This article contains spoilers for Barbie, the movie, in its discussion of the theme and paradox of motherhood.
The paradox of motherhood sits at the center of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
Barbie opens with an extended homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which makes the oft-observed point that the eponymous doll (Margot Robbie) was revolutionary because it marked a departure from the kinds of baby dolls that little girls had played with for generations. Barbie was radical at the time because she was a grown woman who could be anything, and the girls playing with her didn’t have to pretend to be mothers. Barbie didn’t teach nurturing.
Indeed, as creator Ruth Handler argued, the beauty of Barbie was that she could be “anything she wanted to be.” Interestingly, that has never extended to motherhood. She has been an astronaut and a judge, but the character has never been marketed or sold as a mother. As Dr. Amanda Anthony has pointed out, the fact that Barbie hasn’t been “specifically branded as mom isn’t necessarily a negative thing, if you see it as being an alternative.”
As such, it is interesting that Gerwig’s Barbie returns time and again to the idea of motherhood as its central thematic preoccupation. When Barbie ventures into the real world, she finds herself tasked with healing a relationship between Gloria (America Ferrera) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). She encounters the ghost of her creator Ruth (Rhea Perlman), who explains that Barbie was named for her own daughter, Barbara Handler.
Even the male characters in Barbie are framed in reference to maternity. “I am the son of a mother,” boasts the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell), the movie’s knowing and ironic take on the classic “as a father of daughters” rhetoric employed by male public figures speaking on feminist issues. Barbie explicitly parallels the creative process with maternity. Barbie’s world is turned upside down by doodles that Gloria draws while working through her complicated relationship with Sasha.
However, Ken (Ryan Gosling) might be the movie’s obvious illustration of this core theme. The film repeatedly stresses that Barbie and Ken are not boyfriend and girlfriend. Their relationship is fundamentally different. As Gerwig pointed out in press for Barbie, Ken is derived from Barbie. “Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world,” Gerwig explained to Vogue. “That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.”
Barbie does not feel any attraction to Ken, while Ken himself is confused about what exactly he feels towards Barbie. When Ken asks to stay over with Barbie, she asks, “To do what?” He confesses, “I’m actually not sure.” It is a decidedly Oedipal dynamic. Ultimately, what Ken seems to crave more than anything is Barbie’s validation and approval, like some divine creator. “Barbie has a great day every day,” explains the narrator (Helen Mirren). “Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”
One of the more interesting aspects of Barbie is the fact that it has surprisingly little to say about Barbie as a character. Barbie doesn’t really have an arc or a story. At the end of the movie, Ruth runs through everything that happened, and Barbie correctly shrugs off her own involvement. She doesn’t play a major role in bringing Gloria and Sasha together. Although she plays a role in liberating Barbieland from the tyranny of the Kens, that was “a group effort.”
The film ends with Barbie expressing her wish to become human. It is a plot twist that seems to come largely out of nowhere. After all, Barbie doesn’t seem especially comfortable when she journeys to the real world earlier in the movie to confront Gloria and Sasha. In some ways, this resolution says more about Ruth as a creator than it does about Barbie as a character. It also seems to exist so the movie doesn’t end with the resolution of Ken’s arc.
There are probably reasons for this. Mattel is famously protective of its core brand. The company’s chief operating officer, Richard Dickson, was reportedly “nervous about damaging the brand,” and there were long debates about what the film could and could not include. It is to Gerwig’s credit as a filmmaker that she completely understands what the film can and cannot get away with. She knows how far she can bend the plastic before it breaks.
Watching Barbie, it seems like Barbie herself is inflexible. She is, as the posters promise, “everything.” However, that also means that she is not anything specific. Any details would damage the brand by undermining her core appeal. As such, Barbie cannot really change. She cannot grow or evolve. She cannot have an arc or a story, because that would imply that she might end up somewhere different than where she started.
To be clear, Gerwig compensates for this with knowing and wry jokes that bring the audience on-side by at least gesturing to criticisms of Barbie. “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you,” the trailer promises. “If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” It makes jokes about Barbie congratulating herself for solving sexism in the real world. When Barbie first meets Sasha at school, Sasha runs through a litany of stock critiques of the doll, reducing Barbie to tears.
