Hi Barbie, you failed!
Why Barbie's Oscars 'snub' is no surprise
I hate the word ‘snub.’ It implies a conscious, mean decision to turn away, rather than a democratic voting process whereby some people didn’t like a film enough to risk giving it an Oscar. But according to the media, at least, the Barbie movie has been ‘snubbed’ because it only had eight nominations (for best picture, best supporting actor, best supporting actress, costume, production, blah…) and neither director Greta Gerwig nor star Margot Robbie were nominated.
According to the outraged of X, this was because the movie is ‘too feminist’ and men ‘didn’t understand how important it is.’ If that’s the case, then Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Betty Freidan and every woman since who ever tried to point out that equal rights would be useful has failed, and it’s been left to a movie about a doll to save what we quaintly used to call ‘women’s lib’.
The film is fun, beautiful to look at, mildly amusing occasionally, and Gosling and Robbie both work within the limited boundaries of their characters to make us believe a doll can feel emotions - the full gamut from A to B, to quote Dorothy Parker. Interestingly, a film which was nominated for an Oscar this year is also about a child-like, beautiful automaton attaining self-actualisation regardless of the men around her. But that one also involves the heroine taking to sex very enthusiastically, which might be a reason why Poor Things appealed rather more powerfully to the voting committee.
The plot of Barbie, by contrast, hinges on Barbie’s telepathic connection to a harassed Mattel employee (America Ferrara) whose bleak thoughts are leaching into Barbie’s sunshine world. Barbie heads for the Real World to find her and stop the irrepressible thoughts of death, Ken stows away in the car, and on arrival, he finds the patriarchy alive and well and running Malibu and the wider globe.
Barbie hitches her pink wagon to the sad Mom and her surly daughter, they all return to Barbieland to find Ken has taken over the place with talk of horses and beer, and they visit Weird Barbie to help them retrieve their power as women. Ferrara gives an impassioned speech about why women must be all things to all people and how unfair it is, the Barbies get their land back, and Barbie herself returns to the Real World to live out her days as a Real Woman.
It’s basically a Virginia Slims ad (you’ve come a long way, baby) meets Pinnochio (I’m a real boy!) and it’s both charming and silly.
It’s not a feminist fable, however. The first thing Barbie does in her new life (and last thing she does in the film - spoiler alert) is visit her gynaecologist, which suggests that the ‘realness’ of women lies entirely in their genitalia – a contention that’s both fundamentally true and immensely reductive. She has returned to the Real World, which is still run by men, and given up her chance to rule over Barbieland. She’s also waved goodbye to all the Barbie pals whose consciousness has been raised to create a feminist utopia.
What made her do this? A talk with the ghost of Ruth, the founder of Mattel, in the same misty space inhabited by Dumbledore’s ghost in Harry Potter (Perhaps the two are incorporeally linked together in this vague, filmic limbo).
Ruth’s biggest take-home line from the movie? ‘We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they have come.’ Admittedly, the great Rhea Perlman does her best to imbue this absolute cast-iron clunker with wisdom, but please, in what world, Barbie or real, is this a feminist statement?
All of which is to say that Barbie the movie is not a blow for feminism, any more than Fifty Shades of Grey was a blow for female sexual freedom. (Blow being the operative word, etc). A truly feminist movie would be Mission: Impossible 23 with a female star. Or Jamesina Bond. Or a film of any genre showing women who don’t look like Margot Robbie living lives which are deemed to be as important as the lives of men. The fact of the stars’ female-ness would be irrelevant, not the focus, and no lessons would be learned because no lessons would need to be learned.
In this year’s big Oscar contenders, the main female characters are, variously; a baby-brained re-animated dead woman who loves sex, a semi-mute Osage beauty several decades younger than her husband, manic sharpei Leonardo Di Caprio (his forehead wrinkles could win an Oscar on their own), the wife of a genius conductor, in a movie about the genius conductor, a woman suspected of murder, a woman married to Oppenheimer in a movie about Oppenheimer and a Nazi’s wife. It’s a shame a movie starring a woman playing a beautiful doll wasn’t included, but had it been, it still wouldn’t have been a win for feminism. Besides, Barbie is enjoyable – but it’s not a masterpiece.
‘It is literally impossible to be a woman,’ says America Ferrara’s Gloria. (Clever naming hat-tip there!)
But it isn’t. It isn’t even impossible to succeed as a woman. And a film being gifted an Oscar nod purely because it’s directed by a woman seems the worst sort of pandering to special pleading. We’re better than that. In fact, we are Kenough.