Social critique from Archivist Ken

If you're a Barbie person, if this film helped you through the night, you really don't have to read this piece. These days, the night is long. But I didn't like it, and I hope I can say so without starting a fight. The moment it was announced, Barbie became one of those The Last Jedi moments: because some of the worst people in the world dislike it, there's a sense that disliking it says something bad about you – in this case, that you don't value camp or femme culture, or that you don't think people have a right to pure pleasure.

I do value these things, although I question any moment that the word "pure" enters the chat. My relationship to femme is complicated, inevitably. I was good at femme once, and there were aspects of it I enjoyed, in the same sense that you can enjoy a food you're allergic to. Or, say, in the sense that you can enjoy the taste of a food whose texture is profoundly uncomfortable to your particular tongue. I turned away from femme at a staggering social cost – first a massive down payment, and then a yearly payment each year until I die. This payment increases every year of my life as an American. Still, I am happy with my choice.

But man! I went to see Barbie last night as part of a friend's birthday party, and I thought it was a fascinating propaganda film, in the same sense that most summer blockbusters are more or less propaganda films, here to uphold American military supremacy and binary gender and the idea of power as the proof of goodness. It was stylishly designed, contained charming performances, and had the weirdest – which is to say, the most normative – ideas about gender imaginable. And it was one of those stories that, while not made to transphobic ends, still manages to be a polished fairytale about a certain popular image of trans people. It does this, not because its creators were thinking about trans people, but because the ways you imagine trans people depend on the ways you imagine gender.

If you managed to avoid the Barbie hype cycle, the film is about a Barbie doll (played by Margot Robbie, a star of the old school) and a Ken doll (played by Ryan Gosling, who also has personality and wit to spare) who leave their home in Barbie Land for real-life Los Angeles to try to solve Barbie's existential crisis. In the process, Ken discovers the patriarchy and brings it back to Barbie Land, so that when Barbie gets home, she discovers that instead of a pink utopia where women are in charge of everything, it's what you'd get if you fed The Pickup Artist to ChatGPT. Barbie saves the day, and the various Kens, having proven that they're not up to the task of having power, are relegated back to second-class status.

The whole thing is an ad for Mattel products, with two hagiographic cameos from the ghost of Barbie's inventor – presented as a kind of nostalgic angel, surrounded by the light of an imaginary spring – and with the subversive, self-parodying sass of a really great corporate Twitter account. None of the corporations take themselves too seriously these days. They've seen the glitchy cynicism of an exhausted generation, and they've trained themselves in its idioms.

The thing is, Robbie's Barbie is a perfect encapsulation of how a normal, mild transphobe – not someone who loathes or fears trans people, but someone who hasn't thought very hard about the role gender plays in their own lives – imagines a trans woman being. She lives in an unrealistic fantasy of womanhood until emerging from Barbie Land into reality, at which point she finds that womanhood is messy, your body ages, you aren't paid well, you have to go to the gynecologist, and so forth. She has never imagined it would be this way. Before "coming out" into the real world, she's lived a life of uncomplicated privilege, and once again, she has no idea that this is the case. When she complains of her lot, she's told the variant of the world-weary "welcome to being a woman" line that so many trans women are used to hearing. The overall vibe is that if people only knew what being a woman entails, they wouldn't want to live as women, although womanhood is also superior and desirable.

Conversely, Ken is a collection of every stereotype about trans men. He can't perform masculinity very well, and is suspicious for this reason (as opposed to Barbie, who is presented as suspicious because she performs femininity too well). He's unable to stop veering between an inescapable femminess and a stereotypical masc presentation, a human tattoo of a motorcycle; he can't actually be masculine, so he surrounds himself with boxing gloves and fur coats and beers and tennis headbands. Initially portrayed as a sweet person, he "comes out," gets drunk on privilege, and immediately betrays and abuses the women he loves. Above all, he's childlike, with the mind of a teenager. The assumption here is that we'd all be men if we could, but only a fool would take that literally.

I don't think that this is how the creators of this film imagine trans people – not trans people, per se. But it is how they imagine "someone who has no experience of being a human woman/man, wants to do it, lives in idealized delusion, and needs to be taught a lesson." And quite honestly, "someone who has no experience of being a human woman/man, wants to do it, lives in idealized delusion, and needs to be taught a lesson" is how a lot of people see trans people. I know this, because there was a time before I knew I was trans. I know how these people think because I used to be one of them.

Obviously, that's not what trans people are like. We have our individual delusions, like anybody, but we're not toys, and only a toy – a puppet, a strawman – would have these problems. But I do think it says a lot about America, that this is what we think about when we think about gender: we get as far as critiquing patriarchy (good, correct), but we struggle to imagine what else we could do. In trying to imagine what else we could do, we also don't listen to the people who have devoted their lives to exploring gender, and the paradox that gender is both the fakest and the realest thing imaginable. In fact, we dismiss them as knowing less about gender than other people. Barbie doesn't really engage with non-metaphorical trans people (though one of the recurring background Barbies, who has a few lines, is played by a trans woman), so this last point is kind of far afield from why I didn't like this damn movie, but it's true. More to the point, I don't trust any entertainment that aims to teach me a lesson, with all that the phrase implies.