The Feminist Cinematic Futures of Barbie and Bella Baxter
Few have expounded on why the 2023 films of Greta Gerwig and Yorgos Lanthimos struck a mass chord at a time of dwindling cinemagoing.
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Two popular 2023 films did much to demonstrate cinema’s capacity to connect audiences to the contradictions of our age and, curiously, offer a similar vision for how we might move beyond them. Despite its inimitable success, it may surprise some that the first of these films was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, with the second being Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ incipient cult classic, Poor Things. While Lanthimos’ film is decidedly adult, Gerwig’s is necessarily more general: it was only possible to produce by working with MATTEL corporation, the multibillion-dollar toy manufacturer that owns the Barbie property.
Though the filmmakers were working at opposite ends of their industry, both focused on whether one can create their own authentic identity today. To examine this, each filmmaker constructs a fantastical representation of our world, distinguished by oppressive systems that impose roles on all. Inherent to this consideration is what kind of identity, if any, could constitute a countervailing force to the singularity of contemporary society. Both filmmakers agree that an answer will ineluctably concern the condition and consciousness of women.
But what is the essence of the present? Philosophy answers, “All that is solid melts into air”: that which would otherwise be Real—from politics to culture and our identities—is abstracted into a flattened regime of competing and fleeting images. Today, this regime manifests in uniformly featureless screens. Virtually everything we experience plays out on these tableaux, from smartphones to television. The driving force has been the decades-long, unchallenged rule of neoliberal capitalism, during which the technology industry’s profitability skyrocketed.
Neoliberalism is itself a procumbent tableau in which we are presented with a seemingly horizontal, borderless world market. The unified market is divided into dozens of subsectors, each composed of countless corporations. Each corporation proliferates endless consumer products and associated ideologies. This hyper-digitised exchange of commodities is the location of personal identity construction today, which occurs on the level of the individual. In short, contemporary life is where the Real becomes imagistic, and said images substitute for what they ostensibly represent.
In these conditions, cinema assumes a unique cultural position. The philosopher Alain Badiou argues that today, cinema (and its lesser designations, from television shows to TikTok) is the only artistic activity that is truly mass. Everyone can access cinema via their phones, televisions and local movie theatres. Pre-fashioned in the form of a screen and radically reproducible via mechanical means—accelerated by internet-connective technologies—cinema was best positioned among the arts to capture primacy in modern capitalist society.
It is the only artistic activity experienced by millions of people and that which, by its unique structural qualities, straddles the dissension between pure creativity and what is, in fact, vulgar or material. The cinema thus creates an artistic space for thinking, where the masses may examine the conflicts of their world. As such, cinema may, just as philosophy does, propose an orientation toward life. For Badiou, this democratic dialectic represented by the cinema is “probably the most important symptom of our history [...] the place where all the contradictions of the world are really assumed”.
Georg Lukács wrote of cinema that “the child that is alive in every person is liberated here and becomes lord over the psyche of the viewer”. What Greta Gerwig achieves with Barbie is enlivening the audience’s inner child while unsparingly examining their general condition today: unable to imagine the emancipated existence that was once a youthful dream. This is an under-discussed element of Barbie, considering its very structure is a dual one. The luxuriant ‘Dreamhouses’ of Barbieland represent the fantasy of childlike imagination, while the ‘Real World’, our one, remains replete with oppression and harm. Barbieland is a synchronic, sexismless utopia where women can be anything they choose to imagine, from President Barbie to Justice on an all-female Supreme Court. In Barbieland, the Court presumably does not exercise neolithic restrictions on women’s reproductive rights as the actual body does.
Conspicuously, these aspirant identities map perfectly to the models of Barbie dolls sold by MATTEL and the pernicious, voluntarist ideology employed to sell them (Barbie’s official motto is “You Can Be Anything You Want”). The absurdity of this proposition is not lost on Gerwig: Barbie’s opening jokes centre on the tension between the ‘American Dream’ and the fact that every girl who plays with a Nobel Prize-winning Barbie is destined to have said dream extinguished. In this sense, the film’s Barbieland represents the Real of our market economy, where we are told we derive our ‘freedom of choice’ in matters of consumption, identity, and vocation.
