I. Introduction

At the time of writing, mid 2023, the entire Anglo-sphere is entrenched in what is informally referred to as the “culture war.” Political ideology has long since seeped into everything. The long march through the institutions has been complete, and now no book, film, or game can free itself from being made into a form of social commentary. In the mainstream, producers and publishers do not even try to avoid overt political agendas turning their products into works of propaganda. For most of them, making political commentary is in fact their intention—and it was certainly the goal of 2023’s Barbie.

This film has been interpreted in numerous ways already: both as a man-hating, pro-woke, intersectional-feminism promoting story; but also as the opposite, a movie in critique of those theories critical of sex, gender, and patriarchy. This Wild Isle Review will fall firmly toward the latter, though it should provide some insights missed by the usual political pundits.

When examined under the lens of dream and myth interpretation, the Barbie movie presents an incredibly consistent meta-narrative in third-order abstraction. A meta-narrative is a theme, and a theme is a thesis—a claim made about reality, the story its premises.

For those short on time, skip to the conclusion for the tl;dr.

II. The Utopia—Nowhere

Barbie opens with a short narration describing the ostensible intention behind the Barbie brand: a line of dolls which would free girls from playing as to practice motherhood. Barbie offered them an icon of female empowerment. The narration plays over a scene of young girls literally dashing their babydolls’ heads in against a barren, rocky terrain in a parody of the beginning of time. Thereby, very first impression and node in the network of symbols is thus: Barbie dolls facilitated female empowerment via representing a life-path in opposition to motherhood which the prior dolls encouraged and prepared girls for.

The scene then shifts to Barbieland, a female ruled city state (not matriarchal, for there are no matrons, no mothers) explicitly said to exist within the imagination. Barbieland is an imaginary place—this will remain relevant—for Barbieland is the utopia pined after by many a resentful feminist. It is a world in which women rule everything, an easy feat, for in Barbieland, there are no challenges to overcome. This is demonstrated within the first few minutes of the film.

Stereotypical Barbie (played by and hereafter referred to as Margot Robbie) goes about her daily routine for the viewers’ sake, so that they can understand that everything in Barbieland is fake. Margot takes an imaginary shower without water, eats an imaginary breakfast, drinks imaginary milk, and is not subject to even the laws of gravity. There is no money in Barbieland. There is no food. There are no walls on the houses because crime does not exist. Therefore, laws are themselves a superfluous show, as are all political offices and jobs. In Barbieland, everything is pretend.

Why is this relevant? There is a particular scene which may seem to an unkeen eye a refutation of antiquated claims about women, emotionality, and logic. A Barbie is giving a speech for the all-female supreme court. About what? It is not important. Recall that there are no problems in the utopia. What is significant is the affirmation at the end of her speech. She states unprompted that her emotional investment in the case does not prevent her from thinking logically about it. Why does she say this? It smacks of the illegitimate king screeching to himself reaffirmations—and worse, it is a reaffirmation that is celebrated and only true in a land which isn’t real and cannot exist because it had no conflict in it.

That is the point. Barbieland is not merely unreal, it cannot be real because it is divorced from the conflicts which make reality what it is. This unreality goes so far as to mock motherhood itself. Beyond the girls dashing their dolls to death, there is a pregnant Barbie whom the other Barbies do not want to associate with. She is a reminder of a biological reality which would serve as a constraint which would make the pretend Barbieland too obviously fake—but more on that later.

One cannot conclude an analysis of Barbieland without discussing the Kens. They are delayed adolescents, essentially. In a world without problems, there is no reason for anyone to depend on them. Without dependents, the Kens can only occupy their time trying to win the Barbies’ attention. There is no other goal available to them, therefore there is no other motivation. They are as boys become when women are liberated from motherhood: they are boys and not men, not fathers, useless. They would also be violent, but in the unreality of Barbieland, the Kens do not sink to the lowest most desperate manifestation of masculinity. In reality, these men would become murderous street gangsters or suicidal mass shooters in a final bid at status or revenge.

The Barbies are lucky, then, that they live in Barbieland, in the utopia, nowhere, a set of circumstances antithetical to the real.

