As with almost anyone, I search for myself on screen. Martin Scorsese, that seer of cinema, once said: “Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things.” Which is true, but they also reinforce prejudice and often cement our own shortcomings as virtues.
This is especially true for men, and boys. Since I was old enough to watch, I’ve been seeing what I assumed to be idealised versions of myself on screen.
James Bond. Indiana Jones. Frank Bullitt. Tony Stark. Every one a hero, a world-saver, no matter how gruff his temperament nor how easy his slide into the use of casual violence. This also, of course, neatly slides to one side the fact that I can’t drive like Steve McQueen, nor am I anything like as handsome as Harrison Ford, and nor can I wear a sleek suit with quite the authority of Connery.
Then again, peep behind the curtain and the veneration of both character and actor becomes exceedingly dodgy. None of these actors are worthy of admiration, given reports from their private lives.
That can all be swept aside, just line up another stunt, another explosion, another witty quip and all can be forgiven, or at least forgotten.
Barbie is a rather different story. I had read the reviews. I was already a huge fan of Margot Robbie, ever since seeing I, Tonya.
Barbenheimer
I was as swept up as anyone in the cultural phenomenon of Barbenheimer, although I did it the other way around — seeing Christopher Nolan’s hefty, weighty, utterly male-dominated (save for small, jewel-like performances amid the sand by Florence Pugh and the incomparable Emily Blunt) Oppenheimer first.
That, I figured, was the right way around. Stare the horror of nuclear conflict in the face first, then rinse one’s soul clean with the frothy joy of Barbie.
How right, and yet how wrong I was.
I knew that the Barbie movie would be subversive. Reviewers had repeatedly said so, but I assumed that the fact that the film was made in close collaboration with Mattel, the vast toy-making corporation that manufacturers Barbie dolls, would leaven that subversion, keeping it slightly below the glossy surface at all times.
Again, how right and yet how wrong I was. Director Greta Gerwig and star Robbie’s subversion of capitalist, corporatist culture is certainly there, but the punch is ever so slightly pulled, as Will Ferrell’s character of Mattel’s CEO is never portrayed as being entirely evil. Mildly venal is about as bad as he gets.
Ken's Porsche
No, it was Ken that got me. Kens, actually.
How to trip around this subject without invoking spoilers? Well, let me start by saying that it was the line about the Porsche 356 sports car that really stove in my solar plexus. My day job is writing about and reviewing car, and I am deeply obsessed with the Porsche brands, so Ken’s recognition of that car’s place in automotive history was entirely correct.
It was also devastating. Watching Indiana Jones or James Bond on screen was me seeing me as I wanted to be. Watching Ken drivel on about old cars to an evidently bored Barbie was me seeing me as my actual mansplaining self. In Technicolour. On a 40-foot screen. In hi-def.
I know I can be boring about cars.
I know I have been that Ken and my wife has had to play the role of that bored Barbie on more than one occasion.
However, while I might idly brush that off, I cannot brush off The Descent Of Ken that the film uses as a core plot point. The exploitation, both for and of, the patriarchy.
The marginalisation and minimisation of women, even in a film in which a woman is the above-the-line title character, is deftly and devastatingly played. The sheer numb-minded, blank-screen, petty dreadfulness that Ryan Gosling so brilliantly performs.
Subversion
This is the ultimate subversion of the Barbie movie. It doesn’t just present a narrative of how brilliant women are and can be, from President Barbie to Nobel Prize Winning Barbie — those roles proving both reductive and inspirational in equal measure — it presents men as they appallingly are or can be.
We’ve gotten better at pretending we hate the patriarchy
As one character puts it ‘We’ve gotten better at pretending we hate the patriarchy.’ As one woman put it to me, ‘That film presents the world as we see it.’ And it’s not pretty.
I am a regular cinema-goer. I love films as much as I love cars, possibly even more so. Yet I generally go to see a film, enjoy it, and then leave the cinema wondering what I shall eat and how long it will take to get home.
The only film I have ever walked out from, after which I had to go and have a quiet sit-down, to collect my thoughts and gather myself, was Saving Private Ryan. As a person raised on the easy, bloodless heroics of The Dam Busters and The Great Escape, Spielberg’s presentation of the sheer horror of war left me feeling breathless and beaten by the end.
Barbie has done the same for me where my witting and unwitting membership of a patriarchal world is concerned. Yes, I laughed. Yes, I enjoyed. Yes, I adored. But equally, yes, I saw myself up there. And while I don’t have Goslings abs nor his perfect teeth, nor his fake tan, there is a part of me that’s Ken. And it’s a part I’ll have to reckon with.
While Barbie is, primarily, a fun (deeply hilarious at times) and enjoyable film, it’s also an education. Every man, every boy, every potential Ken, needs to see it. And learn.
