All the “Barbie” Hot Takes

Also: Dominic Green on the blues, California’s outdoor bookstore, Bill Buckley’s travel writing, and more.

Still from “Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig.

I don’t know why I am doing this, but something has possessed me to provide a quick rundown of all—well, not all, but several—of the Barbie takes that have been published over the last few days. (If this sounds like hell to you, scroll down to the break, where you’ll find Dominic Green on the blues, Matthew Continetti on Bill Buckley’s travel writing, an image of the day, and much more.)

First, there is Helen Andrews in The American Conservative, who argues that Barbie is about the gift of growing old. She notes that Greta Gerwig co-wrote Barbie with her partner, Noah Baumbach, whose films are about how terrible youth is:

The only redeeming thing about youth, in a Baumbach movie, is that it’s the way to become old. His debut, Kicking and Screaming (1995), came out when Baumbach was 26 years old but all the best lines in it are about how much he would prefer to be at least 56 years old. “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now.” Even the climactic love scene is about age . . . When Baumbach joined up with his muse Gerwig, he added another theme to his dissection of youth: how careless young people are about hurting others.

Here’s Andrews’ takeaway from the film:

Barbie is a symbol of youth, beauty, and possibility. She can be anything, and everyone is drawn to her. But it’s all meaningless because the reason she’s so beautiful and perfect is that nothing has ever happened to Barbie. All the meaning in life comes from the things that give you wrinkles.

When she comes to the real world, Barbie finds herself on a bench at a bus stop next to a grandmotherly looking old lady. She has never seen an elderly woman before. No one ages in Barbie Land. Barbie gazes at her face and says, “You’re so beautiful.” The woman smiles and says, “I know it.”

According to Gerwig, studio executives wanted her to cut the scene, because it doesn’t move the plot along. She told them, “If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.”

In The New Statesman, Pravina Rudra argues that progressive critiques of the film, mostly by men, miss the mark. The film doesn’t objectify women—or not exactly. What it does, Rudra argues, is make feminism feminine again:  

Progressive men often think that feminism is defined by the idea that women can be just as interested in politics, sports and other stereotypically male endeavours as men. But feminism should also ensure stereotypically “female” interests are taken as seriously as male ones. That would involve emotional significance and aesthetics being afforded weight too – not treated, as Barbie mania has been, as childish or superficial. Men who wrestle or play Fantasy Football aren’t considered Neanderthal, so why should women who like pink or who find comfort in contouring their face each morning be seen as airheads? . . . I don’t want to go back to a world where it’s assumed women only want to talk about make-up and boys. But I also don’t want women to have to give up their fantasies for fear of being viewed as, quite literally, “doll”: all beauty and no brains. It’s not that Barbie is feminist – more that to be anti-Barbie doesn’t make you feminist either.

The poet and critic Katha Pollitt doesn’t buy it. The message of the film, she writes in The Nation, “is that girls can be anything” but “still have to be gorgeous” while doing it:

The centerpiece of the movie is a glorious rant by Gloria (America Ferrara), a Mattel receptionist and mother of a very sullen Barbie-hating middle schooler, about the many double binds in which women find themselves: “You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people.…You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.”

The ultimate irony of this very wink-wink-ironic movie is that it exemplifies that double bind itself. Even in Barbie Land, there is no Frumpy Barbie, no Too-Busy to Care About My Hair Barbie, no I Hate to Shop Barbie, no Don’t Bother Me I’m Writing Barbie. The message of Barbie is that girls can be anything, but you still have to be gorgeous while you’re doing it. Even Weird Barbie, whose hair has been chopped off and whose face is covered with crayon scribbles, is adorable.

Grace Segers sees a double bind, too, in her review of the film at The New Republic:

Is this self-aware struggle against a rather obvious manifestation of the Patriarchy enough to exorcize the oppressive ideals that have hung around Barbie for decades? The movie lovingly depicts Barbie’s routine as a source of fun rather than of intense pressure, reveling in her commitment to pink, the intensive grooming, the frequent changes in hairstyles and outfits. And it strives to show that Robbie’s Barbie is not the only version of the doll in Barbie Land: She is surrounded by Barbie friends of different races, sizes, body shapes, and physical ability (one of the Barbies uses a wheelchair). The president of Barbie Land is a Black woman, played by Issa Rae, and its Supreme Court is entirely female.

Yet at times, Barbie risks veering into what critic Maureen Ryan identifies as “plastic representation”—the idea that it is enough to have characters of diverse backgrounds without providing any cultural context for their experiences. In the Real World, America Ferrera portrays the film’s avatar of an everyday woman, an overworked mom named Gloria who works as an executive assistant at Mattel. We see Gloria struggle with bills, the everyday sexism of her boss, and the increasing disinterest of her teenage daughter. Toward the middle of the movie, Gloria gives a rousing speech about the suffocating ordeal of being a woman, a sort of G-rated version of the “cool girl” monologue in Gone Girl. But without the acknowledgment of how being working class and Latina particularly complicates those experiences, the argument feels somewhat hollow.

