as a guide for “how to be”, like parables and fables do. Here’s an example: despite the absurd universes in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, it’s quite instructional. As Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) goes from miserable and trapped to hopeful and a bit less trapped, we learn a lesson alongside her: let go of what ‘could have been’ to find fulfilment in the present; there is no pre-determined purpose or destined path, you create your life through your own actions. Here’s another: Promising Young Woman tells us that taking justice in your own hands will get results – though it will come with a very high price, and may not look like the justice you imagined.
Both are great stories, both are feminist.
Barbie is not instructive. It does not propose a strategy to fix or survive patriarchy. Barbie is a mirror. It reflects our current reality, using storytelling to make that reality more easily understood.
There are lots of feminist films that reflect an experience of the world back to us: Ava DuVernay’s Selma; Jennifer’s Body by Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody; Girlhood and Tomboy, both from French director Céline Sciamma. In different genres and styles, they comment on what is, without directly providing a ‘moral of the story’.
As a director, Greta Gerwig has done this before with Lady Bird. The relationship between Christine (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalfe) is brutally combative, tense, characterised by one yearning for tenderness while the other throws a jab where she knows it will hurt. Lady Bird does not provide a model for what a healthy mother-daughter relationship looks like, but it does portray exactly what many mother-daughter relationships in the 21st Century feel like. While Christine thanks and apologises to her mum in the end we’re not explicitly shown what the impact of this gesture is. Does Marion accept the apology and Christine’s decision to move away? Do they ever speak again? Does apologising heal Christine a little bit, or does she regret it? We’ll never know. It doesn’t matter.
All that matters to Lady Bird is that we see our mothers (“I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be”) and ourselves (“What if this is the best version?”) in loving detail, and understand that relationship a little better than we did before.
** Spoilers from this point on – if that matters to you, come back after you’ve watched! **
Barbie sits in this category of films. No answers, just ruminations. With these kinds of stories, it’s easy to misinterpret the reflection of reality as an endorsement of reality (especially if you’re expecting a take-home message). It’s why a lot of the criticisms made of Barbie match the flaws in our world that the movie intentionally wants us to notice and ruminate on. Things like:
A supposed utopia, Barbieland still casts out those who do not conform, i.e.: Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) and Allan (Michael Cera);
A supposed utopia, Barbieland still has second-class citizens (the Kens). Pre-revolution, the Barbies give very little thought to the wellbeing of these citizens – they don’t even know where the Kens live;
Stereotypical Barbie* (Margot Robbie) did not want Barbieland, where everything works out perfectly for her, to change. She only reluctantly decides to ‘do the work’ when she is told that if she doesn’t, things will get worse for her (“the cellulite will spread”) – her motivation is entirely personal; *I hate the clunkiness of the name ‘Stereotypical Barbie’ so from here on I’m going to refer to her as Barbie Margot.
It’s the outcasts and women of colour outsiders (America Ferrera as Gloria, and Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha) who have to dismantle the Kendom – despite the benefits of this going to Barbies who have done little for them;
Post-revolution, Ken (Ryan Gosling) does not apologise to Barbie Margot for stealing her house and trying to ruin her life, even though she apologises to him for being unkind in stringing him along (that whole ‘men fear women will laugh at them, women fear men will kill them’ thing);
And post-revolution, the Barbies give the outcasts and second-class citizens only token or minimal roles within Barbieland’s power systems and structures, even though Weird Barbie and Allan are largely to thank for restoring order to Barbieland.
These are not blind spots, they are intentional features of the story. We are supposed to recognise them as behaviours we inflict on each other, and reflect on our role in upholding or dismantling them. Whose actions most closely mirror your own? What does that mean?
Viewers who are mad that Barbieland is a vision of deeply flawed feminism are both 100% correct and narrowly missing the point. This matriarchal society is not aspirational. Any corporate feminism that enforces its own supremacy (beauty, wealth, goodness and whiteness) is not a safe, healing or fulfilling alternative to patriarchy. To quote Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Barbie Margot comes to this realisation when she finally understands Ken’s oppression and how it spurred on his angry uprising. Now knowing that restoring female empowerment to Barbieland does not liberate anyone, she graduates from this shallow version of feminism and leaves.
If we were supposed to interpret this as an ideal place for women, Barbie Margot would not choose to leave for the messier and more dangerous real world. We’re not meant to revere Barbieland – we’re meant to recognise it as the place many of us are trapped in.
The end of Barbie is ambiguous in the same way that Lady Bird is. Physically, Barbie Margot is in the real world; metaphorically, we don’t get to find out what that means for her (and therefore, us). That’s to be expected, because this movie is tethered to two mega-corporations, Warner Bros. and Mattel. There’s been a lot of discussion about how much veto power the companies had over the script and overall vision… but I’m not naive. Even the most convincing creative team would be forced by the corporates to end the movie there, because the logic of story arcs tells us exactly what should happen next: Barbie Margot explores a more radical version of feminism!
