For What Stage is Barbie Cast?

Review of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (Warner Bros., 2023), written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, 1h 54 m, PG-13.

It is tempting to see Barbie as telling the story of a girl’s emergence into adolescence, as if what we are witnessing is a switch from one of Erik Erikson’s social stages to another. The film begins with girls smashing their baby dolls to bits as they appreciate their new Barbie dolls. Though not even close to being adolescents, these girls seem to recognize the full-figured Barbies as already a part of who they are, thus rejecting their previous dolls for only mirroring their infancy. All the Barbies in Barbieland have lived the same constant life, only knowing one that is instantly provisioning and supporting a preoedipal existence, as seen by theorists like James Masterson, who argue it is a period of relative calm before the leap into adolescence.

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Stereotypical Barbie, the oldest Barbie in terms of product design (and the Barbie I will be referring to throughout the rest of this review as simply “Barbie”), rejects the Ken who wants to sleep over at her place and who’d tried and failed to kiss her; she has done this every evening. But the next morning, we learn a breach has occurred, a breaking of a membrane that had separated Barbieland and our own world, reality. The specific use of the term “membrane” makes one think that the next time Ken asks to sleep over, it might have dawned at least on Barbie what exactly they might do together while alone at night, something that had previously been a mystery to the both of them. Her previously perfectly arched feet are now flat, the smell of her breath is changing, and she is lacking her normal coordination as she accustoms herself to a new body. Surely many of us feel at this point that Barbie has found adolescence sprung upon her, whether ready or not.

However, there are difficulties with this picture. While all the Barbies are enjoying themselves, none of the Kens are. The Kens live only so that they might get the attention of Barbies. They will do anything to get their attention, even if it means their own hospitalization, and only furtively get it, as every Barbie vastly prefers girl-only events. The Kens are actually Cinderellas, attention-deprived victims, creatures of Harlow, not Erikson; the Barbies, who are so minimally impressed with them and also so spoiled, are the equivalent of Cinderella’s stepsisters. By keeping the Kens in mind, not just the Barbies, seeing this story as a transition of life stages hides its resemblance to a fairy tale of child abuse, where some are favorites and others are barely acknowledged.

Barbie is experiencing something new to her but not new to the Kens—we’d already seen a Ken show a lack of grace as he tried to surf a spectacular wave and fumbled badly. As the changes to her body induce retching in other Barbies, Barbie is compared to burnt toast, spoiled milk, and vomit. She is compared to things that, like the Kens at times, Barbies automatically reject rather than accept. This is not about the price automatically incurred in growing up for the Kens and Barbies; it’s more about how parents can potentially make a child feel if they feel there is some crime in their growing away from them. We do learn that Barbie is feeling gross because she is carrying the emotions of a mother in our world who feels rejected and no longer appealing after her daughter has become much more interested in other people.

When Barbie and Ken penetrate the membrane that separates Barbieland and our world, a transition in how they are situated vis-à-vis one another on screen occurs. Barbie begins the journey by driving a car while Ken remains in the back seat, and she is similarly in the lead through the various landscapes they go through. But just as they are about to arrive, Ken is in front. This change in how they are positioned on screen is appropriate to his experience in this new world because his stay in it is in some ways akin to how Cinderella felt when she finally left

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her abusive household and got to the ball—there are contexts, he discovers, where he would actually get attention automatically and the advantages of being a man. Our world begins a reparenting of him. It informs him of how it could have been for him if not only the Barbies but also the Kens had been made to feel special in Barbieland. Given this, it is no surprise that he takes everything he notices about this world and remakes his previous home in its image, thereby shaming his home and further integrating this new awareness of worth into himself and the other Kens.

In contrast, Barbie’s stay in our world is a continuation of where she just was, the previous state of dissimulation. While Ken is delighted with the attention, Barbie is uncomfortable with it. Before she led; now she finds herself used. Ken sees so much that is thrilling, while Barbie notices, most especially, depressed people. Before she rejected Kens, now she is rejected. She had told Ken, “You can go now,” and “I don’t want you here.” Now she is told, “We haven’t played with Barbie since [we were] five years old,” and “even then it was horrible for us.” Barbie learns that if she is to recover herself, she has to tend to the mother who has regressed into playing with her again; she has to heal her wounds and this older woman’s wounds in the hopes that it will trickle down. She doesn’t realize it, but potentially sacrificing your own self to hopefully have your own needs met is precisely what Ken was doing when he tried to charm Barbie into being less self-involved. It can entrench resentment, a source for future dissimulations, in no way necessarily involved in transitions between life stages.

Barbie reclaims Barbieland from the Kens, a reversion of the regime that gives the mother who had been playing with her a chance to both re-bond with her daughter and find herself heard. She, and therefore Barbie, are restored. But their victory involved distracting the Kens by playing to their lack of self-esteem, a replay of what Barbie dolls are accused of having been: a capitalist tool that breeds insecurity. The result is that even though the film leads us to see Barbie as embracing sexual maturity by seeing a gynecologist, we can’t be sure how welcoming we should be. If she exploits the vulnerabilities she helped implant, how readily should we grant her growth? In our world, she found an elderly woman she met beautiful and told her so, and in her previous one, she does admit to having neglected the Kens. I will try and keep in mind these aspects, as with the success of the film, Barbie dolls populate the world once more.

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