Innocence and experience in Barbie

The paradisical garden of archetypal myth is an image both of the world as it once was and of how it should ideally be. This Arcadian or Edenic space, the ‘Happy Garden’, is verdant, safe and sunny. Its inhabitants do not have to labour to live; rather, their environment spontaneously provides all that they need, and more. Its myths regularly assert a reciprocal relationship between the untroubled minds of the inhabitants and the unchanging equanimity of the space. In Ovid's account of this first, golden age, ‘[t]here was no need at all of armed men, for nations, secure from war's alarms, passed the years in gentle ease’ (1916: 99–100). In the version offered in Genesis, this harmonious state also shapes humans’ perceptions of their own bodies: ‘And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’ (Genesis 2.25 [NKJV]). Childhood will later become the temporal substitute for this lost space. Barbie Land offers up its own pastel and plastic version of a world whose inhabitants are untroubled by intemperate weather, hunger or sexual desire. As the camera descends on Barbie Land in the opening shot, we can see that the circle above the I of Barbie forms the enclosing wall within which we find Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and her neighbours. The film's ‘Happy Suburbia’ draws on an American version of this myth (specifically its Californian variation). The Barbies’ every day is the ‘most perfect day ever’ because change does not exist in Barbie Land. Time is only notionally linear and order is supplied by the same events happening every day: Stereotypical Barbie listens to arguments before the Supreme Court, attends a Nobel Prize awards ceremony, spends the afternoon at the beach, enjoys an evening dance party and, finally, hosts Girls’ Night, a pattern that she expects to continue ‘from now until forever’.

The bodies of the Barbies and Kens are also resistant to change: they do not grow or age; neither for that matter do they ingest, digest, sweat, menstruate, ejaculate or excrete. Midge (Emerald Fennell) represents somatic disruption in terms of promising a reproductive futurity but her perpetual pregnancy is one in which the cyclical time of biological life is arrested (or, in Barbie terms, ‘discontinued’) – though her presence is a constant reminder of what is being denied by these bodies. ¹ Yet it is because of this absence that shame and self-consciousness do not exist. No house in Barbie Land has walls but its inhabitants’ permanent visibility is not a thing to be feared in this unfallen world. The lack of walls represents only constant opportunity for the Barbies’ mutual, sustained admiration. Katie Spencer, the set decorator on Barbie, pointed to a source of inspiration in the photography of George ‘Slim’ Aarons. Much of Aarons’ work focused on American actors, celebrities and socialites from the 1950s to the 1970s. Many of his images featured women such as C. Z. Guest or Babe Paley, wealthy socialites known for their beauty and style, posing in beautiful homes architecturally adapted to temperate climates (his photograph of a party poolside, at the desert house in Palm Springs designed by Richard Neutra for Edgar Kaufmann, is one of his best known (Friend, 2023)). Aarons aimed, he said, to photograph ‘attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places’ (Hawk, 2016); his work, Nick Foulkes has written, sought to ‘present the world of the perennial perfect moment’ (Foulkes, 2023). But Aarons’ influence went beyond providing idealising images of a certain class and aesthetic. Spencer noted that his work evoked the feeling the Barbie team wanted to create: ‘his pictures are of women with women, and there's no sense of threat. Women being comfortable with each other, just being innocent’. (StudioBinder, 2023: 4.48-52) The production designer, Sarah Greenwood, spoke of the Barbies’ purity as having an ‘Adam and Eve quality’ (Bradley, 2024). The innocence, comfort and absence of threat in this Arcadia is directly connected to the absence of men. Barbie Land is a peaceful matriarchy, yet a matriarchy without mothers. This is because Barbie, as we learn from the opening sequence, is the doll that made girls realise they no longer had to play just at being mother.

Yet this account needs qualification. Negative affect is present in Barbie Land's ‘Happy Suburbia’ from its outset. Concealment and hiddenness structure its space. Bodies do change. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) is a doll who has been altered by play in the Real World. It appears that only certain kinds of play can change a doll, typically play that is ‘too hard’, that is, by play that transgresses the prescribed norms of interaction with these dolls. Weird Barbie's experience of having been changed through unconventional play gives her a knowledge of the Real World denied to other Barbies. It also makes her a figure simultaneously mocked, feared and isolated by them (see: Babin, 2024). Her house is set at a hygienic moral and geographical distance from the Dreamhouse. In the Restored Barbie Land, Weird Barbie, now reintegrated into its community, asks to take over the running of its sanitation; initially excluded from the space as a kind of pollutant, she becomes the figure who keeps it purified. Her Weird House has internal walls to conceal what it contains: the shameful evidence of failed Barbies and Kens. These include dolls such as Growing Up Skipper, who has a body that maps onto pubertal change, a dog who defecates and a series of otherwise blameless dolls who have become, for unknown reasons, ‘mushy and complicated’, their bodies softening and their feelings confused. The Weird House dolls, who have failed in various ways to meet the commercial and cultural expectations of a resident of Barbie Land, are safely cordoned off from its more successful inhabitants, but persist as a reminder of abjection's threat.

