I grew up watching Speed Racer, the original anime, on television in the late 1960s. I probably watched it from the time I was four or five until I was eight or ten on a constant stream of reruns. So when the Wachowskis released a live action Speed Racer in 2008, I was gratified. Not necessarily as a discriminating adult, however. When it comes to film, I’m more into analysis than evaluation — I’m far too easy to please. What was most gratified was my inner ten year old. The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer was written just for that: for living ten year olds today and for the inner ten year olds of men in their 60s and younger who grew up watching the original series when it ran from 1967-1968. I could tell they wrote their iteration of Speed Racer to gratify their own inner ten year olds, and it worked. It gratified mine. The film was perfect in that respect.
Now I’m waiting for a Racer X movie!
I imagine this year’s Barbie movie has had a similar effect on adult women. There’s a nostalgia factor involved in watching a film or series based on a childhood cartoon, or toy, or book or film. I grew up around Barbies, but I didn’t have a sister, so they weren’t in my own household. They were in my friends’ houses, their sisters’ toys. Something for us to play with perhaps a little too rough — my friends and I, I must confess, were as children directly responsible for the creation of a few weird Barbies. I feel right now like I owe a few kids out there new Barbies as some kind of recompense for my own childhood crimes. So while I was watching this year’s Barbie movie, I understood the nostalgia factor only from a distance. I got that these were all real Barbies at different times, and that the women in the audience were laughing at real life versions of their childhood toys. And I had daughters, but I remember their Barbies only vaguely. Barbies never took over my adult houses the way GI Joes took over my childhood home. So the nostalgia factor was subdued for me. I still experienced it, though. I felt it myself at the first sight of Weird Barbie.
And I still laughed through the whole movie, and I loved seeing Rhea Perlman on a screen again.
My favorite scene was near the beginning, right after Barbie arrives in the real world. She’s sitting at a bus stop, looks over at a very elderly woman, stares at her awhile, and then tells her that she’s beautiful. I said this to my daughter Grace (16), and she told me that she’s done the exact same thing, so the scene may have been in the movie because it’s a common experience. At a close second for favorite scene was the fourth wall breaking MARGOT ROBBIE IS NOT THE BEST CHOICE FOR THIS SCENE scene.
I could extend my list of favorite scenes, but what I’d really like to discuss is the Barbie film’s feminism, because it made a feminist statement, but not one that fits common stereotypes of feminism. Its feminism was more toward the complex and intelligent type than toward any stereotypical misrepresentation of feminism current today.
What, do you ask, do I mean by the word “feminism”? The term “feminism” is a very large umbrella term covering political, sociological, and aesthetic analyses of a variety of cultural products and institutions. Some feminisms are more or less compatible with others, but even these are completely at odds with still other feminisms. The only thing keeping anything under the umbrella is a specific focus on women’s issues and identity within the object of analysis, critique, or advocacy, but not all feminisms agree on much of anything beyond that. Feminism isn’t about hating men; it’s not even necessarily about criticizing men. Sometimes it is (see the S.C.U.M. Manifesto), but more often it empathizes with men as well. Feminism is not always directly political. It may or may not have an agenda beyond analysis for the sake of understanding. What it is, consistently, is concerned with women, and that’s it.
A stereotype of feminism would say that feminism asserts that men in general have it better than women in general in this world because of our embeddedness in a patriarchal system. I would describe that idea as a patriarchal fantasy.
The movie didn’t make it so easy, though. Ken was useless in the real world. He couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t even do what he was born to do — #beach. Which is now, yes, a verb and now, yes, must forever be accompanied by a hashtag. I suspect had Ken found a modeling agency he would have been much happier, but the film didn’t go that way.
Ken enjoyed the patriarchal fantasy only by remaking Barbieland into Kenland, which means that the patriarchal fantasy is just as much a fantasy as Barbieland is. It’s a male dreamworld, but not a male reality.
But, at the same time, and you’re already thinking this, the chairmen of the board of Mattel making decisions about the Barbie product were all in fact men — in the real world. And when Barbie got loose in the real world, they wanted to put her back in a box. So Ken got the idea for a patriarchal fantasy from the real world, but since the patriarchal fantasy isn’t real in the real world, he couldn’t participate in it.
The real world system is still patriarchal because it is run by men, but it is not run by all men. The real divisions here are class and income divisions that are still, but not necessarily, split along gender lines as well. Would you rather be a female manager or a male floor worker in a factory? Would you rather be a female CEO or a male manual laborer? Being male doesn’t mean you’re on top. Being a male may or may not provide an advantage over female peers, and generally does, at least in terms of income, but even this may be on a case by case basis. It depends upon who is on top, and that could be a woman, or it could be a man who is sympathetic to women… or not.
So the real world was awful for Ken too — both the Barbieland fantasy was awful for men and the real world was awful for almost all men. Only Kenland fulfilled the patriarchal fantasy where men as a group were on top and women as a group were subordinate. This patriarchal fantasy is also the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. But Kenland itself is a fantasy, one shared by many men and a number of women.
Fantasy, however, in the film, and in real life, and in real life in the film, isn’t irrelevant. It had its impact on the real world. When Kenland started ramping up, new toys started being sent out, toys which would capture the imaginations of both boys and girls alike — presumably making the real world a little bit more like Kenland every day. Fortunately (spoiler alert), the Barbies won Barbieland back, but when they took it back, it didn’t quite go back to being what it was. Barbie wouldn’t have it. She saw, and rejected, its cruelty toward men, toward Kens, who ultimately lost their supreme power when Barbies started consciously and deliberately manipulating them romantically. Draw them in… then drop them.
So if Barbieland, a dreamworld where girls rule instead of boys, was rejected at the end, what did the film aspire to? Not a feminism that asserts the superiority of women over men — that is a stereotype of feminism. It aspired to an unformed and barely imaginable future where men and women relate freely and equally and both have agency — so they work out together what they want their lives to be, and they find value in themselves rather than relationally.
I AM KENOUGH!
I typed that because my wife would want me to.
I think the film atomizes people in a bad way on this point, but it’s seeking a way forward — not working out every answer.
This is as opposed to the real world where very few people have real agency except for a few at the top who happen to be mostly men.
Anyway, it was funny, and I now own a pink shirt.
Go Allan.
James Rovira 
Leave a comment