III. Awakening

The inciting incident of Barbie is Margot’s sudden and inexplicable elevation of consciousness. She becomes aware of death—that she will one day die. Moreover, she begins to suffer the consequences of aging. In short, Margot experiences an intrusion by reality into her utopic existence: she no longer wakes up feeling perfect; her imaginary shower runs cold; her phony breakfast is burnt; and even her fake milk carton in spoiled. She can no longer defy gravity and fall magically into the seat of her sportscar. Her heels come down, grounding her for the first time in reality. This causes her a tremendous amount of distress, and she eventually resorts to consulting the one they call Weird Barbie (both behind her back and to her face).

While the film explains that Weird Barbie is the result of a doll “played with too hard,” her costume design and role in the story depict her as a stereotypical social justice warrior functioning as a gnostic sage. Weird Barbie has been broken by the real world and has been thereby woken to its secrets. She possesses the secret knowledge, the gnosis, requisite for Margot to reach the transcendental reality and regain her utopic existence. This sounds an awful lot like Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, though really Weird Barbie is Hegelian through and through—but what does that mean? To understand, one must first know the basics of German Idealism and Queer Theory.

The philosophy of Hegel centers on the concept of aufheben, a simultaneous elevation and destruction in the act of resolving a contradiction between the ideal and the concrete. This is accomplished through reflection and action. One reflects on the ideal to gain a higher understanding of it (vernunft), then one destroys the concrete reality save for what aligns with said ideal, creating what Immanuel Kant would call a synthesis of the two. The belief is that through repeated syntheses, institutions such as the state can act to progress man toward the End of History, at which point he will realize (read: make real) himself as a God and bring forth the utopia.

In reality, this amounts to adding two opposing elements together, incorporating a thing and its opposite, with the notion that one plus negative-one equals infinity instead of zero. In classic philosophy, this is called a violation of the principle of non-contradiction. It is also known as philosophical explosion, the elimination of a concept by expanding its definition to include its own negation. If this sounds like alchemical witchcraft, that is because it is. Hegel was himself an alchemist, and his philosophy was in fact a Neoplatonic cult-religion. He thought he could bring the realm of ideal forms into reality through state action and sorcery. So does Queer Theory.

Queer Theory is a more modern development of older German Idealism. Queerness is the abolition of normalcy through the incorporation or inclusion of the abnormal. That is to say, it is philosophical explosion of the concept of normal—to what end? To annihilate anything normative so that nobody can be marginalized by falling outside the norm. Just like German Idealism, it is an attempt to bring forth the Neoplatonic realm of ideal forms (i.e. the utopia) via synthesizing a new reality without opposites and therefore without conflicts.

(e.g. if there is no such thing as a woman, then there can be no such thing as a man in opposition to a woman; therefore there can be no conflict or oppression along the dimension of sex, nor can there be social or biological constraints based on male or femaleness. Use this formula on anything in order to Queer it, which dissolves it in philosophical acid under the same Hegelian presumption that, once everything is dissolved, what is left will be the utopia rather than nothingness).

In short, Weird Barbie is Queer Barbie. She is by definition that which is not normal. She is a marginalized being with secret knowledge of the realm of forms. She gives Margot a quest to regain her utopic existence via synthesizing her false idyllic state with the real, concrete world (the function of Barbie dolls in the first place).

IV. Reality

After Ken sneaks a ride, both he and Margot cross over into real world Los Angeles. Here in reality, Margot discovers that everything she thought she knew about real life and its relationship with Barbieland was and is false.

The Barbies believed that their existence liberated women from oppression and gender roles. They believed that reality must be a pseudo-matriarchy like Barbieland, free from the constraints of physics, nature and society. The truth, according to the film’s representation of reality, is that the conditions of girls and women is in large part biologically determined.

One arrives at this interpretation by contrasting the real world and Barbieland. The Barbies’ lifestyles are predicated on the lack of biological imperatives omnipresent in Los Angeles. In real life, people need money to buy food and clothes. They have to think about their health. They have to choose careers in accordance with their natural abilities and dispositions. And they have to balance goals of the ego with biological drives to have and care for children.

Margot and Ken know nothing of any of this. They say explicitly that they do not possess sexual organs. They have no regard for the demands of certain forms of labor (e.g. Margot is shocked not to find any women doing construction). They do not understand that taking clothes without paying is theft because they never have to work to produce food or shelter—in the utopia, all is given freely. They do not relate to reality in the slightest, except as its antithesis.

