Obviously, I am late to this party, having only watched the film this week—and obviously this is not a mystery novel.
The Barbie film was not an expected vehicle for any kind of cultural touchstone. And yet, it is the highest grossing comedy film of all time. What makes this especially challenging to explain is that the film flaunts many of the values and standards that dominate contemporary film criticism. Yet, it seems that both critics and audiences have been able to look past that problem and are more or less enamoured with the film. I will not try to push against this current and produce some kind of hot take about Barbie being bad, actually. (Although, personally, the film did leave me less than enamoured.) Rather, I thought I would take the opportunity to quickly discuss its peculiarity and structure through a different—and perhaps unexpected—lens, as I think it offers the opportunity to see sides to the film that are all too absent from the discussions of it that I have come across.
The nominal transition from the first to the second act of Barbie is clearly signposted in terms typical of Hollywood screenwriting. With the central conflict of the film established—Barbie is turning into a ‘real’ woman—her and Ken cross a metaphysical threshold and travel from Barbieland to the ‘real’ world. In fact, it is rather impressive exactly how conventionally structured this whole first act is: The opening monologue establishes a clear theme; from the perspective of Barbieland, it is believed that the existence of Barbie has solved gender politics forever. However, the influence of reality on Barbieland is a corrupting influence that is revealing the imperfections of womanhood by imposing them on Barbie’s body. Therefore, a savvy audience is primed for a narrative that reflects this thematic foundation. Barbie and Ken’s journey to the real world should, in this framework, reveal the dissonance between the complexities of the real world next to the superficial illusion of Barbieland as a reified corporate commodity. That is, the first act of the film establishes the foundations of a satire that would parody Barbie’s capitalist-feminist brand as being opposed to a ‘real’ and imperfect womanhood.
The structure of this narrative (time) is closely related to its world (space). And I expect that most readers have seen a film that follows some variation of this structure: The ‘world’ is divided between a ‘real’ space and a ‘fictional’ space, and as the protagonists travel from one to the other, the differences between each allegorically comment on the central themes of the narrative. In a highly sincere story, the directionality is most often from the real world to the fictional; Wendy travels from London to Neverland, a world which reflects the ironies and challenges of mortality; Harry travels from London to Hogwarts, a world which—clumsily—heightens and reifies the class hierarchies of Britain into a strange race war between wizards. But in a parody, the directionality is typically inverted. The specific and allegorical is mocked by exposing it to the mundane and general real world. For example, a ‘Disney princess’ appears in New York in Enchanted,or the characters of a war film are placed in a ‘real’ war in Tropic Thunder. Putting the formula a little more accurately, structuring a parody often relies on placing an ‘insane’ subject in a space that enforces a ‘sane’ set of rules derived from the cynical or overtly real. Such structures can become rather complex; for a comparison between a highly layered parody and a direct binary parody, place Spaceballs next to Galaxy Quest as parodies of Star Wars and Star Trek respectively.
The structure of Barbie, both in terms of space and time, seems to be pushing it in the trajectory of Galaxy Quest over Spaceballs—at least for the first act. But there is an odd moment in Barbie that represents its opaque place in the world of parody. Early into the second act, the various hijinks of Barbie and Ken lead to their immediate discovery by the authorities of the human world. However, the force that arrives to confront the ‘insanity’ of Barbie and Ken is not a sterile and rigid representation of reality such as the police or government agents—a common trope of such stories—but rather, a sudden reinfusion of absurdity into the film via the characterisation of the toy company Mattel—the makers of Barbie dolls—as an all-powerful hyperreal pseudo-government. This is, structurally speaking, a key pivot for the film. The movement from the abstract non-reality of Barbieland to the concrete reality of Los Angeles established the core grammar and subjects of the film as a parody. The significance of this threshold was signposted by a literal move from the superficial flatness of Barbieland into a whole new dimension:
However, the later depiction of Mattel reambiguates the diegetic structure of the world: Is Mattel part of the ‘real’ world or Barbieland? Gloria, one of the few named people living in this real world, works at Mattel and seemingly does not take issue with this absurd location when she leaves it and returns to her mundane life:
Note in particular the non-literal spaces and flat lack of dimensionality present here. The architecture of Mattel seems to reverse the transition of space represented within the movement from Barbieland to the real world. And yet, Mattel is canonically a space in the diegetic ‘real world’ of Barbie. There is a straightforward metaphorical reading: The arrival of this locale signals to the audience that the division between Barbieland and the real world is illusory. By establishing a concrete sense of reality and then polluting that reality, the surreal non-reality of Barbieland transforms into a wider sense of hyperreality that unites the whole world of Barbie together as a singularly unrealistic total reality. I would like to investigate this resultant hyperreality within the context of a deliberately tortured interpretation of Barbie’s plot structure.
