Abstract
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive . . .
The closer I am to fine
In late July of 2023, flocks of people dressed in hot pink started appearing everywhere, coming to and from movie theaters, with an exuberance that had gone missing in the pandemic and post-pandemic epoch up until then. They were dressed up to see Barbie, a film directed by Greta Gerwig and written jointly by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, which had become a cultural phenomenon in the span of weeks.
Barbie is undeniably about gender, immediately evoking assumptions about its contents with its title. Like the toy from which the movie derives, the ideas in the film can be “played with” on multiple levels. Arguably, the film’s power (which has inspired a gleeful fandom and equally fervent hostility in its reception) is its ability to stimulate debate about the core frameworks of identity that exist in all of us. Among many other interpretations, Barbie can be understood as a dramatization of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s theory of gender (2003), which is centered on the developing child’s relation to the adult world. Here I will use the film as a scaffold to talk about his ideas, dressing Barbie up in Laplanche. Of course, readers are free to play with his theories however they want.
Before we get to the film, we have to talk shop. Laplanche provides us a way of thinking about gender as a part of human development that is simultaneously universal, culturally informed, and to some degree unique for each individual. His theory begins with the idea that humans are meaning-seeking creatures, or “hermeneuts.” That is, we are naturally compelled not just to survive, attach, seek pleasure, reproduce, and so on, but to try to make meaning of our experiences. In Laplanche’s view, we use any interpretive means available to pursue this aim, from the communicative bodily gestures we develop in infancy to the sophisticated languages and cultural forms we acquire over the course of life.
In childhood, according to Laplanche, we are most interested in understanding the experiences that occur in our relationships with the human beings responsible for our care. Children, in other words, are keenly interested in deciphering the meanings of the messages they receive from their parents and other adults they depend on. And these communications always include messages that express the adults’ vision of the child’s identity—who or what the adults think and feel the child is.
Intended or not, such messages unavoidably include the adults’ vision of the child’s gender, which arises from their psyche and links to the wider cultural world. Societal ideas about gender are mediated through the lens of the adults caring for the child, transfigured by the unique marks of their psychic lives (their beliefs, feelings, fantasies, and desires). Caretakers begin conveying such complex messages to children from the moment they are born—in the ways they hold them, look at them, speak to them, and so on—and later in more sophisticated forms as children acquire language. Importantly, in Laplanche’s view, these messages include—or are “compromised” by—elements that are repressed and thus unconscious in the adult sender’s psyche-soma. Such unconscious elements are received as “noise” (versus “signal”) and are thus always to some degree indecipherable or “enigmatic” to the child (Laplanche 1987, 2003). Their meanings, in other words, can never be translated once and for all.
As children develop, they acquire cultural codes and forms that they use in attempts to translate these messages in increasingly complex ways. The first and most consequential form children will learn and try to use in interpreting gender is a binary code of biological sex: male/female. As any parent knows, children become extremely interested in the differences between boys and girls as soon as they acquire the words designating them. A key reason for this intense interest, according to Laplanche, is that they are trying hard to use these two biological sexual categories to translate or answer questions about the messages concerning gender that they have received from day one.
The binary sexual code inevitably fails to some extent as a translation of gender, however. It is always inadequate for the task because it is too simple to capture the highly complex, nuanced, and often conflicting messages the child is attempting to decipher. While biological sex is concrete, binary, and generic, the messages we all contend with concerning gender are symbolic, polysemic, and unique to each individual’s experience. Most importantly for Laplanche, some elements of these messages are unconscious and thus permanently enigmatic and never fully translatable. The inevitable failure of the first attempts at a translation leaves the child with “leftover” partial messages that remain in continual need of further translation. These leftovers become conscious questions and unconscious enigmas that perturb and propel the child and, later, the adult into the ongoing task of working out an understanding and expression of gender over the course of life (Michael Levin, personal communication).
In a satirical tribute to the cultural doll symbol, Gerwig’s Barbie unwittingly illustrates Laplanche’s gender theory. As the film starts, we are quickly taken to Barbieland, a pink, fantastical world that functions on the natural laws of Barbie toys (Her feet are curved for heels! She floats places! Her waffle pops and magically lands on her plate! Every day is the best day ever!). Here all people are named Barbie, or versions of her, or are one of her accessories, like Ken. There is an unquestioned stereotype of what being Barbie means (empowered, stereotypically feminine, fun) and what being Ken means (always pining for Barbie, buff, “beach”), which also highlights the ostracized few who fall outside these rubrics, like Weird Barbie and Allan.