If that sounds insane, I get it. But Barbie leaving Barbieland to find her place in the grassroots activism of the real world fits perfectly into the Heroine’s Journey narrative structure that female-focused stories often follow – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Katniss in The Hunger Games and Elle in Legally Blonde. According to Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s version of the Heroine’s Journey:
Illusion of the perfect world: Barbie’s life in Barbieland seems perfect.
Betrayal: She begins having thoughts of death and gets flat feet. She learns from Weird Barbie it’s because the girl connected to her in the real world is depressed.
The awakening: She decides to go to the real world to help the girl, and thereby fix her problems in Barbieland.
The descent: In the real world, she is subjected to misogyny and realises that Barbie is not viewed as a saviour.
Eye of the storm: She finds the girl – who is actually an adult woman, Gloria. Meeting Barbie gives Gloria a renewed zest for life. Success! Gloria and her daughter Sasha help Barbie get back home.
All is lost: They arrive to find that Ken has brought patriarchy back to Barbieland, turning it into a Kendom. It’s very bad.
Support: Gloria, Sasha, Allan and Weird Barbie devise and execute a plan to take Barbieland back.
Rebirth: Barbie is glad that she has saved her friends and made them happy, but she is changed by the experience and sees Barbieland differently.
Return to a new world: Barbie chooses to become human and return with Gloria and Sasha to live in the real world, even though she knows this entails pain alongside happiness and eventual death.
The key is the conclusion to the Heroine’s Journey – the protagonist cannot go back. Barbie Margot cannot go back to believing the Barbie-fied version of empowerment is helpful to women.
Even though it’s a nudge-and-wink joke, the fact that the first and only thing we see Barbie Margot do in her new life is go to the gynaecologist does suggest she actively chooses to keep learning. Knowledge is power, and here she is insisting to be fully informed about her own human body. Information she would never have in Barbieland. To me, that’s a hint this Barbie is ready for more radical feminist thinking.
You don’t just learn about the concept of feminism one day and immediately have an advanced, nuanced understanding of it. There are levels to feminist thinking that start out with simplistic ideas about equality. I’ve been in my girlboss era, where I understood feminism to mean that I should also be able to wield capital and power like men do. I don’t believe that any more, but it’s taken years of continual learning to bring me to the understanding that empowerment ≠ liberation. And I won’t stop here. Who knows what epiphanies lie ahead of me on this intellectual journey?
Just like in a university degree, you cannot skip courses – you have to pass 101 before you can graduate to more challenging topics. To remain inclusive and continue to welcome new people to feminist thinking, we still need content and teachers who specialise in the entry-level ideas. A PhD student does not get to insist that because the 101 course is too basic for them, the university should stop teaching it.
The goal is to keep people wanting to learn more and progress them to bigger ideas. From where I stand now, Florence Given’s book Women Don’t Own You Pretty is a shallow, highly commercialised text… but it’s also the way a lot of very young women are initially introduced to ‘baby feminism’. All it needs to do is engage and nudge a person in a more progressive direction, where others can be ready to add layers of complexity, nuance, deconstruction and reconstruction as they go. You can’t do that all on day one.
TikTok user @lesspotter
So, back to Barbie. To analyse the feminist ideas it presents, we have to consider the medium it packages them in. This thing is a blockbuster movie. It is intended for mass reach. Within this mass reach, Barbie’s specific brand also has particular appeal to women who define their identity by the things they consume. Influencers and their audiences drove a lot of the hype pre-release.
The feminist ideas in Barbie are appropriately challenging for a mass audience drawn to a movie about the ideal white woman as a literal product. It is subversive to take a woman as aspirational as Margot Robbie, place her in a girly utopia, then have her practically look the audience dead in the eye and say: “I do not want to be here.”
By putting ideas around empowerment vs liberation, conformity, and self-interested activism in this story, Gerwig is asking viewers to notice them and think about them. Packaged in the Barbie movie, she is reaching people for whom these ideas are new. The goal is to hold up a mirror and wake us up in the exact same way Barbie Margot is awakened, and move us towards more advanced feminist ideas. Going back to being blind would be a mistake – Barbie Margot does not choose this, and nor should you.
But this story refuses to instruct viewers about what to do next. That was never the purpose. Any plot features that stirred a response in you – whether annoyance or curiosity or a deep sense of recognition – are ready to be fully explored. There is a wealth of knowledge out there just waiting, and other people who can guide you through it. You’ve just gotta do that somewhere else, because it’s beyond the scope of a two-hour blockbuster.
Is this a perfect feminist movie? No. Does such a thing exist? No. Is this the perfect feminist movie for where the bulk of its target audience is at in their political understanding of the world? Honestly, I think so. The reason I’ve dedicated 2500 words to the Barbie movie is the same reason, presumably, that Greta Gerwig thought the doll-woman could be an interesting vessel for genuine feminist ruminations: it will reach those who aren’t already thinking about all of this.