There are also men in Barbie Land, though they enter the Dreamhouse by invitation only. They are both present and invisible in Barbie Land. ‘Where do the Kens stay?’, asks Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). ‘I don’t know’, replies Stereotypical Barbie. The Kens collectively are positioned as stereotypes of a decorative 1950s femininity, an adoring, unthreatening but unstable backdrop to the real business being conducted by the Barbies. Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) is aware from the outset of the contingency of perfection, of the potential for change. The Narrator (Helen Mirren) observes that ‘Barbie has a great day every day. Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him’. Barbie Land, like Eden, is structured on precedence: Barbie comes first and Ken second in terms of creation, significance and value. (Gosling's script came with ‘and Ken’ scratched out of the title (Olsen, 2023)). Ken's dilemma exemplifies the crisis of being dependent on another for his meaning: ‘I don’t know who I am without you … That's why I was created’ (Barbie, 2023: 1.34.20), Ken laments when Barbie rejects him towards the end of the narrative. In compensation for his secondariness, Ken doubles up in the narrative as Barbie Land's Eve and its serpent, the corrupting force that overthrows Barbie Land's original order by successfully persuading both the Barbies and the Kens of the logic of patriarchy. The instability of his position motivates his unwitting search for something that will grant him a more stable sense of self. He is jealous, needy, insecure, intensely competitive with Rival Ken (Simu Liu) for Barbie's attention, uncertain of what his economic purpose is (‘My job … it's just beach’, he clarifies, a line that anticipates his self-description as ‘just Ken’) but certain that he is undervalued (‘Anywhere else I’d be a ten’, he sings). He is anxious to win Rival Ken's respect but unsure how to manage his need for his rival's approval (‘Ken is not cool’, Stereotypical Barbie snaps at one point. ‘He is to me’, mutters Ken). He asks to stay over with Barbie because ‘we’re girlfriend/boyfriend’ and when Barbie asks ‘to do what?’ he replies in resigned puzzlement: ‘I’m actually not sure’. Ken's recognition that something is lacking is a neat meta-joke at the expense of Mattel's toy design but also feeds his niggling discontent. His unsatisfied desires and his discovery in the Real World of the rival ideal of patriarchy will prompt his rebellion.

Myths of the ‘Happy Garden’ seek to answer one key question: how was this original innocence lost? Barbie and Ken leave this paradise voluntarily on their quest (Ken in the unnecessary helper role) but return separately, one to bring about its fall and one to restore it. The catalyst for these events, as so often in archetypal myth, is the arrival of death into the world. In the midst of another ‘rager’ of a party, Stereotypical Barbie asks without change of expression: ‘you guys ever think about dying?’. The performance literally comes to a complete stop: the music is silenced, the Barbies and Kens become rigid and stare aghast. Stereotypical Barbie covers up her first ever social faux pas by telling her first ever lie: ‘I’m just dying … to dance!’. This first act of concealment is followed inevitably by a second as, the next day, her feet go flat. As she shows her feet to dismayed onlookers at the beach that afternoon, two moments demonstrate how swiftly malfunctioning dolls are sanctioned. Basketball Ken (Ben Kingsley-Adir) turns to spy on the situation through his binoculars before the other Barbies respectively shriek, gaze (again) in stunned revulsion or start to dry retch. Stereotypical Barbie's body has changed ‘beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ in Barbie Land (Kristeva, 1982: 1). Barbie experiences bodily pain and disorder: her breath smells, she reacts to the changed temperature of the shower, she can taste sourness and her feet hurt as she hobbles up the steps to Weird Barbie's house. Shamed by and hiding part of her body, Barbie is subject to a disciplining gaze shown to be not so much absent as waiting, made manifest by her body's non-conformity to the expectations of Barbie Land. This experience of shame unites with the other objects of that gaze in the Weird House. In the Real World, where she travels in order to restore her lost perfection, Barbie's bodily transformation is not checked as she hoped but developed, mediated through her encounters not only with the male gaze but also with older women, mothers and mother-figures. Her slow recognition of changing, ageing bodies as valid bodies is captured by her wondering observation to an older woman sitting on a bench – ‘you’re so beautiful’ – a knowledge impossible to acquire in Barbie Land since no such ageing body exists there.

