Barbie (2023) and the Dignity Comedy

Why can't the woman be the fool?

Barbie is a funny movie. Let’s give it that. It’s a 2020s studio comedy film based on a sixty-year-old toy line that produces genuine laughs. That’s a goddamn feat of filmmaking right there. And I’m almost happy to leave my review here, because that’s a rare delight these days. But unfortunately, Barbie is a movie concerned with women and feminism, so of course it is shrouded in suffocating cultural discourse from right-wing pundits about it being man-hating propaganda. But if only its detractors actually watched the dang movie. They’d realize that fears of neutered manhood are the literal plot of the film, are actually Gosling’s arc, and that there’s an entirely different, more complex and nuanced slate of issues to have with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

What’s frustrating about Barbie is that the most interesting part of it is Ken. Ryan Gosling delivers a stand-out, hilarious performance as this frustrated, wannabe wife-guy. After contemporary Los Angeles strokes Ken’s wilting ego in the tiniest way possible (“A woman asked me what time it is!”), he becomes infected by the patriarchy of the Real World and his wounded masculinity inflates into the villain of the film. He suppresses the Barbies into sex bots content to spend their days serving men brewsky-beers, and he imbues the Kens with legislative and financial power they are not equipped to wield. Ken is the undercover, backdoor protagonist of Barbie. On paper, the arc of the film is Margot Robbie’s. But Barbie’s journey only serves to jump-start the real narrative odyssey of the film: Ken’s.

A 2001-referencing prologue and then the movie begins: after yet another blissful day of fun and work, Barbie hosts yet another killer party, replete with matching outfits, planned choreography, and a “bespoke” song. But then, on the dance floor, mid-way through a Dua Lipa bop, she abruptly interjects, “You guys ever think about dying?” We can assume, from everyone else’s huge, record-scratch reaction, that this is the first time Robbie-Barbie has expressed something like this. We can also assume, from the accelerating speed at which her “imperfection” expands (the next morning, she is shocked by a cold shower, spoiled milk, flat feet, and cellulite), that this has not been some long, drawn-out process. If so, these unsettling events would have dripped ever more slowly into Barbie’s life. She would share, at least with Weird Barbie, that strange things had occurred before the movie opens. But no: this has all just begun and is happening fast. However, before Robbie-Barbie utters her first existential anxiety, Gosling-Ken is already dissatisfied with his life in Barbie Land. Earlier that same day, on the beach, Gosling-Ken yearns to be seen by his so-called girlfriend Barbie, and disastrously attempts to impress her by surfing a static wave. It is not Barbie’s fresh sadness that makes Gosling-Ken do this. No, he is already unhappy, before Robbie-Barbie’s perfect, pink life starts to turn askew. (Ken is also already in conflict with his rival, Liu-Ken.) In fact, Robbie-Barbie’s weirdness makes no large impact on Barbie Land. Her friends are disgusted by her flattened feet and cellulite, but their lives or values don’t change because she shares this with them. We learn from them that Barbies before Robbie-Barbie have gone “weird,” and Barbie Land has remained constant. The only real plot reason why Barbie becomes “strange,” and thus travels to the Real World, is so that Ken can tag along, and thus bring the patriarchy back with him.

In the final act of Barbie, Robbie-Barbie chooses to become human. However, before this, throughout the film, Robbie-Barbie repeatedly states that she was content with her life before Gloria (America Ferrera) glumly played with her and thus induced unease. Barbie even chooses the “blue pill,” in a meta narrative-structure joke on the hero’s journey and The Matrix. Barbie does not come to the realization that she craves the unpredictability of humanness because of Gloria or because of something she sees while in the Real World. No, she does not know this about herself until she witnesses Ken having an epiphany — when he finally lets it soak in that there is Barbie and there is Ken, that he is “Kenough.” Barbie does not have “kenough” of an emotional arc to fuel such a charged moment, and so her growth only ignites after being lit by the magnificence of Ken’s breakthrough, his that has been so gradually, beautifully kindled throughout the film. Likewise, Robbie-Barbie isn’t even the one who decides Status Quo for Barbie Land isn’t acceptable anymore, and it is President Barbie who, seeing Ken’s breakdown and its consequences, just kind of suddenly declares that Kens should get more equality. (The implication of the Barbies’ third act drive for a full reset is that Barbie Land as it was is the female ideal (with no diversity of sexuality or gender expression, and barely any diversity in body type (cellulite is definitely bad in the eyes of the Barbies), and that the only reason it needs to change at all is because it was suppressing the Kens. If there were no Kens, it’d be back to all pink all the time.) Similarly, Robbie-Barbie’s human parallel, Gloria, does not choose to stop fleeing Barbie Land and go back and help the Barbies; it is her daughter, Sasha, who for no given reason just abruptly changes her mind and says that they should.