The Kenergy of Sekai-kei
In the context of Nisio, Isin’s Our Broken World, we described the structure of sekai-kei fiction in some detail. For those who are not familiar with the term, sekai-kei is defined by Kiyoshi Kasai as:
A group of works in which the small, everyday life problem of the relationship (kimi to boku) of the protagonist (boku, i.e. a male) and the heroine in his thoughts (kimi), and an abstract, extraordinary large problem such as ‘a world (sekai) crisis’ or ‘the end of the world,’ are simplistically connected directly without a (midway) interposition of a completely concrete (social) context.
In other words, a kind of fusion of romance and fantastical drama through the intermeshing of the introspective and the universal without explicit treatments of external human structures such as society. To invent an excessively stereotypical example to get the point across: A sekai-kei story is the type of story where a sad, isolated boy discovers that the cute girl he has a crush on is actually a mecha pilot who holds the fate of the world in her hands. The wider society and implications of this world-threatening crisis is generally ambiguous. What matters is that by successfully connecting with the love interest and bringing her into his isolated world, the boy is able to save both that introspective world and the wider world in one stroke. The historical context of the emergence of this genre was a kind of social listlessness and crisis that occupied the Japanese zeitgeist after a string of successive disasters in Japan throughout the 1990s. The conventional interpretation of sekai-kei works in this light is that they allow one to play out the escapist fantasy of saving the world without dealing with the messiness of interpersonal social reality; romance, adventure, meaning, and a secure world can all be achieved within a world that can be perceived in an isolated, antisocial posture. (The merits and nuances of such theories are better explored elsewhere on this blog.)
Barbie engages with a similar structure and perspective, but in a reasonably distinct context. When discussing sekai-kei fiction, we have used the following visual guide of how fiction works in order to explain certain elements of their formal construction:
To explain briefly, the graphic offers an abstract explanation of how we perceive the illusion of humanity in the false world that emerges from a work of fiction. Representing the audience using the Lacanian triad of orders, it graphs out how they perceive the (in actuality totally Symbolic) work of fiction as a full reality with its own Real (world) and Imaginary (perspective). Since art is, at its core, a process of interpreting symbols, the perception of depth taking place here is entirely false: The work of art is a mirror where something flat and unreal transforms in the eye of the beholder.
Again, the model is explored in greater depth elsewhere on this blog: Regardless, the essential utility of this model does not differ that much in a work of parody. In a world with concrete rules such as Galaxy Quest, it operates as is in a fairly easy to understand manner. (In the case of a surreal work like Spaceballs, reality is smashed apart into a series of fractured pieces, but each piece can still be related to this model in a useful manner.) But works of hyperreality are a little more challenging to perceive. Fortunately, the reason we discussed sekai-kei fiction is that it is helpful in this case.
As suggested, Barbie is similar in structure to a work of sekai-kei fiction. Focusing in on the surface level aesthetics of the genre, Barbie is indeed a kind of world-scale romance that abstracts away the concrete intermediation of society. Or rather, a kind of anti-romance which approaches heterosexual romance from a critical lens. However, this is not sufficient to qualify it as a sekai-kei-esque work. According to Tsunehiro Uno, sekai-kei works frequently centre the male perspective. And more specifically, this male perspective is afforded the escapist fantasy of passivity while women take the effort to understand the male’s interior world and take on the hard work of solving the world-scale crisis as a metaphorical parallel. Uno articulates this in the following terms:
[in sekai-kei] the desire for a broken, beautiful girl, whose process of healing can provide one with an unconditional source of love and meaning, is used to justify the postmodern condition. This is why the action … is driven by women, who are the ones made to take initiative and dirty their hands.
