I remember when I first saw Barbie. My family and I all wore pink, some of us brought our Barbie dolls, and it was this beautiful and communal experience that I still look back on fondly. We all sang “I’m Just Ken” for the summer, we all made those Tiktoks about healing our inner child with product fulfillment, and we all thought ‘girl power’ really did something with that film.
Yet looking back, I saw it once. I never sought out to rewatch it, and when I did it was when I was at home and knew I could put it on as ‘safe’ viewing: no one would be potentially offended by anything in it, it was funny enough, and like a YouTube essay, it could provide background noise while I got real work done.
Aside from Ryan Gosling’s brilliant portrayal of Ken, I really didn’t take away from Barbie much more than thinking ‘wow, Ryan Gosling is really funny‘. In retrospect, what a bizarre takeaway from a movie that is supposed to be about girl power. But is it? Barbie exists in her own story as sort of a plot device, moving the audience from point to point without really being an active participant. Everything happens to Barbie, not from. She doesn’t know what she wants the whole runtime, and then decides to be human. It’s the other Barbies around her that take action, make plans, and figure things out.
And while there’s certainly a story to be told about being passive in life and the repercussions of that, it doesn’t make for a compelling story. Especially when the strength of that story would be the emotional breakthroughs and breakdowns that passive people have about their life and their role in it. Whenever Barbie has an emotional moment, it is treated as a joke. Every other character is allowed to speak their truth and be taken seriously, even Ken though momentarily, yet when the main female character speaks, it’s treated as a joke by the director, other characters, or even the Narrator (the scene where Barbie breaks down about feeling ugly and the Narrator says something along the lines of ‘Margot Robbie saying that was stupid LOL’, feels especially cruel. As if Margot Robbie should never be allowed to feel insecure because she is conventionally attractive).
That is not the case in The Substance, a body horror movie that takes women’s pain very seriously. The Substance tackles similar subjects to Barbie, such as being a woman seen as glamorous, agism, beauty, and societal impacts. While the two different genres and the different ratings allow for things to be handled in different lights, it is evident that The Substance loves women while Barbie likes them, but is otherwise indifferent. Barbie pays lip service to womanhood while The Substance takes action. The Substance is unafraid to show the ‘knots’ women tie themselves into to be liked, as opposed to Barbie which merely mentions them in a speech but never bothers to show you. Barbie very much leans into maternal roles, the strength of motherhood and the growing pains of children, whereas The Substance approaches figurative motherhood but to one’s inner child or inner demons. Elisabeth Sparkles (Demi Moore) is very much Sue’s (Margaret Qualley) “mother”, but she also is Sue. The Substance tackles womanhood from all angles while focusing on one particular character, who is a very key player in everything that happens to and around her. Elisabeth is sympathetic, but makes impulsive choices that are due to the misogyny that surrounds her. Barbie just simply exists.
The villains in both films are misogyny, yet The Substance is brutally honest about it where Barbie likes to tiptoe around it. Barbie’s most compelling story is given to Ken, who much like Elisabeth in The Substance, struggles to adapt to a world that sees him as disposable. So he, like Elisabeth, hackneys a solution that ultimately robs him of his identity even more than before. While Ken, unlike Elisabeth, gets a happy ending because a woman listens to him and comforts him (why is this scene in this movie? Why does Barbie apologize to Ken while he NEVER apologizes to her?), Elisabeth is left on her own at the end of the movie. She goes through true, unimaginable horror and at the end of the day, no one has her back. While this is exceptionally nihilistic from one angle, I approach it from The Twilight Zone angle instead: I believe it’s trying to teach audiences a lesson. The Substance says to women not to tie yourselves in knots for anyone’s approval because these same people will not help you in the end. Love yourself wholly, and that will be enough for you. Rod Serling coming out at the end feels plausible, and to me that makes a good horror movie.
The finale of Barbie however, is much more muddled in terms of what I am supposed to take away from it. Misogyny, identity politics, feminism, sisterhood…all of these things are brushed upon in Barbie, but the solution is to ultimately be a human being and all problems are solved. Except that’s not how any of that works. Being a human for a lot of women, especially women in marginalized groups, doesn’t mean they get anything resolved. Being a human and a woman makes life a lot harder most of the time. Barbie says nothing about any of the things it pretends to care about, and Barbie just gets to watch as her friends save the day and then gets to be a human being as if that’s a solve. There’s no community, no coming together, no real grasp on identity — which would be fine, if those were not the set up core values of the movie.
Barbie and The Substance both set up to be stories about women told through an aesthetically pink lens. The body horror one ultimately serves as a love letter to women, the validation that are struggles are seen and understood. We have two main characters who both flounder under the misogynist societal values that prevent them from being their best selves and as a result, punish themselves so they can conform. The result is that they are ultimately punished by a world they desperately wanted to belong to, and the lesson for audiences is that women struggle just to exist. The ultimate solve to this is to love yourself, and even if that won’t wrap everything in a nice bow, you at least can count on yourself at the end of the day. So why not just embrace yourself?
The other one, as aesthetic and as fun as it is, really doesn’t do much of anything for women. It pays lip service to issues women face, but not really. The main focus seems to be mothers, which is all well and good, but then it gives the more meaningful story of navigating the patriarchy and it’s aftermath to….Ken, not Barbie. Barbie is great at telling, not showing. Sure they could illustrate how Barbie feels and thinks, but the film would rather follow Gloria’s journey of navigating motherhood or Ken’s journey about finding an identity outside of being a boyfriend. The film does a good job at being a lighthearted approach to feminism, and for some that is enough. For some that might even be a reprieve from the harsh weight of the reality of being a woman, and I think that’s fine.
Barbie’s problem isn’t that it’s not doing enough, the problem is it promises it understands while barely acknowledging that it’s listening at all. The result is audiences feeling frustrated, so they keep trying to engage with the media so they can get the same meaning everyone else seemed to get out of it, thinking they must have missed the point or there is something wrong with their journey into womanhood. And that ultimately is a woman’s journey, so maybe Barbie unintentionally hit the nail on the head.