“Surface and depth: ambivalence as postfeminist ideal in Barbie”

ABSTRACT

Of the multiple instances of feminist ambivalence present in Barbie, perhaps the most poignant for cinema studies concerns the affirmation of both descriptive and interpretive practices. Across its narrative and aesthetic features, Barbie develops a logic that equates matriarchal culture with “wonderful” surface (Greta Gerwig 2023), and patriarchal culture with paranoid depth. As for the former, Greta Gerwig (2023) has characterised Barbie Land through reference to the original toy Dreamhouse: as a space of openness, where “nothing is obscured because there’s no depth, there’s no shame, there’s no aging, there’s no pain.” In contrast, the returned gaze of the real-world effects depth in the form of self-awareness; as Stereotypical Barbie remarks upon entry, “I’m conscious but it’s myself that I’m conscious of.” This opposition is redolent of recent critical debates concerning modes of reading that pit feminist and queer oriented approaches foregrounding surface against older, masculine models that assume the latency of meaning. Relative to this tension, it is interesting that Barbie has it both ways: by the film’s ending, its project to restore matriarchy to Barbie Land is realised just as Stereotypical Barbie comes to terms with her desire to join the real-world, to “be part of the people that make meaning.” This essay interrogates the surface/depth binary tendered throughout Barbie, arguing that the film’s value for contemporary feminists, specifically those working in the field of cinema studies, hinges on the unification of these levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• ambivalence
• surface reading
• reparation
• Greta Gerwig

Barbie’s (Greta Gerwig 2023) dual worlds are divided along lines of gender as well as measure. Barbie Land, of matriarchal culture, prizes all manner of surfaces, from the openness of the Barbies’ Dreamhouses to their transparent sense of selves. The Real World, a patriarchal domain, values depth in the form of concealment, symbolism and complication for the authority it affords men as interpreters. Barbie’s narrative conflict and apparent worth for feminists is staged through the opposition of these spaces. Barbie Land shows us what a world free of man’s scrutinizing gaze and convoluted systems might be like (e.g., open, un-self-critical, unending) such that its preservation is central to the plotline of Barbie. Why, then, does Stereotypical Barbie¹ (Margot Robbie) choose to join the Real World at the film’s conclusion?

In this essay I offer a critique of sorts of Barbie’s feminism. Rather than reading with the grain—as Barbie Land, with its preference for surfaces, might have it—I take the film’s ending as an invitation to locate its feminism outside of matriarchy. This is to say: if Barbie doesn’t go back to Barbie Land, then there must be more to women’s rights than female dominance and the simplicity that it supposedly brings. I propose that Barbie’s contemporary feminism is one of ambivalence. This feminism relieves itself of ideological gospel and the dynamics of opposition and instead has it all ways. Critical discourse on methodologies of reading provides a useful frame of reference to elaborate this proposition, invested as it is in questions of the hierarchy between surface and depth. Where a combination of these relationalities—a “model of reading grounded in ambivalence,” as Jackie Stacey (2014, 47) puts it—has been suggested as ideal for feminist exegesis, the essay interprets Barbie’s decision to leave Barbie Land as a compromise necessary for her personal and the evolution of women culturally. Consideration of Gerwig’s authorship indicates that Barbie, too, solicits such an ambivalent model of analysis, imploring the feminist critic to look both at and beyond the film’s surfaces to understand its politics.

Gerwig has said that she took inspiration for the ethos of Barbie Land from the architecture of the original toy Dreamhouse. Lacking a back wall, that structure enabled the willful hands of little girls and created an environment of openness. Equally, in Barbie Land, “there is literally no place to hide,” Gerwig, Greta with Elvis Mitchell (2023) explains, “there’s no depth, no aging, there’s no pain. It’s just wonderful.” Consider the formal and narrative features of Barbie’s exposition. Barbie wakes from her restful slumber, showers without water, drinks from an empty glass, and reaches her car without taking the stairs. The accompanying soundscape includes an original song by Lizzo and a voiceover narration by Helen Mirren, both of which narrate Barbie’s activities in perfect sync. Following her morning routine, Barbie arrives at the beach where Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) makes an unsuccessful attempt at surfing, resulting in an injury that is quickly healed. Tonal uniformity and tactility are evident within and across the images that convey these events. Barbie Land’s color palette, which predominantly features shades of pink but also blues, yellows, and greens, is of the same vibrant pastel family. Its landscape and fixtures (e.g., houses, cars, lamp posts, chairs) appear, against its painted backdrops, exceedingly close and dimensional. Little physical or intellectual exertion is altogether required of Barbie or spectator here; in Barbie Land, things are self-evident and easy.

