VI. On S(m)elling Out

; or, I'm having a real Proustian Moment!

[Spoilers for Barbie (2023) ahead—also, I saw it nearly a month ago, so please forgive my memory on exact dialogue, etc!]

I.

The other week I was telling Torrey and Harron I’d noticed a pattern in writing on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, particularly among women: scenes from our girlhoods in which we physically destroyed our dolls, or otherwise put them through the psychic ringer. What surprised me was not the fact of the chaos impulse itself, but that anyone felt alone in this, as if our melancholic dollwork had been shameful, an anomalous history. Every girl I knew tortured the dishwater-dull denizens of Barbieland; annihilation was not exceptional but encoded in the very DNA of our play. What else would there be to do with them, I wondered, have them elaborate upon the largely unintelligible costumes of their careers? I suppose on occasion my Barbie would be a bartender (like my mom was), or a special education teacher (also like my mom was, only later), but usually my dolls came into money or were artists (in other words, they “worked” from home), which meant they always had time for the baroque, traumatizing psychodramas I and my sister would conjure for them.

We staged awful scenes. Each episode of our synthetic series was summoned in the shape of a Lifetime movie. Skipper would, inevitably, be a humiliated teen mom; Ken was a shameless philanderer with a taste for violence (or even, sometimes, murder). Midge carried the unfortunate burden of being not only morally but physically monstrous, because we’d made her so: her hair shorn like a monk’s, face Sharpied into unrecognizability—my god, I shudder to think how once we even stole our mother’s cigarette lighter to melt Midge’s perfect plastic tits. She had survived, we recounted, an awful house fire, and it had made her bitter, and vengeful. She resented the other Barbies for their beauty, their capacity to be lovable. (Her sole crime? Having a name we found as eminently ridiculous as MIDGE. Only a truly awful girl, we told ourselves, would be born into such a name. We may have been poor, but at least we weren’t named Midge.)

The thing is, little girls aren’t strangers to the horrors of this world. Intuitively, we understood in play as we knew already in life that someone had to be the Midge. Someone had to pull the short, unfuckable end of the pink plastic stick. What makes me sad, looking back, is rather that we couldn’t imagine Barbie having sympathy for Midge, for building a kind of solidarity with the luckless runt of our litter, particularly as the True Villain of our stories was never Midge, who was only ever an ancillary irritant, but Ken. All this, too, makes sense, I suppose. We knew, somehow—or in any case, recapitulated the fact—that the system likes to keep women at odds, even as there is always a more structural trouble at hand. I think there was also something incommunicable there about our own dull ache of familial constriction. We never had any money, we never went anywhere. After work, our mother chain-smoked at the kitchen table, fretting over the bills¹. Her boyfriends were an endless chain of dopes, creeps, and assholes (among them, incidentally—and I’m not making this up—men named Kenny, Ken, and Kenneth).

from Sam Humphreys’s series “What If?”

Our Barbies were aspirational in their way—mainly inasmuch as we awarded them a sort of de facto economic stability—but ours nonetheless withstood the indignities we saw the adult women in our lives suffering. Something else my sister and I understood: beauty was not always a blessing, nor did it guarantee safety, security, or love. The prevailing notion that little girls look at Barbie and imagine existential paradise—so long as they grow up to look like that—supposes that little girls are incredibly stupid, and that they have no other imaginative or real models for womanhood. Barbie’s not the only grown up you see when you’re small. She might have cultural baggage, but even the most well-adjusted child is bringing a lot of their own to Barbie and her small world from the jump.

I once stole a Sleeping Beauty Barbie from a doctor’s office. My aspiration was to, yes, sleep for a very, very long time and, on waking, be initiated into a sort of unexciting, entirely predictable monotony.² Barbie was a kind of place, in this way, where I imagined some respite from disorder, a peaceable life. I didn’t look to her for guidelines on how blonde I should be, or how narrow my waist needed to appear. I understand there are plenty of people who did, but I want to say I think we’re short-changing ourselves if we pretend we can’t engage with art or play objects in a self-reflexive and critical way.

We tend to identify, yes, with what is most proximate to us, but love and hate—desire and disavowal—are more complicated attachments: they coexist, conflict, overlap, and collaborate. Meanwhile, children, no matter how you try to shield them from the worst of this world, still have to live in it. That’s the first difficulty. I never felt wholly alienated from the experiences of my tiny plastic people. I imagined lives for them that looked a little like mine, a little like the ones I knew. I didn’t see myself as “exerting some sort of power over the archetypes that tyrannized me,” as Leslie Jamieson recently wrote in The New Yorker (an essay, I should say, that I quite liked!). We weren’t the gods of our dolls. They were us, and in their lives we processed the griefs we didn’t yet have language for, or the emotional maturity to recognize in a reasonably steady context. We dreamed up stability, and pleasure. Arguably, it was in the narratives I constructed for Barbie and her fucked up cohort that I learned how to be a storyteller. In some makeshift fashion, I suppose, it may have been Barbie who made me a writer.