The main character, Stereotypical Barbie, is a portrayal of the way a child might temporarily “squeeze” her gender into a binary sexual code (female/girl). To reduce gender to biological sex is to reduce it to a stereotype, which, in Laplanche’s view, all children try to do for a while. So far, Barbie is naive regarding the anarchic “noise” that litters the human unconscious, which gives rise to disruptive fantasies and desires that include themes such as death and sex (evidenced by a comical moment in which she and Ken cannot fathom what they would do at a “sleepover”). Barbie believes she is a role model to girls and that her Barbieland, more or less, is a mirror of a human girl’s world.
At this point, Barbie is the enactment of a toy whose existence and activities depend on its owner; what appears to be an enclosed world (Barbieland, a child’s world) actually is embedded in a greater sociocultural context (the Real World, the adult world). As we will discover, she was created by somebody and dressed up by somebody with complex ideas (along with enigmatic aspects) of what Barbie means—every Barbie set comes with the standard outfits but also enigmatic accessories, so to speak. She, and we as the audience, are soon faced with evidence of such messages emanating from that world.
Dancing amid a raving disco party with a smile on her face, Barbie abruptly exclaims, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” She has been hit unexpectedly by “irrepressible thoughts of death” so disturbingly enigmatic to her she must cover them up right away. Soon her perfectly curved feet fall flat, her waffle burns, and she wakes up disheveled. She learns that the cause of these changes is a portal, a rip in the membrane between Barbieland and the Real World, and that the girl who plays with her must be experiencing an emotional disturbance. This drives her (literally, in a pink convertible through all sorts of terrain) to seek out her owner for repair; along the way, she inadvertently begins to explore a new translation of who she is.
Upon leaving Barbieland, Barbie is slammed with the realities of the Real World: she is groped on Venice Beach, arrested for punching her assailant, and informed that the world is actually not run by women. She sees the humanity of humans and is subjected to experiences that cause her confusion, anxiety, sadness, and warmth, sometimes all at once. As a result of this metaphorical portal/rip between the Barbieland of her psyche and the Real World, she starts to become a meaning-seeking creature: she says, “I’m conscious . . . but it’s myself that I’m conscious of.” She sheds real tears.
But the enigma of this portal/rip has no fix, no going back; it creates only a demand for more meaning-making. Weird Barbie was right in insisting that choosing Birkenstocks over her usual high heels for her flat feet was not, in fact, a choice. For Laplanche, the enigmatic signifiers we receive are simultaneously traumas from the outside (a portal/rip) and stimuli to create an “inside” that attempts to integrate these messages into our psychic life (Stein 2007, p. 180). Beginning with her “irrepressible thoughts of death,” Barbie is forced to discover the complexities and desires of those who have created her—perhaps we can call these the irrepressible questions about life. We are shown how she seeks out her owner, finding at first a teenaged girl Sasha (who subjects her to a diatribe on how Barbie is Bad for Girls), then the girl’s mother Gloria (whose fondness for Barbie comes poignantly from her memories of playing with her child), and finally Ruth Handler, the woman who invented Barbie for her daughter. Along the way, we see the profit-focused influence of the men in suits at Mattel, too, who manufacture Barbie. Barbie’s quest has led her to the people who have both invested in her existence and have complicated her with their messages, their unconscious desires, and their enigmatic signifiers—to them she seems to ask back, as Billie Eilish sings in the film’s soundtrack, “What was I made for?” (O’Connell and O’Connell 2023).
Barbie’s journey eventually leaves her standing at the core of an empty (and at the same time infinite) room with her inventor Ruth—are we now cinematically inside of Barbie’s psyche? As Barbie is faced with the prospect of becoming human, Ruth tells Barbie about her origins, that her intended identity is indeterminate, and that, to be human, she must find out what it’s like for herself. In this exchange, Gerwig’s emotional life comes through, conveying the tenderness of a mother-daughter connection. I imagined Gerwig as a new mother, a child, a fellow working woman directing this film; the “music” of this humanized me as the viewer. In the lens of Laplanche, this is the aesthetic nature of the messages a child receives: the hopes, self-narratives, and unknowns of the parents, conveyed through their ways of being.
