I am here for the Barbie discourse
and I'm Kenough
Part One: Just Here for the Discourse
The Barbie movie was released a month ago and, in that month, it has become a main feature of the discourse. It got there by becoming culturally instilled in a rare sort of way — it permeated everything. Turn on the television and you’ll see Barbie in a Chevy commercial. Or a Progressive commercial. The Barbie roller blades are sold out. The Barbie candle is sold out. Thankfully, you can still get Barbie crocs.
Critics of all ideologies have now seen the movie and told us what they think. And they all think something slightly different. This what happens when a cultural leviathan parks itself in the discourse — everybody brings their own opinions and uses it as a mirror to reflect their own ideas. And you already know how predictable that process is. Fox News commentators say Barbie is too woke. Ben Shapiro did forty-three minutes on why he hates the Barbie movie. (And here’s a funny sidenote on cultural touchstones — you can usually tell how much fun they are by how much they bother Ben Shapiro. Remember how much he hated ‘WAP?”)
Some critics thought Barbie wasn’t woke enough. The more succinct critics were of the opinion that it’s impossible to make Barbie woke. At Vogue, the reviewer closed her Barbie piece by saying “I suspect Barbie will end up like Barbie the doll—great fun for a short time, with a legacy that seems likely to change in the years to come.”
And maybe it’s true that Barbie won’t age well. We don’t know yet. American Pie didn’t age well. Neither did Animal House. But neither of those were really trying to do anything, Barbie is. What we can be sure of is that people will be talking about in the years to come. The biggest movie of a year tells you something about what life was like during that year. That’s why when you go into gift-shops, they always have a rack of those kitschy cards from 1952 through 1991, listing the biggest movies and songs of the year. When they make one of those cards for 2023, they’ll put Barbie on there beside Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.
Barbie has become that thing. The Barbie movie isn’t really about the Barbie movie anymore. It’s about how it spun off into the world. I mean, this is great. On Barstool, the reviewer (who loved the movie) raves “I’m so sick of movies that have nothing to say and you fucking vomit it out your butt.” Meanwhile, a Tennessee pastor said on Facebook that the Barbie movie “is full of Demonic influences and do not be surprised if your child suddenly starts to behave differently!” He added that “the Lord showed me the Millions of Demons that will be released on your children! Don't take this lightly.” That post has something like 30,000 reactions.
I mean, I love it. I love looking around and everybody — even the crazy online guy — is talking about the same thing. It sort of grounds you. And it makes life a bit easier because when you meet your cousin-in-law’s friend’s boring boyfriend, you finally have something to talk about other than the weather.
Part Two: Okay, lets discourse
So it was in the hurricane of discourse that I finally went to see Barbie last week. I’d rather not inject myself directly into the discourse. But I suppose I’ve got to and so I’ll rely on platitudes. I thought the Barbie movie was pretty. And I don’t mean the characters, that’s obvious — I mean the scenery. I think the weird thing that nobody is talking about is that Barbie obviously lives, not in Malibu as we always believed, but in Palm Springs. There are palm trees and everywhere and the streets are empty and clean, almost like it never rains. There’s no water. Everything is plastic, even the ocean and it’s all so pretty. That’s not Malibu. That’s Palm Springs.1
Now, I don’t have Ben Shapiro’s apparently unlimited energy to get upset about cultural touchstones. But I guess I should say something about Ken. Because I know Ken. When I saw Barbie and Ken said “I’m just beach”, my reaction was okay, so this is me and all of my buddies at age twenty-two. Ken isn’t really a bad guy. The patriarchy isn’t Ken’s fault, he’s just living in it. Barbie is trying to fix the system but Ken is kind of just there. Ken wants Barbie but Ken also just wants to beach. He has to stop being an asshole and figure out how to live in an indifferent world, but isn’t that all of us? When he’s in Barbieland, he has to figure out how to move in that world, that’s how the movie closes. And again, isn’t that all of us? Barbie has an existential crisis but so does Ken. And he solves it not by going down awful incel internet holes or by reading too much Foucault but by realizing that just being Ken is Kenough. But, of course, he’s ridiculously good-looking and he can sing. Most of us aren’t even Kenough. And with that, I’ll just leave this banger here:
In the beginning of the movie, before she went into the real-world, Barbie lives in a place that looks pretty similar to the house that Slim Aarons photographed in the California desert town. Beyond the overwhelming pink, the vibe is very similar to Hockney’s A Bigger Splash.