While Ken goes off on his own to learn about patriarchy, Margot finds Sasha, the girl whom she believes she was sent to find. Margot is mistaken, however. Sasha hates Barbie for the damage the toy-line has done to girls and women. Sasha hurls a slew of typical left-wing insults at Margot, calling her a capitalist fascist who promotes harmful body standards—and she’s not wrong. While capitalist-fascist is an oxymoron, from the progressive perspective, Barbie is in fact guilty of a number of sins committed with the best of intentions.

Barbie epitomizes the promises of second and third wave feminism: girls can be anything and everything they want, that there is no limitation based in the biological reality of being a woman, that children aren’t going to be the most meaningful part of most girls’ lives, that career, status, and material wealth are. But as Sasha points out, these promises fell utterly short. They turned out to be lies told by the feminists—despisers of their own femininity (a joke gets made of this at one point; Sasha tells Margot that nearly everyone in reality dislikes women—including women).

Meanwhile, Ken discovers a world in which it is possible for a man to be respected. He discovers ambition in the form of gym-bros and horse-riding—precisely what would attract an immature boy (as opposed to a mature man) to embody masculinity. Still, this feminist strawman is infinitely preferable to the impossible relegation of men to useless, backbiting yet somehow peaceful lay-abouts (what feminist truly think about modern women, perhaps?).

Ken’s immature interpretation aside, the real world manifestation of patriarchy as shown in the film is at least productive and somewhat fair. Ken gets rejected from positions of power and authority multiple times for lacking any real skills or credentials. He even finds women in positions of high status and authority, such as the female physician.

In other words, in the real world, what the film identifies as patriarchy is shown to be a dignified meritocracy. In contrast, Barbieland—to which Ken returns with his boy-level-interpretation of patriarchy—is an unfair, arbitrary, oppressive oligarchy of a female aristocracy against the male peasantry: even the feminist utopia with all its impossibility is worse than reality; it is the opposite of what it claims to be.

Maybe that is why the Barbie’s find Ken’s patriarchy so enticing.

V. Coming to Ruth

Upon returning to Barbieland, Ken persuades all the other Barbies and Kens (though not Dan, the archetypal beta-male and eventual power-fantasy of the male-feminist weasel) to adopt his understanding of patriarchy. However, the details of his conquest are not revealed to the viewers until Margot makes her return.

Back in reality, Barbie is eventually captured and brought before the executives at Mattel, whose only solution to the escaped Barbie problem is to return her to her box (perhaps a metaphor for out-of-touch, elite men returning women to their confined roles from which they had only recently been liberated. This is worth an aside, as it shows a level of sophistication when contrasted with the alternative solution presented at the end of the film. There are multiple factions: one pines for a return to prior order and stability—the blind tyrannical king—while another looks for stability in the acknowledgement and acceptance of biological essentialism—the king reconstituted via spoils of the natural world, mother nature).

Margot escapes the clutches of the executives but only with the help of the ghost of Ruth. Ruth is the woman who designed the original Barbie doll for her daughter, Barbara. In that way, she is Margot’s mother. She teaches Margot a short lesson about the nature of real being and how it contains constraints and limitations that don’t exist within the imagination. Then she sends Margot on her way where she is encountered by her true target, Sasha’s mom.

It turns out that Sasha’s mom, and not her daughter, is the one who is too attached to sentimental memories, many of which surround her daughter’s old Barbies. She has been playing with them during her down-time as a high-end secretary at Mattel as a means of coping with irrepressible thoughts of aging and death.

Sasha’s mom’s career did not fulfill her. Playing with false ideals did not assuage her confrontation with the tragedies of being. No amount of aufheben via clownish play could recreate the true meaning she got from spending time with her family—namely her daughter. It is noteworthy that she had one daughter, probably with a different man than to whom she is currently married (she learned to drive wildly from Sasha’s dad, but later in the film, her current husband, also referred to as “Dad,” is a meek academic hipster type, suggesting the former “dad” is someone else). After Sasha, it seems as though Mom focused on her job. She probably had to as a single mother. (The film doesn’t say she was a single mom explicitly, but she seems to be one during her flashbacks).