Such transparency has positive effects for the Barbies’ self-worth. They don’t get embarrassed, they readily acknowledge their talents, they embrace their unique beauty and perfection. This outcome is the most appealing prospect of Barbie Land for this feminist. (Imagine being freed of the burden of internal criticism assigned by patriarchy!) Notably, when Barbie enters the Real World her sense of self is immediately doubled by a judgmental returned gaze. “I’m conscious but it’s myself that I’m conscious of,” she remarks. Her disposition is soon colored by a set of other self-reflexive feelings, including anxiety (“I have fear with no specific object”) and shame (“Girls hate me”). These are the first signs of the organising principle of the Real World: depth. Take, for instance, the image of the horse, which Beach Ken (more or less rightly) observes as an exemplifier and “extender” of man. The Real World convolutes and obscures the meaning of language into terms like “EOD” and “Mojo Dojo Casa House,” or through apps like Duolingo. It also communicates by other mediums, like dance or song. Disordered maximalism is, according to Beach Ken, its preferred aesthetic, encompassing the combination of styles (e.g., Western, 80s metal, tennis prep) and excess (e.g., big cars, multiple wristwatches). Far from self-evident, its realities are concealed. The workings of patriarchy; the beauty of the bespectacled woman; the artistic merits of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola 1972): these truths demand exposure. The resting posture of the patriarchal subject is thus one of interpreter; “Here: let me show you!”

Barbie’s discrete worlds recall a perceived opposition in reading practices that preoccupied literary theorists through the early 2000s, and film theorists more recently. Symptomatic reading, characterised by the interrogation of a given text to reveal its latent meanings, assumed precedence within scholarly circles from around the 1970s. Inspired by the psychoanalytic frameworks then in vogue, this mode of reading casts the critic as therapist. Tasked with the diagnosis of their object of study, the critic’s work is at once “suspicious,” “aggressive,” “strenuous,” and “heroic” (Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus 2009, 5–18). The masculine connotations are not hard to see here. It is in part owing to such associations that an alternative, surface method of reading developed, one by which meaning is intuited rather than coaxed. Surface reading is attuned to “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; […] what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.” (Best and Marcus 2009, 9)² Its relation to the text is open-handed and trusting.

The parallel I’m drawing is this: the principles of surface reading align with the logic of Barbie Land, and symptomatic reading utilises the same systems as the Real World. Similar temporal and moral dynamics are also in play. Like the Barbies’ matriarchy, the surface model emerges after its opposite and carries a corrective charge. Indeed, the merits of critical description for the socially minded reader seem obvious and ideal. By reading with the grain, she is at one and the same time issuing a gesture of repudiation toward mechanisms of control—both those that master the text and her person. But for critics like Ellen Rooney (2010) and Stacey (2014), the luster (sparkle?) of surface reading is as clear as it is misleading. This is not to say that such an approach is not useful. Rather, as Rooney (2010) argues, that its virtues may have been overstated. Responding to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s claim that surface reading has replaced its symptomatic forebear, Rooney (quoting Best and Marcus 2009, 124) claims:

To “register what the text itself is saying,” to make present what is “already present,” is a productive act entailed by the ineluctable change of terrain. The presentation of “critical description” is neither a description of the way we read now nor a description of the way anyone might read, ever.

To provide an account of a work always involves a degree of interpretation. Moreover, Rooney (2010, 116) points out that the practice of symptomatic reading may not be as independently minded as its detractors allege; a far cry from intellectual autonomy, “ … symptomatic reading implies a kind of unfreedom, an imposition, the trace of a force never entirely in the control of either reader or writer, a reading effect not as easily disputed or eluded as content, with its thematic obviousness, may be.” Any scholar familiar with close reading (in its classic version), who has struggled to marshal the ideas of an unwieldy text into some kind of coherent exegesis, will corroborate Rooney’s assessment.