II.

There’s a minor Proust joke just past halfway through Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which is, for good or ill, the moment that licensed me to write about the film here. At base, the story of Barbie is a hero’s quest: tracking Margot Robbie’s Barbie (“Stereotypical Barbie”; or, the ür-model of the doll) from Barbieland to the real world, as she seeks the cause of her suddenly flat feet, cellulite-rippled thighs, and irrepressible thoughts of death. (This rot of mind and body becomes mirrored in her domestic domain: her toaster waffle burns, her milk spoils, her shower water runs cold.) After she’s arrived in the Mattel boardroom, the company’s CEO (Will Ferrell) promises Barbie they’ll fix her right up—so long as she returns to the confinement of her original packaging and agrees to be sent back to the manufacturer for an identity reboot. On the surface of things, this is a rather easy moral statement on the dull tragedy of personal digestibility, of conformism, but the scene takes a stranger turn.

Here’s where Proust appears. Barbie steps into her box. Lackeys begin twist-tying her hands into immovability. She sniffs at the box’s interior, catching an odd whiff of a submerged remembrance, ostensibly her synthetic genesis: “I’m having a real Proustian moment,” she announces. (“Remember Proust Barbie?” the CEO asks, “That did not sell well.”) Just before her captivity is finalized, Barbie encounters in this smell her own kind of madeleine. Instinctively, she moves her wrists out of reach and exits her box—just in the nick of time³. The memory of the past transforms her present, though, fascinatingly, it’s scent and not taste that proves the most evocative sense here (Barbie of course doesn’t eat—her food is plastic and inedible; not to mention, actual running water would be required for a functioning septic system). The comic citation of Proust’s novel is “a nice Easter egg for one person,” Gerwig told an interviewer. À la recherche du pumps perdu!

If Barbie’s box functions as the portal that would return her to a pre-lapsarian non-existence, her refusal to be sucked back in is the crucial pivot toward self-actualization, her decision to become a sort of person. Frighteningly, in Barbieland, even her mirror is a vacant frame; it’s non-reflective, only another visual tunnel into an unchanging and unchangeable future horizon. Barbie’s ‘self,’ such as it exists (the point of course is that it doesn’t—she is the play-object of an until-now invisibilized god), is the film’s true tabula rasa, a present-absence. While the film’s guiding conflict—Incel Ken seeks vengeance by infecting Barbieland’s blank feminist ‘utopia’ with the scourge of patriarchy—is fun and smart, Gerwig is historically stronger on crises of authorship and autonomy, particularly when what must be written into existence is a woman’s life, a woman’s art.

Margot Robbie (Barbie) in Barbie (2023)

Barbie’s near-imprisonment and subsequent escape from the box seems to me a more unsettling visual gag than critics have let on. The broad ‘feminist’ joke of the scene is obvious, in the way that much of the film’s political messaging is a touch too tidy: Mattel’s executive class is comprised entirely of men, something that shocks Barbie as she appraises the group.⁴ (Barbie’s structural incapacity to critique its own corporatist overlord is another conversation entirely.) But this demographic inequity as filtered through a dynamic of coercion—the CEO sweet-talking⁵ Barbie into believing the board is a-ok (“I’m the nephew of a woman-aunt”), that the ‘cure’ for her malfunction is in factory-stamped lobotomization, all while other men wordlessly attempt to physically restrain the lone woman in a room full of suited losers—is more disturbing than the slapstick chase scene that ensues, more Stepford than Looney Tunes. That these men are the anonymized specters of capitalist extraction is the first register of meaning on offer; that they are also physical bodies able and eager to manipulate a woman’s body into shapes and spaces she can’t possibly consent to seems the darker shade here.

It’s one of several destabilizing ripples in the glassy magenta matrix of the film, instances where you witness another kind of movie struggling to break free of its Barbie box. Something rather more existential, a sort of Beauvoirian meditation on the complicated finger-trap that is this process of becoming a woman. Because that is the undertaking at hand for Robbie’s Barbie, her (re)birth or assimilation into “real”—or in any case, into the organic, human matter of—womanhood⁶, and, in turn, her reckoning with the acrid admixture of desire and desubjectification therein, this project of disaffiliating from structural debasement even as you’re unable to absent yourself from a seemingly totalized misogynistic system, one that at times rewards you, worships you, renders you legible in an expanse of experiential chaos. If Barbie’s marketing apparatus promised revolution through patly delineated brackets of identificatory visibility—and I couldn’t help but wonder what a Barbie where Issa Rae and Hari Nef had more to chew on might have looked like—the film’s deep ambivalence about Robbie’s Barbie’s interpellation in the real world is more fascinatingly textured.

