I last did a movie review in May 2020 and at that time confessed that I rarely watched movies and usually missed all the deeper meanings trapped in the plots. So, caveat emptor here, especially on the movie part.
Perhaps I am the last person in America to see it, but I watched Barbie. And as it unfolded, I felt as if I was watching 40 years of my life as a divorce lawyer. The movie is, of course, a parody. But it isn’t. As a child growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Barbie and Ken really were paradigms of what we were encouraged to be. Ironically, Barbie was introduced in America in 1959 three years after William Whyte published his groundbreaking book The Organization Man. That book suggested that the zeitgeist of “conformity” prevalent in the 1950s was strangling American ingenuity and progress.
The movie mocks that age of conformity in which no one could be too thin, too stylishly dressed or too cheerful. But it also unveils much of what I heard in initial interviews with both men and women who came to me to discuss their failing marriages. Even today, a half century after the Equal Rights Amendment passed in Congress we live in a world where highly talented women will sit across the table and ask me whether it’s ok to separate. And equally talented men will tell me that they are spying on their spouses or engaged in other behavior that radiates a perverse need to “control” their families. The movie unwraps these still surviving cultural norms in a way that is both amusing and enlightening. Its central theme is that it’s ok not to be Barbie and Ken. In fact, it is often destructive and demeaning to the person and their relationships. The presence of children in the film is also telling. Often marriages that start off well and with mutual respect will start to disintegrate when the kids come along because there is now a perceived need to become perfect parents, just as Barbie and Ken would be.
How did we get here? For this I offer David Stebenne’s 2020 book about American life and culture 1929-1968 titled Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America. Stebenne’s history reminds us that in 1929 the middle class was just beginning to form as businesses grew large enough to require not just owners and workers but people who managed the workers, ordered the material they manufactured and kept the books. This was a day when the average American died before age 60, often of infection or tuberculosis and lived in a world where there was no social safety net. For all but the rich, life’s focus was on survival and not what Ford’s latest Mustang would look like or whether Botox was a force for good or evil. The national programs created by the Roosevelt administration coupled with the demands of World War II created a culture of conformity and uniformity. Those who did not conform to the new national programs created for banking, mortgages, student college subsidies and product rationing did not “get” mortgages, student loans and subsidies or tires and meat. Even after the depression and the war ended, the demand for products made in the U.S. caused by the war’s destruction of European and Asian economies enforced conformity at all levels to achieve high levels of productivity. As the middle class grew this demand also brought about money that could be allocated for the extras in life like designer shoes, golf clubs and trips to Disney. If your neighbors in this new middle class driven America vacationed at Disney, were you a “lesser” parent if you didn’t do the same?
Stebenne’s book ends in 1968 probably because by that point the die of middle class life was now cast. You bought a car every 4 years, you sprayed yourself with “Chanel” or “Obsession.” Your kids went to college because that was how they got ahead. This was all captured by Billy Joel’s 1982 song “Allentown” with its iconic line: “Every child had a pretty good shot to get at least as far as his old man got.” Joel notes then that industrial America was in decline. The computer and electronics age has substituted for that decline but also signaled that perhaps humans aren’t as useful or productive as we like to think ourselves.
This has contributed to much of today’s anger and malaise. Job security, home ownership and the certain success of a college degree are now all in question and it’s disquieting. But if you look at the world from the perspective of 90% of Americans as they lived in 1928, our life is one imbued with unprecedented health, wealth and the time to enjoy both.
Meanwhile, we still pine for the good old days and old values. What Barbie does is to tear down the mirage that Barbie and Ken ever really existed and that theirs were lives of unbridled security and joy. The child character Sasha is well worth watching. At first she completely rejects Barbie but over time she begins to see that Barbie is an enticing concept but not “reality.”
People in their 20s and 30s today who are forming domestic relationships of any kind are often trapped in a world where their parents sought to emulate Barbie and Ken. The results are mixed because the ideal was illusory. These young folks come at life with the approach of 15 year old Ariana Greenblatt who plays Sasha. There is much to learn here about how relationships come heavily imbued with expectations. This movie challenges us to ask whether those great expectations have anything to do with real happiness.
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