For Stacey, the character of the descriptive act is also not as warm as its exemplars suggest. Wary of feminist criticism’s turning away from symptomatic reading, she reconnects the surface strategy of “reparation” popularised by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) to its psychoanalytic origins in the work of Melanie Klein. Stacey’s (2014, 43) venture reveals that reading generously does not reflect pure “love,” as surface readers have implied, but a more “conflicted relation” to the object. The child of Kleinian psychoanalysis covets the mother’s breast for the sustenance that it supplies and resents that breast for its tendency to disappear. The eventual realisation that these breasts are one and the same requires an act of reparation on the child’s part, their frustration with the mother overwritten, but not erased, by forgiveness. Stacey (2014, 44–5) explains that “the nature of the repair brings with it fresh anxieties that then need to be managed […] Klein’s model of reparation is thus […] never one in which love operates free of hate.” Where Sedgwick’s “extracting and privileging of love’s place in the reparative position” has been received by critics as “an invitation to amplify love” in their surface descriptions, the reinstation of such a tension is significant (Stacey 2014, 46).

Turning back to Gerwig’s film with these perspectives in mind, Barbie’s decision to join the Real World reads as an admission of the necessity of conflict. The many virtues that Barbie Land affords—sisterhood, self-assuredness, immortality—seem less shiny in the absence of variability and change. Recall the exposition described earlier. That stretch of the film (morning routine; round of hellos at the beach; failed surfing attempt) becomes increasingly tedious due to a lack of stakes. When chance does happen—a knock on effect of the Real World—and Barbie confronts her mortality, she recognises her naivete as it pertains to the dynamics of cause and effect: “I know I’m Stereotypical Barbie and therefore don’t form conjectures concerning the causality of adjacent unfolding events, but some things have been happening that might be related.” The Barbies are unlearned of the problems that can divert one’s course from its standard trajectory. The several closeups of Barbie in the film’s third act, looking satisfied with her fellow Barbies’ efforts to restore matriarchy, speak to a newfound understanding of the rewards of such conflict.

This framing also provides a new angle on the problem of Barbie Land’s “utopian” depiction of race relations (Caetlin Benson-Allott 2023, 70). Critics have already begun to point out that Barbie’s inclusive casting is something of an empty gesture, with the positionality of figures like Gloria (played by Latina actress America Ferrera) or Dr. Barbie (played by transgender actress Hari Nef) unacknowledged. The only mention of race comes from Sasha, an especially critical member of the Real World, with her congratulations of “white savior Barbie.”³ Is it possible that Barbie Land’s ethos of surface also produces self-sameness, such that the Barbies see bodily difference as a pantomime (akin to showering without water)? Is the film suggesting that we need judgement to appreciate intersectionality? Perhaps now I’m reading too generously. What is clear, even if we take the film’s flawed picture of diversity at face value, is that optics are not enough; deep thinking and the attendant recognition of what is not always made apparent on the surface is also needed.

Barbie explains of her choice to leave Barbie Land, “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made.” Inventions like Barbie are, Ruth Handler tells her, humanity’s way of dealing with life’s chaos. They are, in other words, reparations, built on the rift between ideal and painful reality. Put this way, Barbie Land’s matriarchy inheres the very issues of patriarchy that it sought to fix. Its “wonderful” surfaces are only part of the whole. Stacey (2014, 42) offers a number of evocative emblems to illustrate such a state of repair: “the darn, the patch, the scar, the graft, the join.” Relatedly, and bringing us back to the discourse of reading, she proposes the need for a “model of reading that is grounded in ambivalence” (Stacey 2014, 47, her emphasis). Both surface and symptomatic methods are, for Stacey (2014, 47), “defences,” and so it behooves us to do away with the either-or problematic and hold both conceptualisations at once. She indicates, albeit briefly, that this model of reading would be “especially appropriate for a queer feminist criticism” (Stacey 2014, 47). We might theorise ambivalence as a good fit for this perspective given its resistance to binary thinking and labile edge. I contend that Barbie’s contemporary feminism resides in such ambivalence.