She also doesn’t care for Ken:

But the biggest problem with Barbie may be Ken. When he travels to the Real World with Barbie, he is not dismayed by the Patriarchy but buoyed by it. Back in the female-dominated Barbie Land, Ken was the underdog. “I think a lot of Kens will feel seen when they see this. Gotta do it for the Kens. No one plays with the Kens,” Gosling told Variety last year. As Ken sings in a plaintive ballad, “Anywhere else, I’d be a 10.” When he reaches the Real World, he is enchanted by the trappings of masculinity, and returns to Barbie Land intent on turning it into another bastion of male pride and power.

To its credit, the film attempts to illustrate that the Patriarchy is a trap for men as well as women, also subjecting them to unrealistic standards and preventing them from cultivating their own identity. Yet this aspect of the plot—a beautiful man having an identity crisis—is not as unique as Barbie seems to think it is; there are a million stories about Kens searching for their purpose. Like Barbie Land, Hollywood may fixate on female beauty, but it is a world all but made for the Kens.

Speaking of Ken, Louise Perry writes about his plight in the film and how he relates to other male characters in films like Fight Club and The Matrix:

In this week’s bonus episode, my husband and I discussed the Barbie film in relation to older films about the impact of affluence on modern men: Fight Club, Office Space, American Beauty, The Matrix, etc. These are all films about men seeking out stimulation because they are bored by the safety and comfort of 1990s-2000s America. Office Space, for instance, ends with our emasculated male protagonist finding meaning by leaving his bourgeois office job and becoming a construction worker, while the hero of the Matrix finds romantic love, friendship, and satisfaction only through privation and peril (speaking of, there’s a good and funny Matrix reference in the Barbie film, when Barbie tries her darnedest to choose the blue pill).

Barbie offers a more intensely dystopian iteration of this genre, because the plight of Ken is so much worse than the plight of the men in these older films. Forget ennui, there is zero role for the men of Barbieland: there is no work to be done, no problems to be solved, no protection to be offered, no children to be conceived and fathered. Ken’s six pack is useless, since his society has no need for either physical strength or sexual attraction, given that his smooth plastic crotch precludes the possibility of sex. Ken has no political power, no property rights, and – worst of all – no telos. Ken is completely expendable. And, before his introduction to the real world, he’s too brainwashed to understand the true cause of his dissatisfaction.

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In one of the many moments of incoherence in the Barbie film (what on earth does Greta Gerwig think ‘patriarchy’ is???), Ken tries to find employment in the real world, having falsely assumed that being a man would give him access to any profession of his choice. But he soon finds that he cannot get a job as a doctor, a businessman, or a lifeguard. The promised ‘patriarchy’ does not have much to offer unskilled men, as it turns out. Ken is as expendable in the real world as he is in Barbieland. He is not kenough.

And all this is played for laughs, because Greta Gerwig & co. consider masculinity to be either bad – think of the sexual harassment that Barbie experiences in the real world – or ridiculous, as in Ken’s LARP-y attempts to become a beer-swigging cowboy.

Reactionary Feminism diverges from other forms of feminism – including Barbie feminism – in that it takes masculinity seriously, having started from the recognition that men and women are profoundly different in important ways. If we believe – wrongly, insanely! – that all differences between men and women are the product of socialisation, then the best advice we can offer to unhappy Kens is that they ought to become more like women. Go to therapy. Cultivate their soft skills. Get over themselves.

Maybe that would work in Barbieland. But here in the real world, we still have to contend with the masculine energy that William Broyles Jr. describes so well – an energy that can be channelled in both extraordinarily antisocial and extraordinarily prosocial directions, depending on the incentives at play.

Leslie Jamison takes a closer look at what the film says about suffering and motherhood:

The story of Barbie has always been a story about mothers and daughters. The very first Barbie—created by a businesswoman named Ruth Handler, the first president of Mattel—was named after her own daughter, Barbara. She first came into the world on March 9, 1959, wearing a black-and-white-striped bathing suit, with red lips and a high blond ponytail. Handler liked to tell the story of Barbie’s origins as a polished autobiographical anecdote: that she had seen her own daughter playing with adult paper dolls and was inspired to create a doll that was not a baby; that would allow little girls to imagine their own futures. Over the years, it would become clear that Handler had specific ideas about what these futures might look like. Barbie has had more than two hundred careers—from McDonald’s employee to paleontologist, Marine Corps sergeant to ballerina—but she has never become a mother. Handler herself once said in an interview, “If I had to stay at home I would be the most dreadful, mixed-up, unhappy woman in the world.”

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Barbie” is brilliantly imagined, and endlessly delightful, but its social critiques are neither original nor disruptive. They ratify articles of shared liberal understanding so that the film can get on with the business of redeeming its heroine—giving us a Barbie we can stand behind. The film’s monologues about the patriarchy are simultaneously incisive and incessant—their sheer abundance, one imagines, meant as an assertion of directorial autonomy. Its commentary is strongest in its narrative absurdities (a thousand Kens eager to “explain ‘The Godfather’ ” to a rapt female audience) and tongue-in-cheek asides, the tonal equivalent of the teen-age girl who appears fleetingly at the end of the film, winking at us as she puts on her makeup. Gerwig might be winking, but she is still putting on her makeup.