When introducing the ‘rules’ of Barbieland, Gerwig instructs us to “use [our] imagination”, something that the market—just as fictitious—need not command, given it enjoys unconditional acceptance. This infantile republic in which Barbies perpetually “have the best day ever”, and there is nothing but triumph and play, is a kind of imaginary compensation for the sexist oppression of modern life. Barbieland is, therefore, the illusion of ‘democratic liberty’ offered by the concrete power of capitalism, where corporations like MATTEL provide profligate image-identities, in place of control over our selves and the social order.
Gerwig contrasts Barbieland to the life of a working-class mother, Gloria (America Ferrara), employed by MATTEL under an all-male board of morons. While Gloria played with Barbie dolls, imagining a free and prosperous future, she now finds herself in a midlife crisis. Saddled with self-loathing and adrift from her teenage daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), Gloria begins illustrating more realistic Barbie models at her desk: Crippling Shame Barbie, Full-Body Cellulite Barbie, and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie. The latter, we learn, sets the plot in motion, which follows Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), who belongs to Gloria.
This depressive drawing causes Barbie to fear her mortality, puncturing her previously plastic existence. We find that a reciprocal connection exists between Barbieland and the Real World—the feelings and actions of people who play with Barbies influence the condition of those dolls. This cross-wiring exemplifies Deleuze’s notion of the interchangeability of the Real and the Imaginary: Barbieland and the Real World are two facets of the same trajectory, constantly intertwining and influencing each other.
It is in the form of Gloria’s repression that the Symbolic order of reality—where Barbie functions as an unattainable sexist ideology—is introduced to Barbieland. In exposing Barbieland to Gloria’s pain, reality operates as a corrupting force. The Symbolic of sexism, of which Barbie herself is a part, begins colonising the Imaginary capitalist paradise. Barbie enters the Real World to invert its influence on Barbieland and restore her own ‘factory settings’, hoping to alleviate her newfound mental and physical imperfections (her feet are no longer moulded in the shape of high heels, and cellulite has appeared on her thigh).
Barbie is shepherded by Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who knows of the two-way world bridge because she was played with “too hard”: she was defiled by the young girl who owned her. This was an act of creative destruction against corrosive feminine beauty ideals, which Barbie is confronted to learn she represents. The outburst reflects a fact of which the audience is aware—any girl who plays with Barbies soon discovers she is victimised by the sexist standards her doll propagates. It also suggests that play has a diachronic nature, where children shift their toys from synchronic Symbols into actively evolving concepts.
During the crossing, Barbie finds she is being followed by her incessantly needy Ken (Ryan Gosling), who refuses to leave her alone. After conceding that Ken may tag along, the pair find themselves on Venice Beach, where Barbie is immediately catcalled, objectified and even sexually assaulted (something she reflexively defends herself from). Guided by phantasmagorical visions, Barbie approaches Gloria’s daughter at school, mistakenly assuming her ‘owner’ must be a child. Like everyone in Barbieland, Barbie believed that MATTEL’s fantasy world had inspired humans to purge sexism from reality. She encounters the truth in the form of an incisive barrage from Sasha. Because she is a political intellectual and Gen Z woman, Sasha knows, as we do, that Barbie is an enemy of feminism—an idol of fetishistic, pornographic capitalism with a “fascist” aspect.
In informing Barbie of reality, Sasha collapses her Barbieland false consciousness and initiates an identity crisis. Weeping, Barbie is apprehended by MATTEL agents alerted to the rift between worlds, a controversy they wish to avoid to maintain profitability. After being transported to MATTEL headquarters, the CEO (Will Ferrell) offers Barbie a Faustian bargain: get “back in the box”, and she will be returned to Barbieland. The deal has seductive appeal because it will be easier for Barbie to stick her head back in the Barbieland sand and never again have to deal with sexism or her role in it.