As a filmmaker, Gerwig is well-practiced at having it both ways. See some of her other endings: Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach 2012) finishes with the titular Frances giving up her dream of being a dancer to take a desk job that enables her to live stably and alone; in Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig 2017), Christine moves to the North American east coast, which in turn allows her to fully appreciate Sacramento and her little life there; Little Women (Greta Gerwig 2019) sees Jo write a fanciful conclusion of romantic union while living out an independent one. Each of these endings involves a concession, whereby the woman in question must relinquish something important to her (an unrealistic dream; writerly integrity) in order to move forward. Concretely speaking, such ambivalence reflects Gerwig’s relation to the objects of popular culture; she appreciates inventions like the happy ending and Barbie while maintaining a mind to the damage that they cause to the expectations of (young) women.⁴ Such ambivalence also benefits the broader female experience under patriarchy, which feminist critics have long understood to encompass a certain duality.⁵ According to these critics, women occupy the dominant male culture and a parallel or marginal female culture simultaneously.

An echo of such ambivalence is evident even where Barbie itself is taken as an exegetical object. Whether by habit or design, I’m inclined to read Barbie’s admission of her desire to “be part of the people that make meaning” as illustrative of Gerwig’s own disposition as a filmmaker. She has, over the past decade, moved away from acting and established herself as writer-director. Her creative hand has proved so assured as to earn her a place among a pantheon of (predominately male) contemporary prestige filmmakers. Gerwig is now one of the ones who gets to make meaning in Hollywood. Like Barbie, she does not take this responsibility lightly: each of her films, including those that she wrote and/or directed with Noah Baumbach, reveal an effort to manage the concerns of the film industry with women’s issues. The small budgets of Lady Bird ($10 million) and Little Women ($40 million) made such work relatively easy; the expression of feminism feels nuanced in those films.

With Barbie ($145 million), the balance becomes skewed. Artistry gives way to financial imperative, and Gerwig translates her politics into the lexicon of blockbuster cinema. Ideas like women’s rights and the upending of patriarchy are here part of the narrative, so clear as to be accessible—and enjoyable—to the everyman at the multiplex. Indeed, the sequence where the Barbies team up to disillusion one another about the workings of patriarchy is arguably as amusing as the genitalia jokes and car chases that precede it. This constitutes a paradox as it concerns the terms of analytical discourse set out earlier in this essay: to infiltrate the symptomatic economy of Hollywood, where men’s stories (however complicated) are the norm, Gerwig must make her meanings exceedingly legible. With the dominant cinematic framework ill-suited to the conveyance of women’s stories, Barbie’s meanings exist at its surface. Were we to take this contradiction further, we might conclude that Gerwig tacitly assigns the faults of a depth hermeneutic not to the mechanisms of that hermeneutic but their gendered affordances.

Gerwig’s deft handling of these issues is evidenced by Barbie’s astounding box office figures. For the film to earn $1.4 billion internationally, moviegoers of all political leanings must have showed out (Box Office Mojo 2023). These viewers were treated to an entertaining film that also taught them something about feminism. But where does this leave the feminist critic? With Barbie’s feminist ideas on its surface, our descriptive methods are easily appeased. Much like the ideology of Barbie Land, however, such meanings feel too facile to satisfy the probing subject. Women’s politics are diluted—literalised as narrative and abstracted to obscure the factors of gender identity and race. The feminist critic thus likely finds herself in an ambivalent relation to her object, happy for Barbie’s success but deflated by its articulation of women’s issues. From this place she would do well to remember her symptomatic methods of reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I will, for the sake of clarity, hereafter refer to Stereotypical Barbie as “Barbie”

2. Among the approaches that fall under this umbrella are materialist, affective, descriptive, reparative, and literalist.

3. I am grateful to my “Introduction to Screen Studies” students at the University of Melbourne for pointing this out to me.

4. Benson-Allott (2023) uses Sedgwick’s theory of reparation to explicate this trend in Gerwig’s oeuvre.

5. See, for instance, Gerda Lerner 1979, 52.