This text was featured in One Story to Learn At this time, a e-newsletter during which our editors advocate a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday by Friday. Join it right here.
This text accommodates spoilers for the movie Barbie.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk introduced that he can be rebranding his social-media platform: Twitter is now, merely, X. Hypothesis abounded as to why Musk would commerce a widely known model for a letter sometimes related to rejection and porn: spite, perhaps. Or perhaps—probably the most absurd principle, and due to this fact the most certainly—the person who had named his automobile fashions “S,” “3,” “X,” and “Y” was doing it, as soon as once more, for the lols. Quickly after Twitter turned X, staff reported, the convention rooms of its headquarters had been rechristened. The staffers Musk hasn’t but fired can now plan the way forward for democratized dialog from a gathering room named “s3Xy.”
X was launched, because it occurred, the identical weekend that the Barbie film was. The coincidence was eloquent. Barbie is a movie about its namesake, positively, and an exploration of inconceivable womanhood. However it’s also a movie about Ken—a Ken who, within the director Greta Gerwig’s rendering, sheds his standing as Barbie’s bland accent to turn out to be … a power-addled man-child decided to show the world into his plaything. No component of Barbie’s aggressive advertising and marketing marketing campaign may have purchased the relevance created by a 52-year-old tech titan who, when he’s not transferring quick and/or breaking issues, amuses himself by discovering new methods to jot down “69” into the general public file.
People dwell below gerontocracy, many pundits have argued: Too a lot of our leaders, having tasted energy after which spent a long time consolidating it, refuse to cede their spoils to anyone else. The broader reality is much more lamentable, although, as a result of it entails leaders who, unable to cope with energy’s tasks, deal with our future as their toy. Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have spent weeks fueling hypothesis that they’ll settle their enterprise variations by the use of a televised cage match. People gave our nuclear codes to a Brioni-swaddled toddler. We could effectively do it once more. We dwell within the thrall of impetuous boy-kings. No fictional determine has captured the absurdity of that state of affairs, and the tragedy of it, higher than a doll who appears like a person however inflicts himself on the world with a boy’s impish glee. Ken calls for consideration. He throws tantrums. He sows chaos. He threatens the entire order of issues. He’s the plastic core of Barbie’s world—and a bleached-blond satire of ours.
Barbie Land is, allegedly, a spot of infantile desires, protected and glad and sterile and pink. “Woman energy,” within the land of the dolls, just isn’t a well-lit lie; it’s, quite the opposite, the one reality that exists—the scaffolding that helps each wall-less Dream Home. It shapes not solely the Barbies’ skilled lives (President Barbie, Physicist Barbie, Physician Barbie) but in addition their sense of the world they occupy. The Barbies are self-confident and self-actualized and simply typically delighted, and naturally they’re: They’ve by no means had motive to be in any other case. In Barbie Land, the Barbies are keen on reminding themselves that daily is “the perfect day ever.”
There are Kens in Barbie Land, however they’re, just like the doll himself, variously ornamental and superfluous. The place do the Kens dwell? What Dream Automobiles do they drive? Such questions are moot. In a spot that treats possessions as proxies for private success, the Kens appear to have none. Nor, in a society that equates occupation with id, have they got obvious careers. The Kens do have a job, although: to function dependable extras within the Barbies’ shiny present. The Kens are there after they’re wanted. They’re cheerful. They’re affected person. They’re all the time able to don sequins and smiles for an intricately choreographed dance quantity. They’re, like just about every thing else in Barbie Land, aggressively uncomplicated. They’re additionally, in consequence, extraordinarily boring.
Besides, that’s, for considered one of them: the Ken who’s paired, per the two-by-two logic of Barbie Land, with Stereotypical Barbie. This Ken, performed—inhabited—by Ryan Gosling, chafes towards his class standing. Barbie Land could appear to be a Paradise Island–type matriarchy whose Amazons are 11 inches tall and molded of polyvinyl chloride; Ken, although, is a reminder of the brute limits of its utopia. The movie’s most blatant downside comes early on, when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) finds herself stricken by the various insults of the human situation (imperfectly browned toast, ideas of demise, cellulite). However Barbie Land’s prefab perfections had been imperfect effectively earlier than Barbie’s disaster. Ken bears the brunt of its errors. He isn’t merely Barbie’s plaything; he’s additionally the recipient of her informal cruelty. “You possibly can go now,” Barbie tells him, flashing a smile as his face falls. Later: “I don’t need you right here.”