The part of “Barbie” that I ultimately found most compelling was its reckoning with various forms of motherhood—not so much its actual mother and daughter, Gloria and Sasha, but its evocation of subtler maternal bonds: the relationships between Barbie and her creator, and between the artist and capitalism. Barbie quite literally meets her maker on the seventeenth floor of Mattel’s headquarters, in a secret room that looks like a mid-century American kitchen. Handler (played by Rhea Perlman) introduces herself as “Ruth” and offers herself as a refuge from the men in suits who are chasing Barbie through the building, trying to force her (literally) back into her box. Eventually, Ruth accepts Barbie’s desire for full humanity, and, in this way, the film offers a version of the Fall that also serves up a fantasy of reunion: Barbie gets to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and she gets to reconcile with her god. She does not have to choose.

If Barbie ends up falling into humanity with her corporate mother’s blessing, choosing to accept suffering and mortality in exchange for full humanity (and a vagina?), it’s also true that her humanity is more about fragility than culpability. Much is made of Barbie’s tears throughout the film, their glittering novelty—and her newly acquired humanity involves foregrounding her vulnerability rather than facing the harm she’s caused. The film’s most explicit critiques of Barbie come from the thirteen-year-old Sasha, who is at once a Barbie critic and an updated Barbie model: Progressive Politics Popular Girl. Sure, she’s wearing her Gen-Z armor—stringy hair, ripped jeans, fierce indignation. (She accuses Barbie of embodying “sexualized capitalism” and sends her away in tears.) But, even as Sasha seems to push back against Barbie, she still embodies what Barbie has always represented: the terrifying power of the popular girl, consolidating her own power by making someone else feel terrible.

And finally, Kay S. Hymowitz argues in City Journal that the film is one big marketing ploy—a fun one!—but a marketing ploy nonetheless:

Gerwig’s Barbie continues Mattel’s mind-boggling success at reading the room. There have been some furrowed brows, of course—critics who worry that Gerwig has sold out. But for the most part, the movie has won people over. The New York Times’s usually savvy Michelle Goldberg praised the film for taking girls and women seriously. Gerwig “called out the hypocrisy of the manufacturer—Mattel—while getting its blessing on the project. And then, somehow, she—and the company—marketed it all back to us,” Goldberg marveled.

Oh, please. Mattel’s suits knew exactly what they were doing. Richard Dickson may have gulped hard when he saw rough cuts of a manic Will Farrell playing a Mattel head honcho in the movie, but he’s no fool. To disarm progressive critics, your best bet is self-mockery, meta-irony, and so much smart humor that they’ll stay quiet lest they seem like killjoys. The company even mocks its own PR about Barbie’s earthshaking significance. Early on, a deadpan Helen Mirren narrates: “Thanks to Barbie, all problems and equal rights have been solved.” Mattel understood that Gerwig’s ironic affirmation of female grievance, especially when joyously pinked out, will seduce even the most scowling Barbie-haters to the sisterhood. Remember the exuberant feeling of the movie, buy yourself a Barbie pink-mini weekender bag manufactured by the Beis Travel brand, and carry it on your next trip. Ironically, of course.

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O.K. Enough Barbie. Let’s talk about the blues. Dominic Green reviews the controversial Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey (see Ted Gioia’s article here about the book if you missed it). Here’s Green:

The authorized version of the history of the blues—the history that was written between the American left discovering it in the 1930s and English rockers annexing it in the 1960s—is that that Delta blues is the purest, original, and most authentic blues because it is a short and simple blues. The theory holds that the language of jazz developed in New Orleans from the blues of the Delta plantations. This makes the Delta blues fons et origo, the wellspring of American music. And that makes Johnson its king, because he was crowned by John Hammond and Eric Clapton in the 1960s.

This theory still enjoys near-universal acceptance. It fits with the primitivist myths that inspired much modernist art in the decades of Johnson’s brief life, and which defined the critical reaction, in the United States as in Europe, to the blues in the 1960s. It fits with the literary-political modernist view of African-American music as vital and energetic because it is primitive; qualities that the New York left of the 1930s sought to mobilize just as Herbert Marcuse did when he wrote in 1969 that “liberation” was a “vital, biological need” for the “ghetto population.” It fits the racist politics, notably European fascism, which were afoot when Johnson was alive. It is probably wrong.

In a lovely essay with lots of photos, Rachel Schnalzer Stewart writes about the outdoor bookstore, Bart’s Books, in Ojai, California: “It’s the open-air bookshelves and palm trees standing sentry in the courtyard. It’s the inventory of more than 100,000 books, including rare finds such as a first American edition of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.” It’s the Instagram-famous cats that have dwelled at the shop through the years. It’s the long-standing traditions, like selling some books on the honor system. For decades, the unique charms of Bart’s Books have beckoned literature lovers from far and wide to the quiet corner of Matilija and Canada streets in Ojai.”