Unbeknownst to her, during this time, Ken discovers real-world patriarchy—contrary to Barbie’s treatment, Ken is readily respected and sees masculinity, not femininity, reigning supreme. Just as the plastic binds are secured around her wrists, Barbie instinctively rejects the box and stages an escape aided by Gloria, who recognises her as her doll. Finding that he lacks the qualifications to thrive in the Real World, Ken has a better idea: he returns to Barbieland, importing patriarchy with him and turning their world on its head.
When Barbie, Gloria and Sasha arrive in Barbieland, the Dreamhouses have been converted into ‘Mojo Dojo Casa Houses’ and the Barbies into servile domestic aids, whose only apparent role is handing Kens “brewski beers”. Just as the feminism of Barbieland was a fantasy, so is its just-established patriarchy: unmediated by the politics of feminism or the need to maintain the appearance of equality, Barbieland now functions like a madcap reality. Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach mine this absurdity for much of Barbie’s raucous comedy.
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once wrote that “comedy embraces, gathers and takes enjoyment from the relationship with an effect… namely the appearance of this signified called the phallus”. Initially, Barbieland had signified one such ‘phallus’ of the present: the false liberatory proposition of feminism-infused market capitalism. Now it has become the farcical semblant of a more readily appreciable phallus: the Real, raw power of capitalism’s patriarchal structure. Ken goes from dressing in cutesy outfits to Sylvester Stallone-inspired fur coats draped over Gosling’s ripped torso. By making naked a particular, only slightly exaggerated conception of masculine supremacy, Gerwig exposes it to our derision and ridicule.
Confronted with ruin, Barbie is first rendered passive—she collapses into a heap, awaiting an external rescue. It is only when Gloria makes a speech to a small group of hangers-on that Barbie realises the possibility of a collective struggle to overturn patriarchal capitalism. The fundamental tenets of feminism are shown to be a necessary ideological basis upon which the women of Barbieland can endeavour toward equality. In the film, this takes the shape of political consciousness-raising and subversion of sexist dynamics.
Plotting that “Kenland contains the seeds of its own destruction”, the Barbies exploit male anxiety to break the unity of the Kens, who rapidly descend into a civil war of jealousy. Gerwig emphasises that Ken “only has a good day if Barbie looks at him”, and his job is “just beach”—his simulation of patriarchal masculinity aims to obscure his lack of skills and self-esteem. He defines himself only in relation to Barbie, lacking an identity of his own. After the upheaval, Barbie imparts her revelation on Ken: male supremacy is, like Stereotypical Barbie, just another synthetic ideology-identity manufactured by capitalism. “Maybe all the things you thought made you you, aren’t really you”, she counsels. Ken’s impotent patriarchy is unable to “dissimulate its ferocity or its emptiness forever”, and he has effectively been deradicalised, accepting that “Ken is me”.
For her part, Barbie learns that there cannot be a non-fetishistic ‘Barbieland’: caught between two worlds, one illusory and obscene and the other oppressive but potentially transformable, she consummates her journey by becoming a real woman. Barbie wrests control over her identity from her Creator, replacing the fantasy she once represented with a self-authored and embodied identity. “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I wanna do the imagining, I don’t wanna be the idea” she informs her inventor, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman). Gerwig deftly tempers this ending, using the film’s final joke to remind us that while the old ideal Barbie represented is no longer beautiful, the new truth of her actualised self is not yet generalised in our world.
With Barbie, Gerwig pounced on an opportunity to reconfigure corporate intellectual property, which author M.G. Lord argues is “the most potent icon of American popular culture”. For MATTEL, the film was an opportunity to reintegrate Barbie into popular consciousness and turn a profit. Despite the investment in the production and associated marketing campaign, MATTEL surely failed to anticipate just how much profit Barbie would earn as a commodity in its own right (the global box office now exceeds $1.4 billion).