Within the smaller scale world of Barbieland, the shape of the world does indeed depend on the relationship between Barbie and Ken. However, rather than the intermediating social context being non-existent or invisible, it is a central character in the film. However, this character is purely symbolic—a kind of mysterious black box and abstract monad. While he is in the real world, Ken discovers intermediating society in the form of the patriarchy, and he transforms Barbieland into The Kendom by importing this patriarchy—which appears as a kind of concrete on-off switch and plot device. Another way of thinking of this is that the social context of Barbieland is superficial and reducible to a plot device and mechanical element of the narrative. The Barbieland plot runs on the logic that, since the romance between Barbie and Ken is obligatory and not authentic, the form of this ‘romance’ corresponds to the shape of the world, rather than the reverse case typical of sekai-kei fiction. In The Kendom, Kens enjoy the sekai-kei fantasy of passive wish-fulfilment and patriarchal automatic interest from women. In Barbieland, Barbies reign supreme in the particular kind of commodified female fantasy typical of Barbie as a brand—the initial subject of parody in the first act of the film. We will from here out call this smaller world-crisis dynamic, based around an objectified patriarchy, a ‘sekai-Ken narrative’.
When discussing sekai-kei fiction, we have previously described it in terms of our general model of fictional orders, saying:
A sekai-kei story connects the subjective logic of the diegetic Imaginary related to its core relationship (you and I | our | kimi to boku) with the fate of the diegetic Real without this intermediating logic. In other words, it draws a direct tunnel between the emotive reality of its core romance to the fate of the diegetic Real, straight through diegesis β. Crucially, sekai-kei is not the same as the elimination of diegesis β. The wholesale elimination of diegesis β would deconstruct the entire model, destroying the distinction between the diegetic Imaginary and diegetic Real, and thereby breach the simulation of the nonexistent world that is the basis of the layered model of fiction we have developed thus far.
Another way of putting this, perhaps more simply, is that in a sekai-kei story, there is a concrete world (diegetic Real) beyond the perception of the story (diegetic Imaginary). However, by resting the fate of that concrete world on concepts and stakes that can be understood within a highly introspective, passive fantasy, the fate of the world is translated into a form deeply insular to the smaller scale of the diegetic Imaginary. By contrast, a sekai-Ken narrative does not erase the division between the diegetic Imaginary and the diegetic Real, but replaces it with a superficial façade that objectifies this dividing force (society). This functions precisely because Barbieland is a superficial, flat dimension to begin with. While there is a literal reality to Barbieland, in the logic of the film, its reality is a matter of perception rather than any deeper materiality. And this perception is in turn determined by the objectified cultural dominant, which acts as a kind of filter: Barbieland’s concrete reality transforms mechanically in response to whether the narrative is currently governed by the perceptive framework of the ‘patriarchy’ or the matriarchal status quo ante. The actual relationships between Barbies and Kens have little authenticity or importance beyond how they are shaped by this overriding filter. Of course, all of this was probably not front of mind for anyone who watched the film. However, we are explaining its mechanics within an obtuse framework in order to get at a larger element of Barbie.
Ken you feel the wider world?
As we discussed, the clear division between concrete reality and abstract fictionality breaks down in Barbie with the arrival of Mattel. This bleeding of worlds complicates the functioning of Barbie’s sekai-Ken narrative. A sekai-Ken narrative does not allow for the complexity of multiple worlds because it explores the world as a flattened, surreal abstraction. To use the language of our general fiction model, a sekai-kei narrative bridges the diegetic Imaginary and diegetic Real by removing certain social context, and thereby circumvents the implication of a diegesis β. A sekai-Ken plugs this hole with an exaggerated abstraction of the social world, and thereby makes the flow of forces through this abstract filter into its own endogenous subject. Put another way, for Barbieland to be read as a simple allegorical tale about the consequences of patriarchy, this division of worlds must remain unambiguous. If Barbieland bleeds into the real world and vice versa, the objectified ‘patriarchy’ or lack thereof cannot operate as the root cause of all phenomena. As a result, the ‘patriarchy’ ceases to be the subject of parody, but rather the narrative expands to include the originating causes from within the real world that shape and form Barbieland’s hollow image of a patriarchy. In a phrase, without a clear division between the two worlds, the film becomes about a total system that equalises both.
This all might be a little abstract, but we can see how world-forms like this shape the meaning and interpretation of narrative when we consider how sekai-kei fiction works: because society is reduced to a dysfunctional, passive non-entity in sekai-kei fiction, ‘action’ only takes place within the immediate frame of reference of the characters. Combining this immediacy with a crisis that is on a world-scale (existential to the very continuation of reality; beyond the scale of society) means that any resolution of this world-scale narrative has to be linked to this immediate frame of reference where all ‘action’ has been staged. The conspicuous presence of an intermediating society would shift the stakes of this action; for example, in the ur-sekai-kei work, Neon Genesis Evangelion, the remnants of societal institutions present in NERV introduces an additional subject. That is, society’s inability to shoulder the excessive responsibilities placed on the shoulders of Shinji Ikari as the lead character, and as only a teenager. By contrast, in a pure sekai-kei story such as Voices of a Distant Star, society’s form, goals, and structure is all left vague: this fuller absence means that society’s failure is not a subject or theme, but an embedded assumption of the fiction. This structures the concerns of the film entirely around its immediate subject. (The effects of emotional and physical distance on an intimate romance.)