These are the kinds of traces which have earned Barbie, within the days since its launch, some indignant accusations of man-hating and sexism and “poisonous femininity.” What the criticisms miss, although—or maybe ignore—is that irony is likely to be current even in a movie about toys. The dynamics of Barbie Land are each sophisticated and easy: Barbie, insulated in its confines, represents—in real-world phrases—the beneficiaries of patriarchy. Ken represents, primarily, all people else. Barbie, in her dismissals of Ken, doesn’t imply to be imply; she treats him thoughtlessly as a result of she has merely by no means thought of that phrases—or something, actually—may trigger damage. She has by no means wanted to. Consolation, in her society as in ours, is a luxurious. The slogans of the human world—and the awful dynamics which have reworked kindness and empathy from kindergarten classes into political pleas—make no sense to those that can not think about different individuals’s ache.
They make quite a lot of sense to Ken, although. He’s, on the outset of the movie, probably the most messily human function of this plastic world, a tangle of want and hope and, ultimately, rage. Within the land of hard-set smiles, he winces. Surrounded by limitless cheer, he aches. He senses that one thing may be very a lot amiss. However sensing is all he can do. Barbie Land could have a president and a structure and a supreme courtroom, however it’s, in apply, aggressively apolitical. (Politics is a response to people and conflicts; Barbie Land permits neither.) And so, having no language or outlet for his frustrations—beleaguered, you may say, by a downside that has no title—Ken merely feels his approach by his plight. His need leaves him stricken with one thing else that’s overseas in Barbie Land: vulnerability.
A lot of Barbie’s magic comes right down to Robbie and Gosling and their potential, as actors, to mix the plastic and the human, the earnest and the camp. Robbie’s efficiency, for its half, is a matter of distillation. It captures most of the parts which have made the Barbie doll each an everlasting icon and an limitless controversy—amongst them her unattainable magnificence, her blithe naivete, her whiteness, her thinness, her reminder that even youngsters are stalked by the shifting calls for of womanhood. Gosling finds related nuance, however from the other way: Ken is, infamously, a plus-one who’s outlined by his absence. Gosling fills within the blanks. And he does so by weaving one of many dolls’ elemental ironies—Barbie and Ken are youngsters who’re routinely mistaken for adults—into his efficiency.
Ken, in Gosling’s rendering, lives in a stew of feelings which might be all the time simply past his management. He’s by turns petulant and teeming with chance, impulsive and self-conscious. Which can be to say that this chisel-jawed doll is, in some ways, a really typical adolescent. Barbie, newly beset by human-borne feeling, shocks herself by crying—first a single tear, after which a flood of them. Gosling’s Ken cries too. However his discord has a stereotypically masculine edge. He erupts into anger. He feels entitled to intercourse, regardless of and due to his ignorance of it. He cares, deeply, what the opposite guys consider him. “You possibly can’t make me look uncool in entrance of Ken!” he wails at Barbie, panic flashing in his eyes.
Ken, within the movie’s early scenes, takes his tumult out on Barbie. There he’s, radiating look-at-me longing. There he’s, like Romeo along with his poems or Lloyd Dobler along with his increase field, turning love right into a present. He orients his life round Barbie so totally that, earlier than lengthy, he’s changing into the one factor a Ken should not be in Barbie Land: a hindrance.
Ken resents his neediness as a lot as Barbie does. However Barbie Land gives him no different choice. She is every thing; he’s simply Ken. That’s the approach of this world. Gosling’s efficiency channels all of that. After which, powerfully, it escalates the matter: Ken’s want for Barbie turns into so consuming that it curdles into violence. Quickly, his hopeful smiles are twisting into sneers. The stubbornness of his need for Barbie—and his incapacity to simply accept her disinterest—begins to evoke the grim entitlements of the incel. His plight turns into everybody else’s menace.
It’s unsettling, the doll made harmful. That’s what makes it so efficient. The majority of the movie finds Barbie and Ken on a journey that mimics adolescence: Having left the land of safety and play and straightforward desires, they’re plunged into the realities of the human world—and the onerous transactions of maturity. The dolls should navigate a spot that has no scarcity of language for its political situation: patriarchy, marginalization, objectification, oppression.
