White, consumerist feminism in Hollywood
WARNING: Spoilers and references to homophobia
“Like hold on, let me go find me a pen” – Ice Spice, “Barbie World”
Since the beginning of time, Barbie’s fingers were always yummy. Yummy in a plastic way, like the way cheap, sticky lip- gloss is. Barbie is always being consumed: visually, physically, and economically. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) follows the doll’s tradition and satisfies its hunger by encouraging consumption in its marketing campaign and big box office success. I understand the pressures, appeals, and demands of the mainstream Hollywood movie. It makes sense that this big-budget film faltered under the expectations of both the studio demands and the feminist narrative. But my hot take still stands: Barbie’s fatal flaw is suggesting feminism can exist within the overtly consumerist film, negating how capitalism—and other ideologies not touched on like racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia—will always interact with feminism.
Barbie took centre stage this past July and certainly had fun doing so. Greta Gerwig plays up the physical power of the plastic doll. As the narrator, voiced by Helen Mirren, says in the movie: “When you play with Barbies, you do not use stairs or doors. You just put them where you want them. You use your imagination.” Gerwig’s construction of who ‘Barbie’ is is not as a human or an object: she is everything. While Barbie is a physical feat of childhood imagination, can Gerwig’s Barbie satisfy the emotional expectations of a mass audience’s imagination?
Is life in plastic not so fantastic? Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie wakes up to her picture-perfect daily routine, riddled with the simplicities that demand imagination of Barbie World. There is no milk in her cup; she imagines it, and so we imagine it along with her. There is no fluid movement; Barbie’s plasticity is stilted and so we acknowledge her rigidness too. Stereotypical Barbie presents herself as a plastic object with plastic ideals, and as the plot advances, she struggles to contain what it is to be human. In the Real World, this means the pressures and forces of different ideological state apparatuses (ISAs). Stereotypical Barbie enters Los Angeles as a thin, white woman and so the main ISA she confronts is sexism. She experiences objectification for the first time: the creepy, threatening feeling that looms in every gaze and with “entendre that appears to be doubled.” The film showcases Stereotypical Barbie’s introduction to the Real World and aligns it with the very commonplace experiences of the audience member— especially those raised or perceived as femme. And so, Gerwig aligns Stereotypical Barbie’s journey with the spectators; what do we do with the messy, complicated, overwhelming feelings of the human experience—emotions ranging from the cathartic cry to existential depression? Stereotypical Barbie chooses to be human (though the gynecology moment felt transphobic, like why did having female genitalia make you human and/or woman?) but I did not get a choice to exist in the Real World.
“On the mood board, she’s the inspo” – Charlie XCX, “Speed Drive”
While Stereotypical Barbie gets to make a choice, our parallel journeys stop when I realise I never had a choice to see or unsee Mattel’s Barbie as a signifier of beauty. The audience’s transition from child to adult—or, as the film explicitly references, from girl to woman—really cannot be aligned with Stereotypical Barbie’s transition from plastic to human. As a human viewer, I sometimes wish to be made up of Barbie’s plastic. Her prettiness is contained in that plastic. There was a moment when I really thought the film would include the nuance of beauty beyond Stereotypical Barbie’s struggle to accept aging, as it entangles itself with issues of race. While the film presented Stereotypical Barbie as the protagonist, I felt myself in America Ferrera’s Gloria, a woman of colour playing with pretty, white dolls who were beautiful. When Gloria performed her monologue on womanhood to remind Stereotypical Barbie of how impossible it is to be perfect, I wanted to hear how Barbie was so pretty that she was the basis of Gloria’s (and my) understanding of pretty. There is a Western lens to this beauty, and I didn’t get to choose to exist in it. I wish Gloria’s journey reflected the complications in her (our) love for Barbie.
Even the casting of Simu Liu is a critical and perfect display of what the film stands for: surface-level inclusion of representation that makes people feel like the job is done while negating the nuanced pitfalls of this contribution. Liu faces criticism in his part of the conversation on Asian representation: is representation worth it if it comes from someone who doesn’t see how it may be used in forms of tokenism? When he receives criticism, he points his fans toward the source of criticism—often a BIPOC woman. The actor was also criticised over his past quotes linking pedophilia to biology and queerness: “From a biological standpoint it’s no different than being gay—a small mutation in the genome that determines our sexual preferences,” he said. He allowed that “taking advantage of minors is wrong. Disgusting and vile, even.”
“Cause I, I don’t know how to feel” – Billie Eilish, What Was I Made For?”
Gloria’s journey is lacklustre at best, her contribution to the narrative reflecting the very real contributions a film like Barbie wants spectators to make.
Films present their own ideology, not just in their content but in their apparatus. The theatre makes us sit, gazes fixed on the screen that it controls. Our experience as a spectator parallels our experience as subjects under socially constructed ideologies. Sometimes, films make us question our positions as spectators. But as a spectator of Barbie, I felt exactly as I feel under the ideological systems as a subject in Western society. The ISAs, specifically sexism and capitalism, that Barbie introduces and speaks to only reflect how these systems want us to act. Barbie doesn’t revolutionise us, it merely reaffirms what was already there—a business success story that can now be rebranded for modern times.
Instead of breaking away from the confines of being human, which includes the trappings of ‘existential dread’, as the film promises, the film asserts the solution to the dread of being human by consuming this film, consuming the pretty in pink pastels, and sharing this practice of consumption with others. Gloria’s existential dread is resolved by her helping Barbie live with the capacity of having human emotions. She ‘wins’ by selling her idea of Ordinary Barbie with the intention that everyone can see themselves in Barbie, and that there is no need to be extraordinary to exist. So… the conclusion to the main human character’s existentialism is the idea of selling something to help people feel okay? Just as the film does? Selling spectators something to make us feel okay; you will be okay because you bought Ordinary Barbie. You will be okay, just consume us more. We make you feel okay. We make you okay. The solution to feeling okay in the Real World is representation: in items that can be sold and bought and consumed.
It makes sense that consumption is the main aspect of Barbie’s marketing campaign. Even my own body adorned in pink, walking to and from the theatre, with a group of friends also dressed in various shades of pink, can be considered an appendage of the marketing strategy. My body, as Barbie’s is, is meant to be consumed.
