Marx in Barbieland
In Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie (2023)’, Barbie lives in Barbieland, which is not the ‘real world’.
Barbieland is a plastic utopia where every idea of a barbie ever conceived lives as a person. We have a physicist barbie, a physician barbie, a pilot barbie and so on. The protagonist is simply the stereotypical barbie. She is the first barbie ever made whom we shall refer to as Barbie. We also have a barbie in a wheelchair, a fat barbie and a pregnant barbie.
But here’s the kicker: in this utopia, we still have a president barbie and a lawyer barbie. This utopia of Barbieland still has courts, court cases and hierarchical governance.

Let’s think about it for a second. Barbieland is a cheerful place where every Barbie has her own home, has infinite supply of food, water and electricity. Some of them have jobs which they enjoy doing and others simply don’t need jobs. All barbies love and support each other except for the weird barbie, who scares them.
What are they even arguing about in the court? We never see a police barbie or a soldier barbie, in that case who is upholding the rulings of the court or the laws by the senate?
Political power after all flows through the barrel of a gun and there aren’t any guns here.

They all have their own homes, no property disputes. Commodities never expire or get over, hence no production and hence no business disputes. None of them are married, hence no family disputes. There is no money in this world, hence no wage disputes. It is essentially a classless society. Nobody has any reason to go to court over another person. Barbies do not need to steal and there are no murderer barbies.

Despite this, there are courts, lawyers and presidents. The writers must believe that state appartuses are a vital and eternal part of human society. The state is as necessary to human society as are nurses and cleaners.
But is that true? Why do we have these people whose job is to quell conflicts and maintain order?
That is because there exist contradictions in human society. People have opposing interests. More precisely, a nation in today’s world is broadly comprised of two classes who are at odds. Two people sitting across an interview table have opposing interests. One class enjoys higher unemployment since that means cheaper labour while the other is mortified at the thought of losing their livelihood.
The state exists to contain the conflict, to keep it in check. It exists to suppress the lower class from revolting or stealing.
When you think of a classless society, that tension is gone. That inherent contradiction in the society is gone. Then we should not need a state, a government, courts, the police and the miltary.
That’s communism. A classless, moneyless and stateless society.

If Barbieland has state machinery, it should also have a suppressed class.
Can it be the kens? I did not mention the kens.
The kens are counter-parts to each barbie. They are always at the beach and don’t have special jobs. They are essentially ‘himbos’. The barbies are so busy in their parties that they are not even aware of whether kens have a place to sleep.
However, the kens do have voting rights, which they do not apparently exercise. In the opening scene where we see a lawyer barbie make an outstanding speech at the court, we see one ken amongst dozens of barbies. The barbies’ applause at the lawyer’s speech and in general a unity can signify a class unity over the lower ken class.

When Ken travels to the real world and finds that the downtrodden people like kens in Barbieland can actually run the world and do whatever they please; he takes the masculine manifesto with him to Barbieland, unites the other kens in overthrowing the feminine rule and establishing a Kendom where Barbieland once stood.

When Barbie returns to now Kenland, she discovers that the lower ken class has seized the previous owners’ private property such as their dream houses in an apparent revolution and made servants out of the barbies.
Then conspiring with two humans, Barbie and the weird barbie make a plan for a coup d’etat. They use two tactics of the ruling classes to achieve this: sowing hatred and division, and voter suppression. They are able to form a majority at the senate and everything magically goes back to normal.
Later we see a ken asking whether he can be made a part of the new government, the barbie president tells him that he can have a small administrative role in a corner somewhere.

If you reverse the genders for a bit, it makes a little sense. In a final scene, Ken struggles to know who he is if not attached to Barbie. He has always seen himself through her gaze and does not know how to exist as an independent person. He decides to finally be free from that shackle and find himself along with all the other kens. Barbie on the other hand decides to be a mother.
It makes sense because ‘Man’ has been running the world, and ‘woman’ is a secondary gender who is written by men. Women must find themselves not as wo-men but as independent entities, and more men should be able to take up fatherhood as an occupation.
But this interpretation may be quite a reach.

What prompted me to write this essay was that the filmmakers could not imagine a utopia without courts and presidents. Who wants to be ruled and governed in their fantasy?
You might say that since the president barbie was made by Mattel in the real world, she should also exist in Barbieland and that is why the filmmakers put her there. However, Mattel also gives jobs to kens and they don’t really exist in the movie, so the status quo enforcing barbie was entirely optional for Gerwig.

The end