Ken’s status as backdoor protagonist is further solidified by the fact that he gets his own ballad, “I’m Just Ken.” Why is there no ballad for Barbie? Is it simply that Margot Robbie can’t sing? Or is it that Ken is the emotional and comedic core of the film? And it is fine for this to be so! However, it is just frustrating for this to be true of the Woman-Led Comedy of the Summer. It is disappointing that in the Barbie (not Ken) movie, Gosling-Ken, as well as the other Kens (and Allan too!), are the funniest, most engaging element of the film.

Almost every line, every look the Kens deliver is a banger. The Barbies get some jokes, too, sure, but these are punchlines at the expense of the base reality of Barbie Land or the dumb Kens co-inhabiting it. These jokes are Barbie pouring an empty jug of milk, or walking with high-heeled bare feet — or, in the second half of the film, lamenting some variation on, “These Kens sure are stupid!” These jokes are expositional. These are not character-based jokes for the Barbies. That’s not to say that Margot Robbie and the other women delivering these jokes don’t pull them off, but that if these moments were instead Ken waxing on about The Godfather without the prompting of a Barbie, or Ken drinking from an empty glass instead of Barbie, it would be equally funny, because the joke is not unique to Barbie’s perspective (AKA a character joke). But for Gosling-Ken, his jokes are at his expense and unique to his POV. He reveals he thinks the patriarchy is largely about horses — a joke specific to Ken because he will get carried away with, and fully support, things he doesn’t even totally understand, like his “romance” with Barbie. When Barbie purposefully misleads Ken by saying she wants to reconcile, he ducks behind a wall to privately celebrate. This is a stereotypical romcom move — to embarrassingly shout an affirmation after succeeding in love — but here we have the uniquely Ken twist of choosing a term a little too emo and poetic to sound cool. “Sublime!” he shouts from behind his Western doors. One of the biggest laughs of the film.

The jokes about Ken are character jokes, and thus, he necessarily looks a bit stupid while delivering them. In order for a character joke to have any impact, their point of view must contrast with the audience’s expected base reality. Thus, the character is going to sound dumb, or at least strange (otherwise, they’re just a normal guy saying a normal thing, which, let’s admit, Gosling would probably somehow make funny, with Ken’s overblown emotional earnestness). However, with situational jokes, the character delivering the joke is not the funny one: the world is. When women in Barbie convey something funny, it is by and large a situational or expositional joke, and the Barbies deliver these punchlines with utmost dignity. The woman is never the fool. Even Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie, who with her splits and odd outfits could be a literal jester, is instead a wise mentor to the other Barbies, gently shepherding them through crises and guiding the film to its next act. In Barbie, only man is the fool. But in a comedy, the fool is king. The comedic power surges to and from the fool. He’s the reason the movie is fun. 

This all relates to a frustrating trend in contemporary comedy trying its darndest to be inclusive. There is this reluctance to write the women characters, or the LGBTQ+ characters, or the BIPOC characters, or the disabled characters as someone who is foolish, who has a character game. So we end up with Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, in which Chris Hemsworth steals the show from the Girlbusters. We get season one of Tracey Wigfield’s Saved by the Bell reboot, in which diverse, low-income students are bussed to join the existing affluent, white-majority students at Bayside High. The new students are all woke and smart and righteous and dignified, but unfortunately this means that the white, privileged characters get to be the wacky funny ones, and thus the ones you want there to be plotlines about. (Thankfully Wigfield fixes this by season two. This is a funny show and more people should watch it!) Having dignity, in a comedy, means being kind of a bummer. Think Sweet Dee in season one of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, complaining about Charlie, Mac, and Dennis’s shenanigans and pointing out their moral failings. Largely all this character does is prompt the boys to explore some hot-button issue, and/or date a man who impacts the plot. There’s a reason why the show made Dee become as much of a monster as the guys by season three — a good person comes off as a wet blanket next to the comedic freaks. And yes, there’s also a reason why this Dignity Comedy trend exists: to make up for the years and years in which a diverse character would only be included in a story as comedic relief, and in the most vile, stereotyped way possible, as someone whose identity itself is the butt of the joke. (Essentially, “Isn’t it funny that this guy is gay??”) But Dignity Comedy is not the answer. A self-aware, good person is not fun to watch in a comedy. Maybe they help move the plot along, or add texture and contrast as a Voice of Reason so the jokes really pop, but they’re not fun, in the way that you don’t enjoy someone halting the action sequences in an action film, or stopping the singing in a musical. In Barbie, all the Barbies are extensively dignified. No woman is the fool. (Even in the Real World, Gloria is not the fool, but her unnamed, Duo Lingo-obsessed husband.) The women in this film are all smart and brave and good-hearted and well-meaning. That’s just not really what I want from a comedy movie. And don’t think that Dignity Comedy means Women Don’t Get to Be Funny. No, the fools can be women. In Bridesmaids, one of the progenitors of this Dignity Comedy trend — Kristen Wiig has some big goofy moments, but we’re supposed to really feel for her when she eats that one cupcake alone — there are male fools, but our main comedic crew are the titular bridesmaids, particularly Melissa McCarthy. With this one role, McCarthy ushered in a new era of her career and a new kind of female comedic archetype: the brash, practical, hyper-sexual female loner (see: Lauren Ash as Dina Fox in Superstore), modeled in part after weirdo lonewolf male characters before her, like Dwight Schrute in The Office or Alan in The Hangover. We see examples of this branch of the Dignity Comedy trope in films like Booksmart, in which our female protagonists are not the funny ones, but at least some of the surrounding fools are women. But back to Barbie.