But taking Laplanche a step further, I think Ruth models to Barbie some essence of being a meaning-making (and doll-inventing) human, one capable of evolving translations and the ability to ask questions. Ruth assumes what Chetrit-Vatine (2004) calls an ethical position of responsibility for the complexity of her role in creating Barbie (the “matricial space”) and in doing so inspires Barbie’s freedom to abandon her stereotypical form and begin elaborating what might be inside, as a woman and a human individual, in a meaningful, bespoke way.
What about Ken? In contrast to the fate of Barbie, Ken shows us the pitfalls of an unexamined, rigid translation of identity. Ken’s makers intended him to be extremely limited in scope (“Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him”). Upon entering the Real World, he easily is lured (much like a toddler impressed by size, quantity, and hierarchy) into a stereotypically male performance act based on superficial binary notions of masculinity (Patriarchy! Brewskis! Horses!) with little self-inquiry. Barbie’s entrance into meaning-making selfhood is facilitated by a series of “parents” (Sasha, Gloria, Ruth) who confer upon her their stories of psychic depth and coherence. In contrast, Ken is a psychological orphan: his Real World experience is a loose assemblage of images and ideas, a set of messages from the sociocultural milieu unbound by deep meaning and unaccompanied by the “music” of a parent’s voice (Blum, Goldberg, and Levin 2023). Ken’s façade collapses at the realization that he is nothing if not defined in relation to the other side of the binary, Stereotypical Barbie. Wrecked by the impact of Barbie’s evolving identity, Ken is faced with his own new assignment to elaborate his inner void.
The last scene shows Barbie newly situated as a person, Barbara Handler, in the human world. In her first pressing errand, she announces, “I’m here to see my gynecologist!” Gerwig playfully cues the audience to think about what such an encounter might reveal. Intentionally or not, she leaves us with the notion that Barbie’s journey of self-discovery is constrained from the start by messages conflating biological sex with gender identity.
In her birth as a human, the question “Who am I?” brings Barbie to a medical doctor, seeking answers to questions of gender as a great many of us do (especially as children, in Laplanche’s account): by reverting to a binary code of biological sex. For Laplanche, this is where we go astray: gender, he claims, comes first in our psychic life and precedes the impact of biological sex in psychic development (Laplanche 2003; Stein 2007). He insists that gender is a translation not of biological sex but of something more complicated and unconscious that occurs in the interpersonal domain. The moment we are conceived is immediately followed by some version of “Is it a boy or a girl?” (House 2017). Through the enigmas entangled in this question, we are all given an assignment to translate ourselves through our gender identities before our biological bodies even get started—a task that is complex, idiosyncratic, ongoing, and far from binary. It is notably fitting that the film has Barbie singing the Indigo Girls song Closer to Fine as she drives to the Real World: “There’s more than one answer to these questions / Pointing me in a crooked line” (Saliers 1989).
Though Barbie is criticized for not offering more examples of gender as a plurality (see, e.g., St. James 2023), the film is Gerwig’s simultaneous protest and love letter to Barbie and what she represents. By showing us this internal conflict, Gerwig actually offers the audience some freedom to ask questions about gender and identity beyond the constraints depicted in Barbieland. Amid the maximal mélange of humor, song and dance, and fast-paced dialogue, we are touched by glimmers of the director’s soulful views of coming into one’s own “crooked line,” echoing the spirit of her protagonists in Frances Ha, Ladybird, and her cinematic rendition of Little Women. Barbie asks us to be passengers in the psychoanalytic act of Barbie and her journey of self-translation, showing us that embarking on true inquiry into one’s identity entails reckoning with the impact of our parents’ and society’s messages within ourselves. As passengers, we are implicitly cued (or perhaps triggered) to feel something emanating from our own process of gender identification and the messages that we received, an experience we all unconsciously “know” because it was an actuality in our psychic life from the very start (Scarfone 2015)—the film is provocative precisely for this reason.