Gerwig’s brilliance is twofold. First, she epitomised Deleuze’s assertion that “cinema is always as perfect as it can be, taking into account the images and signs which it invents and which it has at its disposal at a given moment”—using today’s raw materials of consumer-capitalist IP, which increasingly dominate studio filmmaking.
It is a mistake to assume Barbie grossed the 14th highest amount in history simply because it was heavily marketed—if true, bigger and less daring films tried and failed. No, millions of people saw Barbie because of its social consumptive aspect. They heard from friends, family or the media that it was worth seeing, and so they, in turn, bought tickets with friends and family. They did so precisely to participate in this mass cultural event. A glance at similarly grossing films reveals Barbie is the only film ever to prompt so much political discussion from masses worldwide.
This is not to say Barbie alone shifts people’s consciousness around sexism or proposes a foolproof blueprint for overcoming the hollowness of capital-derived identities. But on some level, it raises the possibility of personal and creative freedom—freedoms that have a necessarily political dimension. As Jacques Ranciere argues:
Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination it presupposes disrupts the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations. What it produces is not rhetorical persuasion about what must be done. [...] It is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective enunciation.
The second essential facet of Gerwig’s achievement lies in her ability to generate the kind of philosophical thinking that spurred Barbie as a social phenomenon. Gerwig not only sparked debate about what constitutes feminism today—she utilised the Barbie property to address the most salient question about modern life. Barbie’s journey in the film evokes the struggle of young people today, especially girls and women, to break free from ‘Barbie’—and capitalist ideology more generally.
Gerwig understood Giorgio Agamben’s argument that “true historical continuity cannot pretend to discard the signifiers of discontinuity by confining them to” a fantasy, like Barbieland. Barbie’s decision to turn her back on Barbieland converts her from sexist stereotype to symbol of critique and refusal: Gerwig’s doll has gone from a regressive ideal to a living person, transmitting herself to the future. Barbie’s trajectory of Becoming is the realisation of Agamben’s suggestion that “once the ritual transformation … has taken place in the body of the new individual, what was the signifier of absolute synchrony, now freed, becomes invested by the diachrony which has lost its signifier (the embryo of the new individual), and is turned around into the signifier of absolute diachrony”.
By electing to suffer the indignity imposed on women that the film’s audience is much too familiar with, Barbie affirms that this struggle is one that we must throw ourselves into. The objection that Barbie is but a cynical marketing ploy to ingratiate the doll to a new generation—only with a plastic feminist veneer—is easy to sympathise with on its face. However, Gerwig saw this as an opportunity to enunciate an anti-systemic challenge from within and extend a form of thinking to her audience that goes against and beyond MATTEL’s negation of authentic women’s liberation and artistry.
In doing so, Gerwig crafts the apotheosis of Badiou’s argument that:
We have very splendid films which are really sinister in form [...] It’s not an obstacle to the greatness of a film to be in this form, to be in a relationship with something very vulgar in some sense, and it’s a possibility to produce an internal critique of all that, not to separate the critique, but to create the critique inside what is criticised.
If Gerwig’s Barbie is a massified cinematic representation of the present fissure, then Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, an adaptation of the titular novel by Alasdair Gray, is its indie cousin. Free from the constraints of making a child-friendly film to safeguard brand respectability, Lanthimos’ protagonist, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), clashes more forcefully with patriarchal capitalism. Like Barbie, Bella is something of a feminine doll, an invention that wasn’t ‘born’ the way that you or I were. Like Barbie, Bella has a tender but stifling relationship with her Creator, and she struggles to transcend the limitations of her design. And like Barbie, Bella’s journey necessitates the development of a self-actualised identity.