Ken loves it. Strolling on a avenue in L.A.—clothed, by an accident of circumstance within the plot and impressed costuming decisions past it, in fringe-covered Western put on—he begins to strut. He feels, for the primary time, revered, admired, seen. Barbie, in the meantime, is the one made to really feel—after which to concern—the vulnerabilities of her gender. One in every of Barbie’s finest jokes finds Ken, having returned to Barbie Land, taking part in her a music on his guitar—singing not to Barbie, he makes clear, however at her. Ken croons and crows, entranced by the romance of his gesture, holding Barbie’s gaze and refusing to let it go. The absurdity of all of it is punctured by the lyrics of the music he chooses—one which turned, in the true world, successful: I wanna push you round, effectively I’ll, effectively I’ll / I wanna push you down, effectively I’ll, effectively I’ll …
Adolescence is a time of extremes. And Ken, having skilled manhood in a person’s world, reacts to his new state of affairs with juvenile glee. Absorbing his environment as a toddler may—alive, all the time, to the pictures and messages round him—he intuits first that manliness is every thing in the true world, and second, that manliness should contain horses. (Patriarchy, he concludes, is the system “the place males on horses run every thing.”) He’s entranced by photographs of Rocky Balboa and Invoice Clinton, captivated by the blokes who high-five each other on the fitness center. Again in Barbie Land, importing the teachings he’s realized from actuality, he takes over Barbie’s Dream Home. His Mojo Dojo Casa Home is a bachelor pad and a bar and, in its general aesthetic, a tribute to John Wayne’s affect on American tropes of masculinity. Its decor options, clearly, an abundance of horses.
Ken’s excesses are humorous, and silly, and, aside from the house-stealing stuff, fairly relatable. Like every teenager, Ken is determining who he’s, and attempting the world’s prospects on for dimension. However his immaturity just isn’t contained, and that is its downside. His adolescent strategy to the world, as a substitute, inflicts itself on everybody else. Quickly—a plot twist that, for anybody who has adopted U.S. politics lately, doubles as a twist of the knife—Ken is attempting to rewrite Barbie Land’s structure.
There’s an ominous type of justice to Ken’s makes an attempt to inject himself into the political lifetime of Barbie Land. It’s a zero-sum answer to the issues of a zero-sum world. The Ken doll has been known as, through the years, a “drip with critically abridged genitalia,” “an uncomfortably freighted icon of anti-masculinity,” and—by Gosling, throughout Barbie’s promotional tour—“an adjunct, and never even one of many cool ones.” When Ken was featured in 2010’s Toy Story 3, he discovered himself on the receiving finish of the next line: “You ascot-wearing pink-noser! You’re not a toy … You’re a handbag with legs!”
The insult was made all of the extra insulting as a result of it was delivered by a tuber with removable limbs and anger-management points. However Mr. Potato Head was merely saying what everybody already knew: The defining truth of Ken is that Ken is outlined by Barbie. That alone makes it onerous to not really feel unhealthy for the man. And for a lot of of Barbie’s viewers, his plight could really feel extraordinarily acquainted. A key second within the movie, as my colleague Shirley Li wrote, comes from considered one of its human protagonists, Gloria (America Ferrera), who summons a life’s value of frustration right into a speech concerning the challenges—and the utter irrationality—of being a lady in a world formed by males. One other key second, although, comes from Ken. It’s close to the top of the film, and he’s lastly getting the one factor he’s actually needed: Barbie is listening to him. He’s telling her what it’s prefer to be dimmed in order that any person else may shine. After which he provides the kicker: “It doesn’t really feel good, does it?”
The critics who’ve accused Barbie of misandry may need to watch that second, if certainly they ever watched it in any respect, as soon as extra. Ken’s line offers punctuation, successfully, to Gloria’s speech. And it does what our present political slogans beg us, fruitlessly, to do: It empathizes. Ken doesn’t actually need political energy, he discovers; it’s quite a lot of work. (Plus, disappointingly, horses are merely “men-extenders.”) What he actually seeks is the ability to determine who he’s on his personal phrases. Does Ken need Barbie in any respect? Would he, because the movie hints, relatively be paired with one other Ken? What would he select to be had been his id broader than Barbie and Seashore?
Ken is, by the top of the movie, not merely a doll who has identified life within the human world; he’s additionally a man who understands what it’s prefer to be handled as an additional in another person’s story. In him, the debates that form—and restrict—our political prospects turn out to be elegantly simple. Ken is an individual who’s denied the total dignity of his personhood. That—no matter your worldview, no matter your explicit circumstance, no matter your emotions concerning the phrase patriarchy—is a blatant type of injustice.
However Ken can be, on the story’s conclusion, a man who has escaped from his arrested improvement. He has come to embody considered one of Barbie’s core concepts: that patriarchy is a profound type of immaturity. It causes childishness. It outcomes from it too. Right here is one motive for hope, although, as our very actual men-children maintain attempting to remake the world into their Mojo Dojo Casa Home: For Ken, immaturity turns into what it’s for most individuals—a part on the way in which to one thing higher. Ken doesn’t turn out to be human. He does, nonetheless, develop up.
