A Platonic Dialogue for Modern Feminists: Barbie Movie Review

*SPOILERS*

A universal yet unexpected impression viewers had after watching this Summer’s Barbie  film was that the movie simply wasn’t meant for children. 

One comes away with the distinct impression that the humor, cinematography, themes, and overall plotline of the film are all targeted toward a mixed audience of adults and teenagers rather than to the little girls who actually play with Barbie toys. The question has been raised as to why exactly this is the case, and whether such an emphasis on an older audience was accidental or an intended feature of the story.

The target audience, contrary to the arguments of some critics, is not one of the movie’s weaknesses. Rather, Barbie discreetly and without pretension fills an uncommon niche among dramatic genres—a niche most famously occupied by the dialogues of Plato. 

Instead of being a movie with a traditional plotline somewhat reminiscent of the classical unities or general principles laid out in Aristotle’s Poetics. The setting, characters, and dialogue all serve the purpose of presenting in a humorous manner different views and understandings of feminism and gender relations in the postmodern world. 

The primary arc of the plot follows the protagonist Barbie as she undertakes the command of the Delphic Oracle, “know thyself.” She enters into varied encounters with representatives of second and third wave feminism, characters who instantiate the values of contemporary “intersectional” feminism, groups which represent non-feminist or “patriarchal” philosophies, corporations which act as non-ideological power-players, and other representatives of various ideas big and small, serious and unserious. The movie, then, is most accurately described (as ridiculous as it sounds at face value) as a Platonic Dialogue.

Just as in Plato’s Republic, the dramatic elements of the film cede to the ideological and philosophical conversations which are very much placed in the foreground. However, in a way uncharacteristic of the genre, Barbie nests these conversations in an overtly humorous, ironic, and even cynical tone. 

While some of the more pressing minor dialogues are carried out in a semi-serious manner, nevertheless the insertion of self-mockery, a lack of seriousness, and a periodic absence of authenticity in the characters’ worldview and conversations add a distinctly postmodern uncertainty to the tone of the film. The dialogues are being had, the ideas are put forward and discussed…but does any of it matter? 

Whereas in Plato we often find certain ideas or positions made fun of, in Barbie it is the conversation itself that’s being mocked. Whereas the previous generation had at one time placed a high emphasis on authenticity and being true to oneself, the speakers in Barbie mock others’ authenticity and their own. Nothing in the film is taken with straightforward seriousness. The lack of authenticity is extreme even for (and especially for) a comedy.

In a manner very much characteristic of a true Platonic dialogue, no intellectual conclusion is reached beyond a return to the status quo by the end of the film. The inhabitants of the Platonic cave that is Barbieland, after their brief experience of “patriarchy” (a system under which both the men and women are, strangely enough, depicted as being unqualifiedly happy), return immediately to their detached, second-wave feminist, implicitly misandrist utopia. Only the protagonist, Barbie herself, really changes from the state she began in, moving from the artificial Barbie Land into the “real world.” The viewer is left in a double state. On the one hand, the humor in the film is certainly well done; Barbie is undeniably the funniest movie to have been released this year. On the other hand, the film’s underlying irony and explicit political and philosophical overtones give the audience a very real view into the current disposition and “mood” of popular feminist thought.