The message is clear. In the real world, most women get their sense of meaning from family and not from career. No amount of work, luxury, or even play can stave off existential dread once it has cropped its ugly head—which is why Sasha and Sasha’s mom make it their purpose to rescue Margot by taking her back to Barbieland.

VI. Kendom

Margot, Sasha, and Mom arrive at Barbieland to find it rebranded “Kendom.” Everything has changed. In place of the feminist utopia is a dreamland of teenage boys. Ken has convinced nearly every single doll to go along with his notions of patriarchy—those being just as unrealistic as the feminist vision which came before it. The Kens spend all their time lounging about, drinking beer, riding horses, lifting weights, and playing guitar. The Barbies have all taken on the role of maid. They even come with the outfits.

Strangely, the Barbies seem to be very happy taking on the servile role. They have been brainwashed, somehow through persuasion made to forget their deeper wants, needs, and desires. Mom explains this strange phenomenon by comparing it to how smallpox killed many Native Americans because they lacked immunity. The logic follows that because the Barbies have never been exposed to patriarchy before, their minds were vulnerable to its deceptions.

This makes absolutely no sense, but it is not supposed to. Remember that the characters are in Barbieland. Everything in this place works counter to how it does in reality—largely because it operates on false feminist beliefs about nature and history.

In reality, unlike in Barbieland, most women never occupied high-status business or political positions with any frequency. This was mostly a consequence of biology. Women were the ones bearing children, and nursing them, serially until their fertility windows closed. Also, women’s natural interests and physical limitations predisposed them away from many physically demanding or violent occupations (and until recently, most occupations outside the home were laborious, dangerous, or both). Therefore, there is no real historical parallel to Ken convincing (or forcing) career women into patriarchy because there were almost no career women before modernity (and there would not be if not thanks to modern technology).

But in the feminist land of falsehood, such a form of brainwashing is possible, and so the Barbies are almost entirely taken in by the equivalent of internalized-misogyny. Almost entirely, but there are a few holdouts.

Margot and crew take refuge with Weird Barbie and the other discontinued (marginalized) dolls. Of course, the queer gnostic sage has a plan to recapture the institutions as well as the minds of the Barbies, thereby returning Barbieland to its Garden of Eden state. This is precisely the thinking of Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and then of the slew of Neo, Academic, Cultural, and Critical Marxists who came after. Their tactics are even the same. They are going to break the patriarchal brainwashing via cognitive dissonance (introducing contradictions; i.e. Hegelian dialectics) and then use deception and subterfuge, first in order to capture the minds of the now marginalized Barbies, then to take the political institutions.

But before they can implement their plan, they have to pull Margot out of a depressive slump. This section of the film warrants its own analysis because it demonstrates the real plight of modern women in the face of an idyllic vision. Mom goes on a rant explaining why it is so difficult to be a woman. This ramble amounts to her listing a great number of contradictory standards that a single woman can never live up to because some are mutually exclusive of the others. What is noteworthy is that the standards are only contradictory if one does not realize that they are not all being made by the same groups in society. Half of the standards impressed upon women are traditional ones centered on the values of loyalty and modesty. The other half are modern standards lauding male-typical values such as honor and competence.

Though most viewers are unlikely to catch the contradiction, if one does, he realizes that women’s suffering in large part comes from within and not from the top down. Modern women hold in their minds a false ideal to which they will always fall unbearably short. The solution is to abandon the false ideal and to embrace what it means to be an imperfect human. That means accepting being a thing with flaws. This message is what rallies Margot back to their cause (even though it doesn’t exactly map onto Margot because Barbie is a perfect, false idol—the film even makes a joke about this). It is also in keeping with the theme of the film, but more on that shortly.

VII. The Long March

With their plan formulated, the team begins conscientization of the Barbies, breaking the patriarchal brainwashing via the presentation of contradictions. Once all of the Barbies have had their sex and gender consciousnesses raised, they engage in a psy-op to turn the Kens against one another so that they can seize control of the institutions while the Kens squabble amongst themselves. (The parallels ought to be obvious).

They accomplish this by making the Kens jealous. This is another telling moment in the film. The Kens are on the beach playing a parody of a ballad in an attempt to impress the Barbies, and the Barbies pretend to be engaged until, all at once, they begin texting the other Kens. What does this say about the Barbies, the Kens, and the feminist nowheres called Patriarchy and Utopia?

