Abstract
I saw the movie Barbie during the catastrophic heat of last summer, drawn in by the power of marketing that linked it to another movie, Oppenheimer, that was released at the same time. How had these two movies—one about a doll, the other about a nuclear physicist—become merged together as Barbenheimer in the collective consciousness? After watching Barbie, I wondered if the key to understanding this connection might be found in the baffling last moments of the movie. Barbie is in a way a standard coming-of-age movie, but it concludes with a triumphant visit to the gynecologist. This final moment of the movie surprises, and then confuses, like an off-color joke that falls flat. Although the reason for Barbie’s visit to the gynecologist is not made explicit, the movie seems to imply that Barbie’s newfound possession of a real female body, in particular a vagina, signifies her transformation into becoming a real woman, the culmination of her journey. Yet despite the movie’s feminist intentions, Barbie’s visit to the gynecologist cannot overcome an underlying message of deep ambivalence toward mothering and fears of the female body, and it is precisely because these conflicting messages have not been addressed in the movie that the final scene is so disturbing. We are left to wonder if, once again, a woman is being ultimately defined by her body and its dangerously powerful capacity to bear children. In these final moments, the movie gives in to the forces of unconscious conflicts about mothering and the female body. These conflicts appear in the movie from its very beginning.
Barbie opens with a scene that parodies the opening moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As in that movie, we see a desolate landscape, deliberately ambiguous as to whether we are in a prehistoric or post-apocalyptic moment. In the classic movie, apes are playing with a found object that ultimately leads to conflict and murder among themselves. The object is a harbinger of their own self-destruction. The parallel scene in Barbie features angry, un-pretty little girls murdering their doll-babies. The narrator tells us that the little girls are angry because they have only doll-babies to play with; they are forced to pretend that they are mothers, like their own mothers. This is an astonishing message of hatred of the maternal and the self. The little girls’ rage toward their doll-babies expresses a wish to rid themselves of their maternal identifications. The little girl’s body, so much like the doll-babies’ body, is rejected, to be replaced by Barbie, whose body is not at all like their own female bodies, or their mothers’. We are told that Barbie rescues the little girls from having to be like their mothers, but in doing so Barbie alters their relationship to the mother, to the self, to the female body.
All of these complex identifications make up the child’s internal world and are the building blocks of psychic structure. The movie’s suggestion that Barbie offers little girls a way to separate from their mothers overlooks much of what we know about development. It is an idea that has its roots in unconscious conflicts about mothering and an aversion to the female body, and evidence of these feelings keeps popping up throughout the movie like a jack-in-the-box. It is as if the movie cannot contain its own conflicts about women despite its conscious efforts to offer us a feminist vision of Barbie. In fact, the kind of play that the original Barbie doll introduced to little girls was always a problem, not only because of what the original, or “stereotypical,” Barbie looks like, but because playing with Barbie encouraged the acquisition of concrete objects, like her clothes and accessories, to build her external world. In the movie, play with Barbie is meant to resolve ambivalent feelings about mothering by disavowing maternal identifications. This violent separation can cleave apart the minds of little girls, unleashing unresolved murderous impulses toward their mothers and themselves.
In what might be an attempt to compensate for the rage toward mothers that is shown at the beginning of the movie, a complex relationship between a real mother and her teenage daughter is also shown. The real mother’s depression has led her to regress into fantasies about her own childhood play with Barbie dolls. Her depressive feelings cross the boundary into Barbie’s mind, providing the impetus for Barbie’s journey to the real world. Together, the real mother and daughter function as mothers to Barbie (and all the other “Barbies” in “Barbieland”), helping them work through the depression and despair they all have to confront during Barbie’s journey. With its recitation of feminist values and display of strong, accomplished female figures (represented by the different types of women shown as Barbies), this is a satisfying part of the movie. But this process takes place within the context of the movie’s vision of feminism, in which women are idealized and men are generally denigrated. This vision bifurcates women and men into two groups, an outgrowth of the way earlier processes of splitting overwhelm the capacity for psychic integration of unconscious conflicts. As does its depiction of other women in the movie, this idealization functions to deny aggression.
