WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW! If you haven’t seen Barbie yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please read after you’ve seen the film.
I liked Barbie overall, but it’s hard to praise the film without critique (more on this later). It could have been a generic apolitical movie about a doll coming to life and entering the real world, but it subverted that conventional route and addressed important themes like feminism, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. Although there was plenty of humor, there were also very powerful and emotional moments as well. The movie provokes timely conversations, and there was plenty of that with the group of people that I saw the movie with.
One of the major themes in the movie highlights how difficult it is being a woman. As a cisgender Pakistani Muslim man, I know I’ll never be able to understand what those experiences are like. I appreciated the movie for engaging with these topics and creating opportunities for people to discuss and reflect on its overall message about how damaging patriarchy is. The scenes that talk about the double standards and challenges that women experience created conversations about sexism and misogyny, including painful ones about internalized misogyny. It reminded me of times at a previous workplace when a couple of women co-workers would ask me if I was concerned about having a daughter because “girls are harder to raise” than boys. This was followed by questions about what rules I would establish if my daughter wanted to date, yet this question was not asked of any of the people in the room who had sons.
As much as I liked the movie, what was most frustrating about it was that it doesn’t really acknowledge race or intersectionality. There seemingly was a conscious effort to make the cast racially diverse. Women of color Barbies are visually prominent in the film, but the narrative doesn’t go beyond this visual diversity. There is hardly any mentioning of race or racism, let alone a deeper acknowledgment about how intersecting factors of identity create diverse experiences for BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ women and femmes, etc. At one point, it seemed like the film shifted focus away from Barbie and centered on the Latina characters Gloria and Sasha played by America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt, respectively. The shift kind of reminded me of Hitchcock’s Psycho, which changes the protagonist midway through the movie, but Barbie’s character gets re-centered, expectedly, shortly after some great scenes with Gloria and Sasha.
Gloria’s speech is by far the most memorable dialogue in the film, but it neglected the opportunity to address race and explore questions like, what was it like for Latina girls and other girls of color to grow up playing with Barbie toys that traditionally targeted white girls? My wife, also Pakistani and Muslim, wrote this critique about the scene:
“All I wanted was Gloria’s race to have been acknowledged in a meaningful way and it would have been as easy as having a line in her monologue about having to live up to white beauty standards as a WoC. She imprinted her feelings onto her Barbie, which had repercussions, because she no longer saw the current version of her reflected in her doll.
“Part of growing up would have also been realizing that Barbie is a different race than she is (has traditionally been marketed to white girls), and that could have contributed to the fractured sense of self that led to the trip in between the worlds.”
There are many critiques that the film depicts white feminism, and this is true, unfortunately. Sasha makes one comment about Barbie being a “white savior,” but it’s very “LOL” and played for laughs. There is no follow up or analysis of it. There’s another moment where Gloria mentions European colonizers bringing smallpox to Indigenous People, but it’s (1) another joke, and (2) a false equivalency to the what she’s comparing it to. I’ve seen Indigenous People online criticizing that “joke.”
Another major critique is that the film is very binary and heteronormative. I know some people are reading the Allan character as gay or queer, but again, this isn’t named in the movie. I’m all for people reading Allan’s character in however they wish, though. I just don’t think the filmmakers can take credit for that.
As I said earlier, the film’s white feminist politics make it difficult to praise completely, and it’s even more nauseating when some fans of the movie argue, “[I]t’s not fair or realistic to expect a doll with such a complex and muddy history to carry the weight of relating to every woman’s story.” I agree that the movie cannot address “everything,” but I think this speaks to a larger, structural problem where BIPOC women are routinely told that their voices/critiques are not valid, that they expect “too much,” and should just settle for white feminism. I also think it’s kind of sad that the late bell hooks gave us a clear and radical definition of feminism in 1984 (or maybe earlier than that) that challenged the conventional white definition of feminism (i.e. “feminism is the notion that women are the social equals of men”) and yet the latter is still the popularized definition in mainstream media and discourse. I’ll end my post with an excerpt from her book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (and I think this quote highlights the problems in Barbie’s political framework):
“Most people in the United States think of feminism as a movement that aims to make women the social equals of men. This broad definition, popularized by the media and mainstream segments of the movement, raises problematic questions. Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to? Do women share a common vision of what equality means? Implicit in this simplistic definition of women’s liberation is a dismissal of race and class as factors that, in conjunction with sexism, determine the extent to which an individual will be discriminated against, exploited, or oppressed. Bourgeois white women interested in women’s rights issues have been satisfied with simple definitions for obvious reasons. Rhetorically placing themselves in the same social category as oppressed women, they are not anxious to call attention to race and class privilege.
“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Feminist struggle takes place anytime anywhere any female or male resists sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Feminist movement happens when groups of people come together with an organized strategy to take action to eliminate patriarchy.”