Joanna Eberhart 2.0, in The Stepford Wives (1975)

There’s a funny analogy to be made here between Barbie’s initiation into the sputtering machine of American womanhood and the much-remarked-upon absorption of Gerwig into the Mattel Industrial Complex. Yes, Gerwig is the first woman at the helm of a billion-dollar studio film, but what pound of flesh will be demanded? Meanwhile, to crib (and entirely decontextualize) one of the few biblical verses I recall, the wages of Barbie’s sin is death—her longing for humanity is a fall, too, into mortality. More than this, it means being subject-ified inside—and subjected to—the violent disenfranchisements of white heteropatriarchy.⁷ Because it’s crucial that Barbie, despite Barbieland’s rather mechanical gynocratic paradise, has a sort of innate familiarity with the hatred of women. She may not fully recognize the particular outline of a world run by men, but Barbie knows when she’s being catcalled, and what it is the construction crew is demanding (“I don’t have one of those,” she tells them). She knows what a fascist is, and she sure as shit doesn’t like being named one.

Her world exists inside ours, or in an odd, inextricable adjacency, a kind of bubble universe in which a simple reversal of the gendering of power uncovers a fully liberated, glimmeringly automated society. That said, who wants to commit to a choreographed dance number every single fucking night? Just imagine clapping to the disco beat in the middle of the seventeen-thousandth iteration of a rote, sparkling performance of immaculately manicured sisterhood led, naturally, by Cursory Land Acknowledgment Barbie. Surely even Dua Lipa tires of the physical repetitions of tour life; surely even she wants to be a slob some days. Barbie is—and it’s funny more people aren’t talking about this—a movie that’s, finally, also or mostly, about death, arguably even a movie that, in some slantwise fashion, longs for it. There is much about the plot that feels sexually and ideologically regressive—I literally gasped when Barbie apologized to Ken! HE was the burgeoning fascist!—but its surprisingly spiritual aspect I found quite radical, not to mention its most successful line of continuity with Gerwig’s earlier work.

A more psychedelic Barbie might have literalized the experience of involuntary memory that reroutes the plot of the film. In hindsight, I admire the scene’s ambiguity, for now I find myself wondering: was the past to which Barbie was transported bound up solely in the trauma (yes, fucking kill me, I’m using the word TRAUMA) of non-being—as represented by the phantasm of her factory settings—or was she returned, too, to the tedium of her life in Barbieland, its dull recursivity. We know from the film’s text that Barbie’s interruptive dance-number death-wish is the doodled curse bestowed upon her by her Real World analog (America Ferreras’s Gloria), but during her Big Day in L.A., Barbie bears witness to the beauty of time’s passing, of aging, of death. This is the revelation that animates her encounter with the old woman at the bus stop: our fallibility, our inexorable decline, the unanticipated losses and delights that attend our movement through time, are what grant life singularity. Who doesn’t enjoy the real sensation of a hairbrush’s real bristles against their real scalp? Shouldn’t there be days you don’t want to wake up with a blowout? Is the perfect waffle even comprehensible without having choked down the charred ones? What use is glamour if it is imperturbable, entirely smooth, unvarying?

In Swann, the narrator’s earliest recollections are of the emotionally fatal separation from his beloved mother, but the arrival of the past is not measured in ethical terms—it’s only the brute function of consciousness. (In other words—the involuntary part of “involuntary memory,” lol.) Proust’s temporality is defiantly achronological; by contrast, Barbie’s cinematic logic requires that the intercession of past in present precipitates a both ontological and moral turn: not only must Barbie’s choice introduce time, and therefore, death, to her universe, it must fit hand in glove with an overarching narrative of both personal and cultural linear progress. Though the reactionary mechanics of an anti-feminist backlash present a stumbling block that reaches its apotheosis in the Kens’ attempted coup (many have commented on Gosling’s Sly Stallone furs, but there’s also something eerily like the January 6th shaman in there), the long arc of Barbie’s history orients toward order, not chaos.

