Barbie (2023) is perhaps the most thoroughly postmodern children’s movie produced to date. The marketing material for this film promised that it was the movie for you whether you loved Barbie or hated Barbie and the film delivers almost precisely this – a story that attempts to shatter any grand narrative surrounding this toy. This is done from a variety of directions: first by establishing, as the premise of the film, that Barbieland is perfect – for Barbies – and that the Barbies who live there are comfortable in the knowledge that through the nebulous and infinitely transforming nature of Barbie they have created an avatar that allows girls, and by extension women, to be anything. The film then sends Barbie out of Barbieland and to the real world – in which the lie to that statement is revealed in full.

And yet, the Barbie movie also refuses to fully let go of the idea of Barbie as a mystical avatar for modern femininity. This creates one of the central double-binds of the film. The Barbie movie wants to demonstrate both that Barbie is representative of the aspirational desires of women but also that it is insufficient to the task.

These sorts of double-binds proliferate the text quite openly such as a late scene in which Gail, the Mattel executive assistant and frustrated mother whose spiritual bond with Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie” leads, in part, to the action of the film delivers a monologue saying, “You have to be a career woman, but also look out for other people.

“You have to answer for men’s bad behavior which is insane but if you point that out you’re accused of complaining.

“Because you’re supposed to stay pretty for men but not so pretty you tempt them too much or you threaten other women. Because you’re supposed to be part of the sisterhood but always stand out.

“You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard, its too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal and says thank you.”

Many critics have been fast to point out that much of the feminist content of this film is reminiscent of “girlboss feminism” – a kind of reintegration of third-wave Feminism that has been fully subsumed by capitalism. But this, too, is a bit of a simplification of a central double-bind for the film in which the CEO of Mattel mumbles that the company is built of women and that two prior CEOs were women while standing amongst a cadre of nameless male executives but in which the ghost of Ruth Handler maintains an office and seems, in some way, to still be running the company. This is a film in which Mattel is proven incapable of taking action of any moral significance because it is restricted by the profit motive but also one in which Mattel will also take moral action because it is restricted by the profit motive. The theme of the Barbie movie is so fragmentary as to be almost fractal.

And, of course, the Barbie movie shares a common concern with other postmodern films such as The Matrix with regard to authenticity and the order of simulacra. However, where the latter settles toward a Kierkegaardian celebration of the leap toward the authentic against all rational odds this movie instead spends two of its three acts reveling in probing the boundary between simulacra and the real. Barbieland is like a town in Sweden. However, when the pedal hits the metal the Barbie movie collapses any vestige of a division between simulacra and the real in favour of a Beauvoirian recognition of the necessity of self-announcement of being.

However let’s not suggest that Gerwig and Baumbach were able to get ahead of the greatest existentialist ethicist with their script. The script introduces our Barbie in a role that maps to Beauvoir’s description of narcissism. “Her memories become fixed, her behavior stereotyped, she dwells on the same words, repeats gestures that have lost all meaning: this is what gives the impression of poverty found in “secret diaries” or “feminine autobiographies”; so occupied in flattering herself, the woman who does nothing becomes nothing and flatters a nothing.”

And from there the film charts her evolution toward a kind of liberation, while attempting to recognize the fundamental incompleteness of the struggle. It’s, honestly, one of the better interpretations of existentialism in any recent scripts. I’ve commented elsewhere that Gerwig and Baumbach appear to grasp Beauvoir far better than the Daniels did Camus and, while I still think Nope did a better job of interrogating questions of recognition and the look, this was in part because Nope was a movie for adults and, as such, could get darker than a children’s comedy. And the script here is very good. It’s funny – very funny – and designed in a way that stays alert both to the child audience who are the primary targets of the film and the inevitable parents who will be escorting their kids there.

But, for all that the film uses Beauvoir’s feminism to strong effect they miss something very critical that Beauvoir said of liberation. “These civic liberties remain abstract if there is no corresponding economic autonomy; the kept woman—wife or mistress—is not freed from the male just because she has a ballot paper in her hands; while today’s customs impose fewer constraints on her than in the past, such negative licenses have not fundamentally changed her situation; she remains a vassal, imprisoned in her condition.”

The action of the Barbie movie comes to a head as the Barbies manage to protect legal rights via legal democratic action. Their economic dependence upon Mattel is, not only not abolished, it’s reaffirmed when Mattel realize that certain progressive doll ideas put forward by Gail would be very profitable. And this is the realm in which the incomplete double-binds of Barbie really strike at it. “Woman’s fate is intimately bound to the fate of socialism,” Beauvoir says, and the film is unable to follow her down such socialist lines of inquiry.