The crucial difference is that Bella Baxter develops sexuality, and sex plays an integral role in her self-discovery. Barbie’s opening reimagining of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey subtly references this lack of sexuality. Here, Barbie appears as a phallic Monolith to the little girls of “prehistory”. The girls erupt into libidinal destruction of their now passé baby dolls because they view scantily-clad Barbie as freeing them from the traditional role of motherhood. Suppose Agamben’s formulation of the toy as “a materialisation of the historicity contained in objects” is correct. In that case, these girls are unaware that the sexualised capitalism Barbie represents will also come to oppress them.
Bella Baxter’s relationship to sex is unique by virtue of her creation: her ‘father’, Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), has implanted the consciousness of an infant into the still-warm body of her deceased, pregnant mother. Bella awakens as a newborn inside an adult woman’s body. As such, Bella is different from Barbie, given that she begins as a perfect subject of patriarchal capitalism rather than its unmolested product. While Bella is blissfully unaware of gender division and the like, the men who encounter her in infancy relate to her as they would any adult woman.
Bella is, therefore, subjected to the Symbolic order, notably the chauvinistic sexual desires of men, while entirely undeveloped. But Bella’s embodiment as an adult woman, absent the decades of social conditioning, is not straightforwardly a danger to her. Bella’s obliviousness to the manner that feminine and masculine sexuality are constructed in “polite society” empowers her to inscribe upon herself—a sort of tabula rasa—her own sexuality and, therefore, identity (an opportunity not afforded to the girls exposed to Barbie).
Bella’s unashamed sexual desire, inextinguishable intellectual inquiry and earnest political morality synthesise into a protective aura, repelling the muck of the film’s age. Set in a steampunk Victorian era, said muck consists of a great many horrors: exploitative ‘medical’ experimentation, women as chattel property governed by contracts and confined by leery men and diabolical deprivation. Encountering these obstacles upon breaking out from her initial captivity, Bella remains unbowed, owing to her preternatural will to defy the internalisation of social maladies.
The first time Bella is allowed into the outside world, albeit under stringent supervision by Godwin and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), she kills a frog they present to her. This is a sign of things to come: Bella will always assert control over her environment in a form of play. This playfulness, a kind of childlike omnipotence, is the wellspring of Bella’s “striving towards being seen, which is at the basis of creative looking” and, therefore, power. When Bella finally ventures into the world without the constraints of male stewardship, Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan ensure we see it through her eyes.
As Bella steps into the vibrance of the world, the film’s initial Escherian black and white presentation bursts into artificial hypercolor. Notably, on this independent perambulation through Lisbon, Bella is enchanted by music played by a woman perched on her balcony. Here, Lanthimos skillfully employs cinema’s temporal dimension, reminding us of the wonderment we experience in our own lives. Simultaneously, the film’s progression from monochrome to colour reflects both cinema’s own progressive complexification (including its movement from mute to sound) and Bella’s accumulation of experience.
As she traverses the breadth of “sugar and violence”, Bella’s perspective develops, and she begins to shape her identity. This precarious yet instructive state of constant traversal—Bella’s countless transgressive abnegations of sexism—characterises most of the runtime. In this manner, Poor Things takes the shape of the character of Bella herself, reflecting cinema’s constitution of Deleuze’s notion that “in its own way, art says what children say. It is made up of trajectories and becomings”.
The extremity of Bella’s metamorphosis throughout the film demands a performance of tremendous acuity and fluidity from Stone. Bella goes from the elemental and animatronic joie de vivre of childhood to the conviction and poise of an activist-intellectual, all within an adult body. By encouraging our identification with Bella’s vigorous trajectories and becomings, Poor Things “renders their mutual presence perceptible” within the audience.
The film’s Australian writer Tony McNamara explains Bella’s magnetism as her personification of “what none of us get to be, we carry shame and society shapes us, and here’s a person who doesn’t have even those two things. [...] And I think there’s part of you that kind of goes, I wish we were that!” Parallel to Barbie, Lanthimos suggests that through rejecting bourgeois morality and its repressive standards, we can form our authentic selves.