Ken's experience in the Real World is also shaped through encounters with male bodies and observation of male peers’ interactions. At Century City, he is bombarded with images of muscular male bodies and of male economic, cultural and political power. He acquires his knowledge of how to be male through observation and reading, refracted through a superficial engagement with screens, images and books, though at times what appears to be a misunderstanding proves a disconcertingly accurate observation. His remark that ‘horses are just men-extenders’ is a peerless judgement of the equestrian portrait. More brutally, his performance of a single pull-up and his remark to Barbie that ‘That's enough’ for him to win dominance in Barbie Land serves as a direct and revealing contrast to Gloria's (America Ferrara) much longer monologue on the intensive and contradictory demands made of women in the Real World. His conversations with people are distinguished by an adversarial showing off which he has learned is how men communicate (or, given his earlier exchanges with Rival Ken, has merely had reaffirmed). The collection of books that he browses through in the library of Davy Crockett Junior High (motto: ‘Home of the Frontiersmen’) is a carefully curated one that defies the logic of any library cataloguing system but offers a concise introduction to the patriarchal imaginary. The books he checks out are made-up titles but he finds them alongside books that exist in the Real World. All are non-fiction, on horses, cars and motorcycles, military special forces, men's fashion and style, sport – including Michael Lewis's Moneyball (2003) and W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982), the basis for the film Field of Dreams (1989) – strength training, popular science, history and architecture. The shelves’ contents feed Ken's imagining of his new dominion. The end of the Edenic ideal is typically signalled by a change for the worse in the surrounding environment and Barbie Land is duly restyled as the Kendom, complete with leather couches, TV screens, large SUVs, mini-fridges, gym equipment and golf clubs, in a colour palette of black, white and chrome. Its best-selling, euphonic Mojo Dojo Casa House immediately captures boys’ attention and their parents’ money. Ken's value, if not his self-worth, has been markedly increased by his investment in patriarchy. ²

Barbie turns the repeated correction of her mistaken assumptions about women's experience in the Real World to use when she returns to Barbie Land and restores its former power balance. She and her team of Barbie and Ken rejects undertake a vaccination programme to restore the body politic of Barbie Land to its former condition and prevent future outbreaks of patriarchy. Yet rather than remaining in the space she has just renewed, Barbie leaves. Her introduction to adult female embodiment in the Real World is the catalyst for that departure. Being played with by Gloria, an adult woman freighted with experience of a world that relies on and exploits women's economic and emotional labour, a woman with whom she has become ‘inextricably intertwined’, changes Stereotypical Barbie's experience of Barbie Land's spontaneous, undemanding plenty. Innocence has been replaced with the burden and opportunity of knowledge. ‘I’m here to see my gynaecologist’, she brightly tells the receptionist in the film's closing line, a moment which once again makes comic fodder of Mattel's genital-free doll design and introduces Barbie's first steps into adult sexuality. As Susan Faludi notes of the film, ‘it begins with little girls playing with dolls learning the origin story of Barbie — and the rejection of the idea that women can just be mothers. It ends with her going to the gynecologist’ (Bennett, 2023). At the end of the narrative, Barbie, now Barbara Handler, has a new task: to learn how to manage the medical demands and cultural assumptions that will structure her Real World experience of the female reproductive body. The fate of the Kens is more uneasily managed. The Ken dream ballet, with its deliberate overtones of Grease (1978) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), is Barbie's principal investment in cinematic spectacle. The scene is paralleled by Stereotypical Barbie's own exposition-heavy exchange with Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) at the conclusion of the film (both scenes use a Singin’ in the Rain-inspired backdrop). The dream ballet, soundtracked by a power ballad, reiterates that physical performance – whether in mock-war, play-ballet or failed surfing – remains the language of masculine feeling. At the film's conclusion, Ken inevitably remains in the restored Barbie Land. The Kens have been promised ‘one lower circuit court judgeship’ as a sop for their frustrations, a reminder of their inferiority and (implicitly) a punishment for their rebellion. Beach Ken is left alone with the self-help bromide of ‘I am Kenough’ even as the structural position he is returned to in Barbie Land makes clear that he is not. Like Barbie, he too must navigate a place that is, he learns from bitter experience, the mirror image of the Real World rather than its ideal form.

The film alters the terms of the expulsion from Eden that lies at the heart of Jewish and Christian accounts of the origin of patriarchy. Barbie leaves voluntarily, unable to remain in a matriarchy that persists in its investment in the forever young. The film is another instance of the power struggle over the meanings, purpose and agency of the female reproductive body, which is to say that it is a film about motherhood, non-motherhood and about the female body as it changes over time. In Jewish and Christian myth, pain in childbirth was a punishment for Eve's transgression and the body's reminder of women's subjugation. In Barbie, by contrast, knowledge of those changes and the experience of coping with them is the mark of Barbie's liberation from the space of innocence.