It does appear that the film is aware of this. There is a self-conscious and recursive auto-critique of Mattel present throughout the movie that treats capitalism as being bleak, dangerous, byzantine and ritualistic in ways that recognize both the libidinal irrationality of capitalism and its tendency to co-opt its own critique. The situationist double-bind of the intrinsic spectacle of capitalist critique is fully present in this film and there’s no effort made to conceal that it is the simulacrum of a criticism rather than anything actually cutting. Mattel makes out like the subject of a televised roast.

But this is a children’s movie. Am I saying I want children’s movies to be socialist propaganda? I mean yes. But that’s neither here nor there for navigating the central tension I’m picking at with this film between its postmodern obsession with the real and the fake and its attempt to create a Beauvoirian thesis regarding objectification. Because this gets to something I’ve danced around until now: how much of the film is predicated upon the conflict intrinsic in “Barbie has a great day everyday. Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”

It’s kind of funny that one defense I’ve seen of the film is that it might encourage little girls to ask about what the Patriarchy is. And that’s all for the good although mine actually just asked what a gynecologist was. But we do have a moment in the movie where Ken says he grew bored with patriarchy once he realized it didn’t have anything to do with horses.

Ultimately the film correctly places patriarchy as being, in part, a failure of the Kens to be for-itself. (I know, it would be lovely to get through an issue of Kid’s Stuff without bringing in Heideggerian phenomenological terminology but, like, it was Gerwig and Baumbach who decided to put this much Beauvoir into their discourse so here we are, again.) Effectively Ken depends upon the gaze of Barbie in order to validate his being. He doesn’t have much of a stable identity. His job is “beach” – not lifeguard. Just beach. But Barbie, being something of a body without organs, escapes the for-itself / for-others dichotomy a bit more than Ken who is oriented so thoroughly to validation via Barbie that he ends up existing only for Barbie. Barbie is effectively nothing because she contains the potential to be anything. Ken is just Ken: hyper-determined in his transfiction in the gaze of the other.

This is, honestly, where it becomes clear that the scriptwriters understand Beauvoir at least outside of her socialism. There is more depth of feminist theory to the psychological landscape of Ken than there is in the boilerplate “girlboss” feminist speeches of Gail and her daughter. Instead Ken’s catharsis comes about from the realization that he needs to understand who he is when he’s not with Barbie. His antagonistic turn and dalliances with patriarchy arise out of the frustration he feels at his own superfluity. Ken tries to bring down Barbieland because he can only have a good day when Barbie looks at him. And Barbie has her own shit going on right now and kind of just doesn’t need constantly validating Ken’s existence to be her focus. The central mystery of where Kens go when Barbies aren’t with them is never resolved because Ken ends the film beginning the search for the answer to that question. And meanwhile Barbie is taken up by God (I mean the ghost of Ruth Handler) and is told that she cannot ask for humanity. No power can give her authentic being for itself. She has to announce it for herself.

I liked the Barbie movie quite a lot. It’s very funny. It’s well-written, well-shot and well-designed. A central scene in the real world in which Barbie is overcome by the beauty of the natural world and is brought to tears demonstrated that Gerwig’s pretensions to indy artistry were strong enough to survive into what should be an over-glorified toy commercial. It helps that it’s very well peformed with Robbie delivering some of her best work of her career in this film. Initially comparisons to The Lego Movie might seem appropriate but that would be doing this film a disservice. Greta Gerwig has created a very good children’s film on the back of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s considerable talent and chemistry. They’re both excellent comedic actors and displaying their talents very well here. There is a remarkable strangeness to this film with its ghosts and ritualistic CEOs, with its plastic other-world and its metaphysical bond between toys and people that is honestly refreshing and that resists boiling down to “parent-child trauma” the way so many of these other toy movies do. In fact the closest this movie gets to that is making it clear that a parent is ultimately not responsible for choosing who her child will grow into.

I like that this movie is one that infuriates all the very worst people. It amuses to imagine Ben Shapiro furiously marking down a tick on a notepad every time somebody says the word Patriarchy in this movie. However the Barbie movie demonstrates a key problem with taking the work of materialist leftist theorists and divorcing them from their economic contexts. The Beauvoir of the Barbie movie is a remarkable work of fictional reproduction. But it’s incomplete through the absence of a coherent economic critique. The Barbies save the day with a vote to protect the constitution and via protecting the liberal character of the supreme court. This failure of the Barbie movie to be as cogent about formal politics and capitalism as it is of cultural criticism of patriarchy is an obvious artifact of the “toy commercial” aspect of what Mattel wanted from this movie. This is to its detriment.

And yet still it is a movie that is satisfied with presenting the messy facticity of life and telling the girls who are its primary audience that it’s alright to be mixed up, frustrated and confused just as long as they keep working toward being for themselves and that nobody will give them this. They must announce it.