However, the movie never answers or acknowledges those criticisms, because doing so would mean accepting that maybe Barbie needed to fundamentally change. Instead, it gives voice to them and moves quickly along, hoping that it has beaten even the most cynical audience members to the punch, so disarming any potential critique of the brand. It is exceedingly clever, but it has the effect of marginalizing Barbie in her own movie.
Gerwig seems to have made the entirely correct calculation that she could enjoy much greater freedom working on the character of Ken, who has never been particularly well developed. As the film points out, his job is literally “Beach.” Before Barbie, the definitive pop culture depiction of Ken was probably Michael Keaton’s delightful voice performance in Toy Story 3, the rare portrayal of the couple that foregrounded Ken. Ken is a very handsome and very blank slate.
Gosling leaned into this in interviews, admitting that some people bristled at his portrayal of the doll. “But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time,’” he told GQ. “No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.” Gosling’s press tour is almost as charming as Gosling’s performance.
Ken is the character who gets the big arc in Barbie, to the point that it seems like Barbie’s journey to meet Gloria and Sasha is largely just an excuse to bring Ken into the real world so that he can take the idea of patriarchy back to Barbieland. Having been ignored for decades in Barbie’s imaginary world, Ken is shocked to find that he is respected and validated in the real world for nothing more than being a man who looks like Ryan Gosling.
In the second half of Barbie, Barbie returns to Barbieland to discover that Ken has brought sexism home with him. He has converted Barbie’s dream house into his “mojo dojo casa house.” Punching bags hang from the ceilings. Monster trucks are parked in the driveways. Widescreen televisions broadcast footage of horses on an infinite loop. All the Barbies now serve the Kens “brewskis.” Every night is “boys’ night.”
One of the better jokes in Barbie is the sense that Ken doesn’t really understand patriarchy as a concept. Most obviously, he seems to fixate on the assumption that it involves horses because so much of the imagery he absorbed in the real world included stallions. However, he doesn’t need to understand it. He just needs to imitate it. Ken is presented as effectively an impressionable child, a kid with no understanding of the world who just uncritically absorbs everything he is told.
One of the smarter choices in Barbie is that Ken isn’t ever truly a villain. He’s a wayward infant who is simply uncritically emulating behavior that makes him feel validated and important. Barbie offers a very gentle and very humanist critique of patriarchy and systemic sexism, one that is perhaps open to criticisms that it ignores the reality that a lot of these systems and structures are created with more direct malice. Barbie can look on Ken with compassion because he’s not a man. He’s a scared and insecure boy.
Barbie ultimately gets through to Ken and convinces him of the error of his ways. She doesn’t do this as a lover, despite his repeated attempts. Indeed, the movie openly rejects the suggestion from the CEO of Mattel that it should end with a wedding of Barbie and Ken. Instead, as Ken throws a tantrum in his bedroom, she listens to him with the empathy and compassion of a mother dealing with a stroppy teenager. After all, Ken was created from her.
It could be seen as reductive to filter a big-budget film by a female director through the lens of motherhood. After all, there are plenty of female directors, like Kathryn Bigelow and Lana Wachowski, who are less interested in that theme. However, it is quite common to talk about male auteurs like Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg being obsessed with fatherhood. Even Gerwig herself has acknowledged that she isn’t always conscious of the parts of her life permeating her work.
Barbie is the first movie that Gerwig has made since she became a mother, having a son with her long-term partner and Barbie co-writer Noah Baumbach. In fact, the pair recently acknowledged having a second son. Just as it’s possible to recognize paternal anxiety in the various films of her “weekend buddy” Christopher Nolan — whose haunting movie Oppenheimer features the director’s own daughter Flora as a victim of nuclear holocaust — there is a strong maternal anxiety permeating Barbie.
Despite the fact that Ruth Handler specifically designed Barbie as a doll to teach anything other than motherhood, motherhood is the central thematic preoccupation of Gerwig’s Barbie. Indeed, the film’s closing joke hinges on the fact that, having become human, Barbie now has reproductive organs. Barbie is a film about what it means to be a woman raising a boy in the deeply flawed real world.