It shows that the Barbies are not concerned with honesty, only the acquisition of power, and that they are willing to deceive and manipulate the emotions of others to get it (as opposed to persuasion, which was the tactic of the Kens). It also shows that even the immature feminist strawman of the patriarch cares about women. The Kens’ value comes from how the Barbies see them, even under Kendom. Kendom itself, then, is actually a benevolent, voluntary, but unequal system. No one is forced into anything in Kendom, unlike in Barbieland, where the Kens are decreed second class citizens by the force of the state.

The Utopia is thus revealed to be, even in fantasy, what it always becomes in reality, an oppressive dictatorship by one group who feels resentful that they cannot compete in open competition with their opposition who promote freedom and meritocracy.

Of course, the Barbies’ plot succeeds, and they seize control of Barbieland at the last second. The Kens are spared retaliation for their bid for dominance (something that only happens in the feminist imagination; in real life, the enemies of the state are always put to the wall and shot). Though forgiven, the Kens still face rejection. Ken himself confesses his feeling for Margot, but she cannot accept him. He is not a real man and she is not a real woman. They cannot pair together, because they do not know themselves; and they do not know themselves because they are beings without an essence—in other words, queer, without a biological basis upon which an imperative to found a reproductive relationship can rest.

That is until the Mattel executives and the ghost of Ruth arrive.

While there is more symbolism in the executives’ incorporation of Mom’s desire for a more realistic Barbie doll, as well as the Barbies’ concession to the Kens that they can hold small local offices, the significant section is Ruth and Margot’s heart-to-heart at the end.

Margot no longer feels satisfied with Barbieland. She has seen what it is to be a real human being, not as she has imagined it but as it really is. This has made her conscious that she does not feel fulfilled being a doll, an object without an essence, a false idol and thus without her own telos. She confronts Ruth about this, and her mother-figure takes her on a walk into the æther where she makes sure Margot knows what she is asking for—imperfection, pain, suffering, struggling, aging, and death. Margot commits despite the necessary sacrifices and closes her eyes to see a montage of what look like childhood memories captured with an old video camera.

Then the scene changes. Margot is in the car with Mom and Sasha, being dropped off to what at first seems to be a job interview. That would be in keeping with the feminist view, that her humanization is cap stoned with a liberated pursuit of a career because Barbie can do and be anything. Only, that is not what it is. The clerk asks Margot why she is there, and she replies with a genuine smile that she is here for a gynecology appointment.

To most, what has just been described will seem nothing more than a twist and an off-color joke. It isn’t. She has a gynecology appointment because she is now a real woman, and real women have real reproductive organs. This is an embracing of the biological essence of being a woman, something which Margot and the other Barbies could not do because they previously lacked said essence. Again, they were queer beings living by the wisdom of their gnostic priestess, incapable of embodying real virtue because there is no real conflict in their world to overcome. They were and are divorced from reality—except for Margot, for she now possesses the source of humankind’s and a woman’s telos. She now has an essential nature from which life can have meaning.

VIII. Conclusion (tl;dr)

2023’s Barbie is a critique of false ideals put forward by second-wave, third-wave, and intersectional feminism. It is distinctly anti-queer (and would be labelled as transphobic by the left if the message was not so deeply embedded). Barbieland is the utopia that feminists and leftists in general imagine but which cannot exist, and in Barbieland the people are all queered—without a biological essence. Being queer, there is no basis for the Barbies and Kens to relate to one another. Everything is superficial play, fake, and pretend—that is until Stereotypical Barbie becomes conscious of mortality. She goes on a quest given by Weird Barbie (Queer Barbie) to restore the never-historically extant utopia by bringing the ideal (herself) to the concrete (the real world). However, this plan backfires (like Hegelian dialectics always do), bringing a strawman of real-world patriarchy back to further contaminate the ideal. The Barbies purge this contamination via subterfuge as a means of recapturing the institutions. Despite their success, Stereotypical Barbie has experienced too much of the real world and no longer feels satisfied being a purposeless doll. She wants to become human and does so through the spirit of her mother. The film ends with a human Barbie, and the viewer knows she is human because she finally possesses what the dolls do not possess, a biology, complete with functioning reproductive organs. She can finally find meaning in becoming a mother herself.