In Barbie, Barbie is talked about as being an idea, and that whether that be a sexual object for male desire, or the embodiment of girl bossery, neither leaves room for Barbie to experience complex emotions or a deep internal life. But there’s so many goddamn characters and plot threads in this movie that there’s no room in the film for Robbie-Barbie to grow into anything more than that empty idea shell. I literally don’t know one specific thing that Robbie-Barbie likes, other than not dating Ken. (This leads to the take that Barbie is actually about the destructiveness of compulsory heterosexuality.) In a way, this still works for Robbie-Barbie, because her arc is discovering her own shallowness and choosing to embrace flawed humanity over empty perfection. However, because of how little screen time everyone gets, the key human in the film, Gloria, is too reduced to an idea. I know nothing about Ferrera’s character other than that she is a mom and has a job as an assistant at Mattel and that she gets a little sad sometimes. Gloria, like Barbie, is just an empty archetype, an idea, but her character is presented by the film as a revelation because the idea that she’s embodying is Messy Womanhood. Well, we’re told she’s Messy Womanhood. Ferrera delivers meandering, distracted dialogue with the ease she did as Amy on Superstore, and we believe that this woman has a complex life, sure, but we don’t see any examples of this. (We do learn she is a skilled getaway driver, but her explanation for this talent is reduced to her relationship with a man. “There was this guy…” This is problematic in an old-school sexist kind of way, when women in stories can only have meaningful abilities because of their fathers or husbands. You’ll see this a lot, where a woman character will have some cool job or skill, and then seemingly for no reason the film “justifies” this by telling us that the woman’s dad used to be the CEO, or he was a famous black belt who trained her. For male characters, their fathers are brought up in a similar manner because they want to prove themselves as worthy successors; for women, it’s seemingly because the audience would not believe a woman could achieve something without a man giving it to her, and there is generally no exploration into her living in the “shadow” of her father.) Gloria’s speeches on Messy Womanhood are what snap the Barbies out of the vapidity stupor induced by the patriarchy, but these speeches are so generic that they don’t point us towards visualizing Ferrera in any authentically messy moment. To paraphrase: “It’s hard to be a mom,” she admits, voice cracking and pitch undulating at all the right moments. “Not to say that every woman has to be a mom. It’s hard not to be a mom, and to have a job. Or not have a job. Or have a job and be a mom.” This generic critique of, essentially, the mother/whore dichotomy of womanhood, loses any impact in its efforts to be universally inclusive of all women. Truly, the weirdest, most interesting thing about Ferrera is that she, an adult, ostensibly plays with Barbie dolls, but we never actually see this scene. There’s no time! There’s no time to show us anything about the women in the film! Only time to tell us in generic, universal terms, what being a Messy Woman is like.

