Barbie and the Se"Ken"ed Sex
"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me." -Greta Gerwig
It’s no longer rare for indie directors to cash in on their acclaim by making toy commercials for big studios. Taika Waititi of What We Do in the Shadows and Chloé Zhao of Nomadland each directed Marvel movies, and rumor has it that Barry Jenkins has signed on to the Star Wars: Greedo movie. Warner probably chose Greta Gerwig for the Barbie movie because of the popularity of Francis Ha among five- to nine-year-old girls, and it paid off: the film was the biggest opening of the year. Though it was successful as a studio film, Gerwig was obviously more ambitious than some of her peers in working politics into the film, incoherent though they might occasionally be. Barbie is saturated with existential feminism, especially the work of Simone de Beauvoir. The movie can be fruitfully read through the lens of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and even beyond the runtime, so can the career of one of its stars.
De Beauvoir opens Book II of The Second Sex by declaring that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” This statement was revolutionary in the 40s because its inverse was so uncontroversial: the idea that one must “become” a man is common to most cultures, from the circumcision ritual of the Masai to the Bar Mitzvah or the Aboriginal Walkabout.1 In the Disney adaptation, Fa Mulan is able to “be a man” despite her assigned sex because “manliness” is not an essentially biological, but rather cultural trait. The idea that manliness is achieved, not inborn, was never in doubt. The essence of woman, on the other hand, has historically been understood as physical and essential—something one is, rather than something one becomes. In her work, de Beauvoir illuminates how the prescriptions of womanliness, assigned at birth and reinforced culturally and economically, buttress sexual oppression. She accuses women of inauthenticity in the ways they play up their dependence on men, reinforcing patriarchy.
Barbie opens with a brief hagiography of the toy, which Helen Mirren winkingly claims completed feminism. In Barbieland, the president is a woman, as are all nine Supreme Court justices, as are all professionals. Men, Kens and Alan, are limited to the passive, domestic roles that might have once been reserved for female dolls (“beach.”) Unfortunately, as Stereotypical Barbie and Ken2 discover in their sojourn to the Real World, patriarchy persists. Ken learns from a man in Mattel’s lobby that men continue to hold all of the real power (in the movie real world [but not the real real world,] Mattel’s board is entirely male.) He brings this knowledge back to Barbieland, and, just as de Beauvoir noted, the Barbies are immediately convinced to perform an inauthentic domesticity.
However, a straight reading is insufficient here. In Barbieland, Kens/men are a subservient class, a Se“Ken”ed Sex. Thus, though it is overtly a critique of patriarchy, Barbie must simultaneously be read in reverse. The ideology that Gosling’s Ken brings back is a revanchist gender nationalism, though one the film is ultimately unsympathetic to. In support of this theory: when he’s at the library, Ken picks up four books, one of them literally called “Patriarchy”—which it’s hard to imagine is a how-to guide to home installation rather than a feminist critique. Ken’s dissatisfaction with the Kendom—he only really liked it for the horses—is really dissatisfaction with gender-supremacist political action and an implicit endorsement of gender abolition.
The resolution that the Barbies win, after the aborted Kenuary 6th riot, is a return to the status quo, the reimposition of political and economic matriarchy. Barbies return to defining themselves in terms of their jobs: President Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Management Consultant Barbie. Ken, though, has an existential crisis as he realizes that he needs to define himself, that he cannot be “& Ken”—but that to be Just Ken is Kenough. In the flipped reading of the film, this aligns with de Beauvoir’s assertion that women have the responsibility to transcend their circumstances and live authentically. However, in the straight reading of Ken=men, this movie flips the critique and applies it to the crisis of masculinity diagnosed by figures from Richard Reeves to Josh Hawley. It is men—a class that has (as discussed ad nauseam) found itself falling behind women on metrics from sociability to academic achievement that Gerwig claims need help from Barbies to find themselves.
Maybe Ken will read Kierkegaard and Camus and return to help the Barbies transcend their careerism in the sequel.3 Regardless, Ken is not the only man to try to transcend himself in Barbie.
For an A-list heartthrob, Ryan Gosling has played a surprising number of weirdo virgins. In Lars and the Real Girl, he plays a man who believes that his anatomically correct RealDoll is a live woman; in Drive and Only God Forgives, he is a loner with obsessive, if distant, relationships with women caught up in organized crime; in Blue Valentine, though he is married, his relationship is precarious and ultimately self-destructs due to his insecurities. Blade Runner 2049 is incel cinema par excellence: Gosling plays K, a cyborg replicant in love with a virtual assistant, Joi (the significance of her name is left as an exercise for the reader.) Replicants are essentially impotent, unable to reproduce, and K’s attempt to have sex with Joi requires her to be awkwardly superimposed over a prostitute. She is eventually destroyed, only for Gosling to be reminded by an enormous advertisement that she was an infinitely replaceable product.
Of course, Gosling is better known for his roles as heartthrob love interests. His life is defined by his relationship with Rachel McAdams in The Notebook and his role in Crazy Stupid Love is literally to lecture The Game to Steve Carrell—to teach him how to be a Chad.4 And in the real world, Ryan Gosling is literally turning down “Sexiest Man Alive” awards.5
Ken does not fit neatly on one side of the virgin/Chad dialectic. Rather, he is its synthesis: he begins Barbie as a virgin, scorned by Margot Robbie, then makes himself into a John Hughes villain with his imposition of patriarchy on Barbieland. Still, this is ultimately unfulfilling—again, he was only really into it for the horses—and the resolution is for him to realize his own self-worth, independent of Barbie. Ryan Gosling so frequently plays either “woman & Ryan,” or his social and romantic failures define him as “woman minus Ryan.” In Barbie, he’s just Ryan—and that is Ryanough.
I hope that when Barbie 2 is churned out it continues to progress the Mattelial dialectic. Maybe the Barbies will realize that political emancipation and representation on the Supreme Court are not sufficient ends for feminism and will seize the means of production from Will Ferrell. Maybe they’ll read The Cyborg Manifesto—plastic and metal aren’t all that different—and reject rigid boundaries between Barbie and Ken. If Warner can make the UNO movie engage with French philosophy this deeply, then the MCU is bound to be an enduring franchise.6
Many female rituals are based around sexual maturity, in contrast with the male rituals’ determination of prudence or courage.
Stereotypical Barbie and Ken, played by a blond Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie, are accused of being fascist by Ariana Greenblatt’s character. Although Robbie refutes that she controls neither the railways nor the flow of commerce, the transition scene where they bike through Holland does evoke the “volk…”
Übermensch Barbie and Knight of Faith Ken would hardly be more obscure than Proust Barbie.
That this works demonstrates that one is not born, but rather becomes, Chad.
La La Land is the one Gosling movie I’ve seen other than Barbie that doesn’t really engage in this dichotomy.
The Mattel Cinematic Universe, which will bring beloved IPs like Magic 8 Ball and View Master to the big screen in the near future.
now do transformers