In Barbie, the initial subject of parody under the sekai-Ken model is how the superficially ‘perfect’ romance—according to a commodified image of female fantasy—of Barbie and Ken immediately turns perverse with the introduction of ‘patriarchy’ in the place of this social fantasy. It’s a story about how the images of ourselves and the world are not autonomous, but determined by a system of enforced heterosexuality and gender norms that are taken as self-evident and natural. However, in Barbie, both the matriarchal idealised vision of Barbieland and the patriarchal alternative of The Kendom have their deeper metaphysical origin in the real world. Barbieland, despite its surreality and autonomy from what we might consider ‘reality’, is actually built and maintained by the hyperreal Mattel. Within Mattel, a secretary named Gloria draws various designs for Barbie in a task that is ambiguously characterised as both a hobby and part of her job. Within the lore of this universe, Barbie’s mental state is presented as being a reflection of these drawings and Gloria’s general sense of self. And according to the descriptions given by ‘Weird Barbie’, the entire premise of Barbieland works on this same principle: Barbieland is a mirrored reflection of the real world’s engagement with Barbie products and the Barbie brand, with each Barbie reflecting someone who ‘plays’ with them.
Sketching the shape of this world out mentally, it is very different from the pure allegory of Barbieland taken in isolation: In the real world, society-at-large engages with the products and brand of Barbie, which is designed and distributed by Mattel, and which itself exists in a hyperreal dreamscape. Due to nebulous mechanics within the hyperreality of Mattel, interacting with Barbie and associated products generates a surreal microcosm called Barbieland, whose shape and contents are determined by the immediate psychological and ideological state of those in the real world. From the perspective of the creators of Barbie, none of this is meant to be taken literally. It is just a convenient plot device for reifying the concept of interacting with a toy like Barbie into a coherent narrative and world. Comparable intentions can be seen in the similarly successful The Lego Movie from 2014. However, what distinguishes Barbie is the impurity of the divisions within the resultant fiction.
The real world as seen in Barbie is not actually supposed to be a close analogue of our own world. The behaviour encountered by Barbie and Ken is exaggerated and didactic: the sexism experienced by Barbie is overly-pronounced and relentless; named characters such as Sasha act out self-aware stereotypes and are described as such by others; Mattel is presented as an unreal parody of itself, with its corresponding characters such as Gloria and the members of the board also acting as parodies of Mattel’s brand. In an example such as The Lego Movie, the events of the film largely take place in a fictional world that acts as a reflection of some idea that is supposed to take place in a real world that more or less corresponds to our own. But in Barbie, the narrative jumps back and forth across these worlds, with the sense of absurdity and parody only slightly changing form. In addition, characters from the real world travel to Barbieland and interface with it as a real space. This is despite how, in a macro sense, Barbieland is just a reflection of the mental space of those within the real world.
In a setting with these sorts of layers, the most important relationship of the film is not between Barbie and Ken, but between Barbie and Gloria. That is, the relationship of Gloria to the embodiment of her ideological conception of femininity. This relationship is not just the most thematically important—as the plan to overthrow the Kens depends on Gloria being able to communicate her sense of worth as a woman—but it is also metaphysically important. As the ‘player’ of our perspective Barbie and as the only female employee of Mattel of note, Gloria is the chief interface between the real world and Barbieland: The microcosmic events of Barbieland play out as a reflection of Gloria’s mental state. As Gloria is overcome with the anxieties of age and inadequacy, Barbie’s ‘perfect’ idealisation of femininity breaks down and she is permeated by the fear of death. This results in her crossing over into the real world, and the motion of the plot is set off, leading to the arrival of the patriarchy into Barbieland and its transfiguration into The Kendom. Putting this another way, there is a narrative structure that is core to Barbie where the whole world is infused with a sense of hyperreality and its content is a reflection of the immediate perspective of its leading woman. We will henceforth call this structure a ‘Barbie-kei narrative’.