Ferrera’s screen time is halved by the film including the character of her daughter Sasha, a stereotypical woke depressed teen. Is Sasha added to explore the mother-daughter bond, or to get a Gen Z perspective on Barbie as a toy? Well, kind of. Yes, in a brief scene, she slams Robbie-Barbie with a Mattel-approved truth bomb about the historical negative impact of Barbie dolls on teenage self-esteem. But truly, plot-wise, Sasha is just a red herring so that it can be a comedic/emotional reveal that the person morosely playing with Robbie-Barbie, and thus summoning her to the Real World, was actually Sasha’s grown-up mother Gloria. Twice, we watch the same montage of “memories” Robbie-Barbie has of being played with, the second time slightly contracted, the camera dollied back to show Ferrera’s face, to reveal that these memories are from her perspective, not Sasha’s. Well, duh. What teen is going to so strongly harbor a memory of once being a little rude to their mother in the car, or of themselves laughing as a toddler? This red herring reveal is a waste of our time, an attempt to wow us with the thought, Moms are people too!, without, again, showing us any moments of motherhood other than the most generic, coffee-commercial-during-the-holidays examples. Why not have a memory be something weird and unique and interesting that we can’t fully comprehend in the instant it’s on screen but that feels deeper, that feels rooted in authenticity, that reveals something about the character? What memories do any of us have that are simple and “bite-sized” and easy? Or, simply, we could have Robbie-Barbie experience these vague Hallmark memories only a single time. After they end, and she sheds her one perfect tear, she could do a double-take when she realizes they’re from an adult’s perspective. There you go, you get your clever joke and maybe we’d have the screentime to learn literally one detail about Ferrera.

And if we’re cutting extraneous threads so we can add depth to the characters who matter, obviously, we’d nix Will Ferrell and the Mattel execs — a coterie whose inclusion just reminds the viewer that Mattel produced this film, and any criticisms of capitalism are only allowed to cut skin deep. Will Ferrell’s character loves women!! He’s a feminist! He genuinely doesn’t want the Kens to take over! It’s not actually bad that the Mattel board is all men! The problem is only that pesky external force called the Patriarchy which is, um, like a virus that’s temporarily sickened the Real World and not something that Mattel in part promulgates, because, remember, Barbie was invented by the ghost of Rhea Perlman!! Remember that montage at the end of random footage of women? That’s our Cry Time. Our gift from Greta to let out all the sadness and the thoughts of death so that we’re refreshed and ready to buy some Barbie merch when we leave the theater. But even Mattel’s supposed “wokeness” is inconsistent, wobbly. Is this discrepancy a commentary by Gerwig, or just a thoughtless mistake? When Ken’s anti-woman Mojo Dojo Casa House starts flying off the shelves, Ferrell exclaims that this is unacceptable, even though it’s making money, because he joined this business to inspire young girls “in the least creepy way possible.” Yet at the close of the film, when Gloria pitches to him “Ordinary Barbie,” he turns it down, scoffing, “That would never sell.” But then CFO Jamie Demetriou sees on an iPad that this Barbie would indeed generate profits, and Ferrell immediately flips his position and is on board. Does Ferrell love women, or just money? What is Gerwig saying here about capitalism and Mattel? Is she saying anything?

There is a part of me that, not while actively viewing the film, but while pondering it afterward, can’t help but think: why should I care about this doll, built from reflections of the male gaze, and whether she feels good about herself? Barbie is not a “real person,” she was not based on one and she never will be. She would have to be remade, whole-cloth, to resemble in any way real womanhood. Barbie has contributed, at least in part, to millions of girls developing eating disorders. (The only “true” Barbie movie is Todd Haynes’ Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story.) I don’t think I personally will ever shake the internalized ideal that the only Good Boobs are those resembling Barbie’s perky, high, smooth domes. Wouldn’t the only ethical, logical response from Barbie, upon seeing the Real World and what she, the brand, the idea has wrought — wouldn’t it be to kill herself? There’s no reason Barbie™ needs to continue to exist, and to be woke now, except for the benefit of Mattel’s shareholders. This is as if Parker Brothers released an updated version of Monopoly in which the properties are all under collective, socialist ownership by the players. At that point, just make a new goddamn game. Just admit your game isn’t relevant and/or ethical anymore. Give up. Don’t cobble together something from the ashes. Society burned it for a reason. Let Barbie go. She’s a girl’s doll based on a German adult gag gift. We don’t need Barbie to be feminist now. We need Barbie to retire, to finally get some use out of that beach house. We need the studios to back woman-directed, woman-led comedies that don’t also have to tie in to a problematic toy line.

But really, this film is good. In the universe where we have to have a Barbie movie, I’m glad it’s this one. Robbie is great and Gosling is excellent. The editing is wonderful, an exceedingly gifted comedic editor, with the timing of gags and cuts to reaction shots. (Reaction shots bolster smaller parts that would have much less screentime if measured just by their dialogue: Issa Rae, Jamie Demetriou, Kingsley Ben-Adir.) The practical effects and the production design of Barbie World is stunning. The dancing is fun. Just, please, if you want to criticize the gender politics of this film, watch the fucking movie first.

Erin’s original review on Letterboxd