After Bella herself has become destitute, compelling her to work in a brothel, the smarmy but wise Madam Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) urges that we must experience the bad with the good in the world. Bella’s empathy has left her disposed to be overwhelmed by the world’s brutality, but Madam Swiney proclaims this is “fantastic”, the “dark period” before “light and wisdom come to [Bella]”. Her advice that Bella “forge through it” clarifies that it is only by suffering abasement that we become “people of substance”, Real people whose oppression prepares us to challenge it.
Pointedly, immediately after receiving this guidance, Bella’s search for freedom leads her to become a socialist militant upon the invitation of her Black workmate, Toinette, with whom she also forms an intimate relationship. In channelling her insatiable desire for knowledge and self-improvement into the struggle to “change the world pour le meilleur”, Bella collectivises her rupture from the prevailing social order.
Having witnessed and personally experienced the degradation of humanity endemic to capitalist society, socialism becomes Bella’s moral compass. Their independence from a corporation like MATTEL frees Lanthimos and McNamara to definitively propose this orientation to their adult audience. What in Barbie is innuendo is in Poor Things made explicit.
At the film’s culmination, Bella transfigurates the scientific legacy bestowed upon her by her Creator, Godwin Baxter (whom she calls ‘God’). Bella begins the film tethered to a lineage marked by socially transmitted injury, hinted via Godwin’s recountings of traumatic experiences at the hands of his father. Just as Barbie confronts her Creator and informs her that she can no longer embody the false and harmful ideal of Stereotypical Barbie, Bella materialises her self-actualised identity. Also, like Barbie, Bella makes the conscious decision not to perpetuate the cycle of harm—in this case, scientific experimentation for brutal purposes—which left Godwin and herself permanently scarred.
Bella reinterprets her upbringing within the scientific milieu, something strictly inseparable from her very being, and in the process, emerges as a protégé to Godwin whilst simultaneously surpassing him. She does so by replicating the procedure Godwin used to create her in order to manumit herself from her mother’s tyrannical husband, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott). While in one sense, Bella’s fusion of Alfie’s body with the mind of a lamb is destructive, recalling her squashing of the frog, it is also a progression from wanton termination to adroit creation. In converting the science once used to torment into a radical tool to “improve” people and the world around her, Bella attests that we, too, have the potential to overturn the conditions we are born into.
By negating the mires of sexist oppression with their acts of self-authoring, Barbie and Bella’s development of autonomy is the signification of a transcendent Real, one which necessarily cannot be Symbolised. In this fashion, Gerwig’s resourcefulness in turning the noxious Barbie property on itself is also Bella Baxter’s highest accomplishment—and the attitude that Lanthimos aims to inculcate in his audience.
In the convergence of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, cinema emerges not merely as a spectacle but as a potent medium for articulating a mass philosophy—a democratic dialogue that resonates with millions. Through the parabolic realms of Barbieland and that of Bella Baxter, cinema becomes a crucible, where the contradictions and struggles of our time are not only depicted but actively engaged with. Gerwig and Lanthimos assert the criticality of a new feminist political subjectivity when challenging capitalism today. Both suggest that rather than outright rejection of our current conditions, we are wise to emulate the approach of their characters by seeking to reconfigure the present into an emancipatory aesthetic and political project.
In their cinematic journeys from objects to fully embodied political agents, Barbie and Bella Baxter become symbols of transformative potential, urging us to harness imagination and critique to challenge oppressive structures. In this way, the stories of Barbie and Bella Baxter superate the confines of the screen, inviting us to participate in the collective project of reshaping our world of repression and domination into a liberated one. As Badiou put it: “After the philosophy of cinema must come — is already coming — philosophy as cinema, which consequently has a chance of being a philosophy of the masses”.