The Mojo Dojo Casa House
A sekai-Ken narrative disempowers the agency of its characters by making the corrosive effects of society’s arbitrary norms into the autonomous subject of parody. A Barbie-kei is a perfect inversion of this, as it tells the story of society as a reflection of an individual woman and her perspective on herself. These two structures fundamentally present opposing subjects and opposing resolutions to the problems that they discuss.
A sekai-Ken story is a satirical parody, and in this mode Barbie presents the patriarchy as an irrational absurdity that corrupts all relationships between men and women by contextualising everything in terms of the wishes and desires of men. It mocks how Barbie, as a brand, presents the illusion of breaking out of this system by a kind of commodified self-actualisation: Barbie reifies a world free of patriarchy, and women can purchase this reification in order to produce a world free of patriarchy within their mind. However, the way that the patriarchy easily subjugates this kind of feminism—that is, the kind where change comes from within the mind—reveals its superficiality. This is inherent to the structure of a sekai-Ken narrative as we have described it.
However, in a Barbie-kei narrative, women’s actualisation is fundamentally based on their self-perception. Barbie, as a reification of the state of women, is not produced by the object-society imposed on Barbieland per se. Rather, Barbies can overcome Ken so long as Gloria is able to imagine and articulate the contradictions of the patriarchy. As the narrative structure ties the shape of the world to the interior landscape of women, ideology is conquered as an exercise of mind over matter.
Barbie’s peculiar feeling lies in how it features both of these structures in parallel. The first act of the film establishes it as a parody in the structural mould of a sekai-Ken story. However, it cannot settle on a subject that deserves parody. For all of the absurdity that it finds in a commodity like Barbie, one that tries to reduce the goals of feminism to a doll where women can imagine their success rather than actually attaining it, Barbie is also enamoured by this fantasy as a sincere and authentic expression of what hope means as a woman living under the patriarchy. That is, the film latches onto the importance of fantasy as a goal even as it attempts to reckon with the insufficiency of that same fantasy. It bounces back and forth between parody and sincerity as it attempts to ‘have it all’—as the infamous slogan of second-wave feminism put it.
Fredric Jameson identifies this incapacity for parody with the unsettled flatness of postmodernism, saying:
If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. … In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the “stable ironies” of the eighteenth century.
Certainly, Barbie’s alternating modes seem to reflect not just a minor realisation of this tendency, but its full maturity to a degree that was far off when Jameson wrote this description. As the real world and Barbieland bleed together, Barbie loses any singular parodic subject. Every character acts in an absurd manner, with the quippy irreality of a Marvel script. It cannot decide if Barbie is a tool of capitalist subjugation within a patriarchal frame, or a sincere embodiment of the hopes and aspirations of women. And the flatness and hyperreality of Barbieland can be found to varying degrees within its picture of the real world, giving it a distinctly postmodern feeling of irreverence towards its own meaning. However, this description, which seems to reduce Barbie down to a failed attempt at parody, seems insufficient next to the film in question. For all of its equivocating, Barbie’s parodywhen read in the light of its conclusion is not truly blank: Jameson’s doomerism is, in my estimation, anachronistic.
Jameson identifies this inability to achieve parody with the lack of historicism present in postmodernism. That is, a sense of timelessness where culture lacks the history to explain the causes of phenomena and therefore cannot unequivocally satirise them. To quote him again:
This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes “pop history”). Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject but rather that of some degraded collective “objective spirit”: it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato’s cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls.
However, this lack of historicity is not necessarily due to some special ignorance imposed by the present conditions of cultural production. In Barbie, the real world lacks any sense of historicity. Corresponding to its hyperreality, time periods are smashed together incoherently; contemporary technology abounds in the form of tablet PCs, smart cars, smartphones, and contemporary architecture, and yet Bill Clinton appears in montage as the president, and fashion from decades past appears at various points. The point of this lack of rootedness to any given time is not to force the audience to not register the flow of time, but to recognise the permanence of its subject. Whether in the fashion of the 1980s, the rapist president of the 1990s, or the technology of the 21st century, the patriarchy co-exists with the decades-long brand of Barbie as a timeless and immovable reality. Dehistoricising realism in fiction creates a sort of omnidirectional montage that allows for an entirely abstract subject beyond the particulars of any specific reality.
This full topic is an issue that I will cover in much, much more detail at a later date. (Blatant future book foreshadowing goes here.) But this lack of subject is connected to the whole portrait of postmodernity as drawn by Jameson and others: A society filled with symbols that have no original that they represent, a flattened perception of reality where all differences and distinctions are treated as suspect since any given reality is subject to debate. Earlier, Jameson compared the post-parodic spirit of pastiche to the post-ironic spirit of blank irony. This post-ironic posture is exactly the point of a film such as Barbie.