Ruth Handler, the actual creator of Barbie and co-founder of Mattel, is reduced to a stereotype. She is shown as an idealized maternal figure who lives in a sepia-toned kitchen that evokes nostalgia for a mid-century childhood. She pours comforting tea for Barbie and gently helps her understand her feelings. In fact, the real Ruth Handler was co-founder of the Mattel Corporation and for decades was its president. In contrast, the movie allows itself more direct expression of aggression toward women in its portrayal of Midge, the doll with the insectile name and short brown hair. Midge, we are told, was introduced as a pregnant doll; her pregnancy led her to be discontinued. But it is as if the movie cannot contain its own aggression when she suddenly reappears, like an apparition, to stand behind Mr. Mattel. Mr. Mattel seems scared and barks at her: “I thought we got rid of you!” Midge vanishes. Later, he tells one of the Barbies to call him “mother.” It seems as if Mr. Mattel is still haunted by the apparition of the pregnant Midge. His discomfort leads him to fantasize that he can rid himself of his anxieties by acquiring her maternal identity for himself.
This underbelly of anxiety about the female body threads its way throughout the movie. When Barbie finally arrives in Los Angeles, she discovers that men leer at her, making aggressive comments about her body. Barbie remarks to Ken that she feels threatened. In this startling moment in the movie, we are reminded that the female body is not only dangerous to others. It is also dangerous to have a female body. For a brief moment a space opens where Barbie and Ken might talk to each other. They might imagine something about each other’s experience, shifting toward a more complex, multidimensional level of mental functioning. But Ken only responds to Barbie by saying, “I don’t.” Later, when Barbie again encounters aggressive men, she solves the problem herself in what is perhaps the movie’s attempt to show self-sufficiency in a woman. In a move both clever and naive, Barbie tells the men that she doesn’t have a vagina. (For the sake of equality she also tells them that Ken hasn’t a penis.) It seems that Barbie’s lack of a vagina secures her safety from male aggression. The movie never confronts the implications of Barbie’s discovery that women in the real world live with an underlying threat of violence. This moment foreshadows the movie’s conclusion, when Barbie’s visit to the gynecologist seems to suggest that having a vagina signifies the capacity to both contain and resolve conscious and unconscious anxieties.
In the final epic conflict between the Barbies and the Kens, we see how the assault on mothering that we have been shown since the beginning of the movie becomes a larger phenomenon as it moves through society. Ken, who has discovered “the patriarchy” while in Los Angeles with Barbie, brings it back to Barbieland. Until this point, Barbieland had been a utopian, unreal vision of a world controlled by the Barbies, multiple iterations of the original or “stereotypical” Barbie, around whom the film revolves, offered as role models representing accomplished women. In contrast, the Kens are less defined and certainly less accomplished; they have submitted to the Barbies’ dominance. But when Ken brings the patriarchy to Barbieland, the Kens rebel. Their latent anger at having submitted to domination by the Barbies is unleashed. The movie becomes a parable for our current societal dynamics in which feminist achievements are met with a backlash of rage by a group of people who feel they have yielded too much power to women.
There is a moment during this conflict when the dynamics might have shifted into something other than a pitched battle. The Barbies have lost control of their world. The relationship between the two groups has been reduced to a struggle for dominance, further constricting possibilities for meaningful communication. There is some irony in the fact that in the midst of the conflict it is Ken who tries to make a real connection to Barbie. He asks her to imagine his experience. As Barbie weeps with despair at losing control of her world, he says, “How does it feel? . . . “It’s not fun, is it?” But she doesn’t answer. The movie proceeds, capitulating to its own unresolved issues, giving way to the chaos of battle and the collapse of complex dynamic thinking.
It is extraordinary how we struggle throughout our lives with intense feelings toward our mothers, and how these feelings permeate society. Without intending to, the movie shines a light on how unconscious feelings about women continue to break through into consciousness, defining how we relate to each other, diminishing our capacity for psychological development. The feminist intent of the movie cannot overcome the ways it mirrors these problems, showing us the destructive force of our ambivalent attitudes toward women. Toward the end of the movie, in the midst of the battle between the Barbies and the Kens, one of the Barbies realizes how they can take their world back from the patriarchy. Kenworld contains the seeds of its own destruction, she says. The Barbies turn the Kens against each other and watch them self-destruct. Perhaps this is what links the two movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer. Both movies show us worlds that contain the seeds of their own destruction.