Here are my reflections on the Barbie movie from the perspective of a trans man.

 

For starters, I never owned a Barbie doll in my life. As a trans kid (without the awareness that such a condition had a name, back in the 1950’s), my passions were cowboys, Indians, plastic horses, erector sets, trains, and tools that pounded, stapled, or did something else that created a new thing. Barbies were for girls, and I wasn’t one. My little sister Jackie was the Barbie lover in the family. Sometimes I played with her (I operated Ken, of course) but I was never Barbie’s operator.

 

And until I saw the movie Barbie, I wasn’t aware that her creator, Ruth Handler, was a feminist (perhaps not something she would have described herself as), in the true sense of that term. She wanted her daughter to have a doll that could aspire to become anything she decided to go after.

 

As we all know (or should), Barbie evolved over the decades, taking on scores of roles and additional races. From cattle rancher to President, she became the dream catcher for several generations of young girls. After seeing the movie, I deeply appreciate the changes that she brought to female children. Their sole target was no longer just motherhood.(Up to that point in the US, dolls were all infants or toddlers, with no trajectory toward thinking about their futures other than same-ol, same-ol wives/baby makers and raisers.)

 

Spoiler alerts ahead

If you don’t want to know what happens until you see Barbie yourself, stop reading now!

 

The movie begins the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey begins… sorta…

 

Only, instead of chimps turning tools into weapons, several little girls bash their baby dolls to smithereens.  To say this upset me in a visceral way is an understatement. It reminded me of my mother’s admonition during the early women’s rights days (1972) when she said, “Oh, great. Now women are giving themselves permission to be as tacky as men.”

 

I don’t like to think of women as baby smashers.  I like to think of them as empathetic nurturers AND powerful individuals (without weapons of mass delusion and destruction at hand) in their own right. That’s an ideal, but it’s pretty much the way I view most progressive, “woke” women.

 

The movie is billed as a comedy because it is a hoot. But behind the humor is abundant pathos.

 

In BarbieLand, the world is run by women. All of Mattel’s Barbies have assumed roles of leadership. They are presidents, builders, entertainers … but there are no children.  Barbies, you see, have no genitals. Nor do the many Kens who share the scene, but without authoritarian power. They are sidekicks: fun, stunted, searching.

 

Essentially, in BarbieLand patriarchy has been flipped on its head, and the women, without exception, are living their best lives. They’re free to be whoever they decided to be, and they are flourishing in a never-ending Happily Ever After.

 

And then someone in the Real World looks up from her BarbieLand dream and sees her real world

 

Barbie (in Barbieland), in the middle of a n ensemble dance routine, poses the question, “Have you ever thought about dying?”

 

The music stops, the dancers stop, everything stops… and then Barbie covers for her faux pas. The party resumes but Something is Different. The question can’t be rescinded. There it sits, in every Barbie’s mind.

 

But for Barbie, things start to change.

 

Her permananely arched ballerina feet go flat. The shower  —  heretofore pantomimed as working as intended — becomes cold and real, and the pantomimed beverage she tips becomes real and spills down her front.  She steps off the roof of her Barbie house and, instead of floating down and into her car, she plummets to the ground, hitting the sidewalk.

 

Unsettled by these bizare new experiences she feels out of control and unbalanced for the first time in her life.

 

She is told by a psychic “Crazy Barbie” that unless she visits the Real World and finds  whoever received that unsettling wake up call, she will never be able to resume her regular life, where death, cellulite and flat feet never happen.  So she sets out on a quest, only to discover that one of the Kens (portrayed by  Ryan Gosling)  has come along as a stowaway. She asks him to go back, but he’s so hangdog about it that she relents.  (Big Mistake!)

 

When Barbie gets to the real World she and Ken find men in charge and mostly behaving badly. When one of them swats her on the butt, she smacks him and ends up being arrested briefly (for being powerful while female, apparently), then released on her own recognisance, only to get into hot water again.

 

These  “unseemly” behaviors in the Real World cause the powers that be to inform Mattel (in the real world, these days all run by men) that a Barbie and Ken have managed to make their way into the Real World and are causing Issues, so the Mattel board goes out to arrest them and put Barbie back in her box.

 

But Barbie has found the Someone Who Looked Up from Her Barbie World and into the Real World… and it isn’t the child she expected: it’s the child’s mother.  The child is already well aware of the Real World, and she’s pissed; she knows Barbie’s World is a myth, an ideal, the dream of a marginalized, discounted gender.

 

Barbie gets depressed, sad, and begins to despair

 

And it’s the child’s mother who summarizes the women’s lot in a male-dominated society. (You do not want to miss this sololiquy!!!) Barbie realizes that all is not lost and that she can regain BarbieLand as long as she remembers who she is (flat feet, cellulite and all): uniquely and wonderfully made by a “god” who wanted all little girls to grow into self-actualizing adults.

 

In the meantime, Ken has discovered What Life is Like With Men in Charge, and he spearheads a crusade to enlist the other Ken’s in his scheme to take control of BarbieLand. The attempt doesn’t end well; the guys end up testosteroning themselves into attacking each other and all hell breaks loose.

 

That’s when all realize that they’re in charge of their own evolution and happiness, that we don’t get satisfaction trying to “complete” someone else. We only get satisfaction to the degree that we complete ourselves.

 

As a trans man, I have been on the “marginalized” side my entire life — first as a perceived female, and now as a trans male. The moral of the story, in both cases, aligns with what I believe to be the truth: until we all learn to embrace and complete ourselves, we can’t truly hope to help others embrace and complete themselves.

 

Needy people think they “need” someone else to complete them.

 

Hurt people seem to need to hurt other people.

 

But truly healed people heal people.  Simple as that. (And hard as that.)