In Barbie, there is no central subject being parodied since it cannot present a stable perspective on any subject. The world is always shifting, corresponding to the insincerity and cynicism of current culture. It contains narrative structures that both mock and affirm Barbie as a brand for feminist liberation. And the film’s reception reflects this post-ironic tendency. Despite his alleged antagonism, Ken as played by Ryan Gosling has become an icon of the film equal to or even above Barbie. His persona is played with a charisma that has led to it being co opted in exactly a post-ironic manner by male fans of the film. At the climax of the film, it is Ken not Barbie who is given an exaggerated musical number that shifts across a range of stereotypical styles all while Gosling sings its insincere, insubstantial, satirical lyrics.
Jameson is right to see the crisis inherent in such post-parody and post-irony (see Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology for a full study of the problems of criticising capitalism from a cynical distance whilst embodying it.) However, culture inherently tends towards the problematics that reflect the contradictions of its underlying economic base. Barbie cannot criticise the patriarchy under the frameworks of earlier modernities, but seeing it as resultantly empty and useless would be to misunderstand this situation.
Post-parody is not something altogether lacking in parody, and post-irony has substantial irony to its bite when deployed properly. Barbie cannot make anything in isolation into its subject of parody—it emerges from a culture that flattens and undifferentiates all phenomena. Barbie as the concept of itself cannot be registered from a parodic perspective: That Barbie is a commodity is not enough to make it ‘mockable’ or ‘funny’ anymore, and so a sekai-Ken type parody would seem anachronistic and lame. In order to laugh at Barbie, contemporary culture has to look at the subject from a meta-referential perspective where its falsehood as a subject is made explicit.
To explain: that Barbie cannot settle on a perspective where it can formulate a real parody of its subject is central to its actual point. The purpose of the earlier form of parody is to present a subject as absurd by comparing it to a context that reveals its irrationalities. But the assumed posture of postmodern art is that all context—everything, in fact—is some form of absurd. Barbie responds by flattening its reality into a hyperreality in exactly this postmodern way, where the rules of Barbieland seem to extend all across the diegetic real world in a vague and confusing manner. In seeing all reality as equivocal and debatable, the subject at issue for parody is not any thing itself, but the structure of attempting to reason with this flattened reality at all. The film does not conclude with any grand gesture to solve gender politics forever, as in a highly sincere treatment of the subject. Nor does it end with an ironic event that reveals the absurdity of trying to use Barbie as an instrument to combat the patriarchy in the first place. Instead, it ends in a manner that is neither sincere or ironic, but both in equal and related portions. Unable to resolve anything, Barbie instead pushes Ken to reconsider—deconstructively—the whole concept of gender politics having a form that can bring meaning or substance to their relationship. Instead, he resolves at the end of the film that they will simply exist as Barbie and Ken (as opposed to Barbie and Ken). That is, that being Ken as himself is ‘Kenough’.
Post-ironic and post-parodic posturing is defined by this dual sincerity and mockery; for a textual example, consider Sasha’s diatribe against Barbie, which she describes as a ‘fascist’ brand. The delivery and framing of the content of this speech are positioned as didactic and inherently valid. And yet, Sasha reverses this attitude and embraces Barbie by the end of the film. This dualism cannot say anything about the subjects of Barbie and patriarchy in the traditional mode of parody, it is in Jameson’s terms, a “neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives.” However, there is something—a concept—being mocked in Barbie. And that is the absurdity of the process of asking such questions to begin with. The subject that is revealed through the narrative structure of Barbie is not Barbie-as-commodity or the patriarchy, but that any answer to such questions would be filled with paradoxes. A cynical and parodical treatment of Barbie in line with a sekai-Ken narrative appears as inauthentic exactly because it arrives at an answer—that Barbie is just a commodified illusion of a world without the patriarchy. A sincere narrative in line with a Barbie-kei narrative has the same problem: Barbieland cannot reflect the actual aspirations of women, because that would make their aspirations into nothing but an empty symbol—an empty gesture of self-affirmation. What Barbie is mocking is the act of existing in a world where a cynical toy sold for money has actual, sincere importance to women and their struggle, and where there is no way to square the circle of seeing the world where that is the case in a manner that makes sense. Neither sekai-Ken or Barbie-kei being sufficient, only a Barbie-Ken narrative, lacking true cynicism and true sincerity, is Kenough.