Ryan Gosling (Ken) in Barbie

I’m not so interested in the question of whether Gerwig “sold out” or not. I think the conceptual frame holds less water than it ever did, and the fact is we know for certain the film had massive financial backing from an enormous corporate entity. Nothing’s been concealed; there’s no deep state conspiracy quietly Stepfordizing everyone’s favorite mumblecore feminists. We know the movie made a billion dollars. We also know, or suspect we know, that this “win” “for” “women” will likely result in a longer and far more lucrative career for Gerwig—not to mention the horrifying prospect of a metric fuck ton of Mattel-branded franchise films on the horizon—but probably not too much for other women-helmed movies, or summer Blockbusters aimed at female audiences more generally. The overlord takes the spoils, after all. The rest is just, how do you say?, a trickle-down sort of economics. Anyway, selling out usually relies on the obfuscations of parasociality. Nirvana wasn’t creating music specifically for you, babe. An art object can please or displease, politically outrage you or fight what you view as the good fight, but the artist isn’t (or isn’t in the first instance) your buddy, your comrade, or your wife. This isn’t to suggest such art is above critique but should be, I think, a reminder that we, as onlookers, are not where the buck stops. Despite our increasingly micro-organized, individualistic algorithms, we are not the final arbiters of all that we encounter. An artist’s work cannot be subject to a career trajectory that you—specifically you, the solitary interlocutor—have designed for them. (I admit I’m also a bit exhausted with the total politicization of all experience, but that’s for another dispatch.)

“I’m doing the thing and I’m subverting the thing,” Gerwig insists, and it’s true—to a point. But the limits of the possible in such a film are pretty transparent. It’s the thing I whined about to Harron as we left the theater on opening night: I could see the places where Gerwig was bristling against the edges of this apparatus she’d been compelled—and compelled herself—to shrink her vision to. Barbie is great fun—and surprisingly moving as a meditation on how death situates a body, a person, and particularly a woman, in time—but I admit there were moments I was taken out. The most compelling critiques of Barbie concern its capitulation to a dream of benevolent capitalism, as well as its (in my sense) rather inert feminism, which is mainly oriented around a neo-liberal desire for rescue by a politics of representation. There’s nothing in the film to suggest that gendered or sexed hierarchies are fundamentally extractive or problematic—the re-seizure of Barbieland from the horse-worshipping army of doofy, but evidently pretty dangerous, Kens tells us that, yes, someone’s got to run shit, it’s just that women are better and more ethical about it. Let’s call it something like Diva Feminism: a more glamorous elaboration on the increasingly sour figure of the Girlboss. Not to say I wanted someone to think of the men!,⁸ but that the fantasy of the useful state, the smoothly-running bureaucracy, survives in Barbieland, and, ominously, is stronger than it’s ever been.

Anyway! THIS Barbie has gone on too long as usual. À bientôt!

xo, jamie

1. I found particular affinity with Jasmine Sanders’s dispatch on Barbie’s economic aspirationalism for n+1, particularly her sense that her childhood hatred of Barbie was less an abject disidentification with the Aryan femininity of Barbie, and more a mode of enacting “juvenile class rage, ignited at the sight of Miss Thing’s Pepto McMansion inside of our project apartment.”

2. Years later, I thought, too, about the way “Sleeping Beauty” is—in any case in some of its original variants—a narrative about sexual violence, and wondered about my attachment to this story. On this aspect, I always advise a (re-)reading of Anne Sexton’s poem “Briar Rose.” (Hell, read the whole text of her Transformations—it’ll take less than an hour!)

3. The box/womb/Eden framing here could go unremarked upon, but I think is sort of unavoidable—it’s a scene of rebirth, a biblical Fall.

4. In the middle of the chase scene that winds through Mattel’s HQ, Barbie stumbles into the domestic phantasmagoria of inventor Ruth Handler’s honorary chambers, where she is assured by Handler (played by living legend Rhea Perlman) of the political usefulness of Barbie to the sexual revolutions of the 20th century. Handler’s legal troubles with the company that produced German doll Bild Lilli appear rather smudged, I’m certain because of time constraints ;)

5. Sweet until he isn’t, of course: “Get back in the box, you Jezebel!” he shouts at her.

6. Speaking of Harron, I remain obsessed with her reading of the story as rotating on an axis between not having a vagina (vis-a-vis the scene with the construction workers) to having one (“I’m here to see my gynecologist!”), which is also to say: Barbie isn’t a transsexual story, but it’s not NOT a transsexual story, either!

7. Arguably, systemic fissures that Barbie herself has been party to—as we witness in her dawning horror on seeing that, back in the real world, “women’s issues” weren’t solved by her invention.

8. In point of fact, one of my biggest complaints about the film was that it offers forgiveness (and apologizes!) to two hordes of pretty fucking evil men (the Kens and the Mattel board) who’ve learned functionally nothing from the conflicts of the narrative.