[Is Barbie out to change the world or just her own life? ]
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BARBIE: MARXISM FOR GEN Z  
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Walden Bello
August 21, 2023
Foreign Policy in Focus [[link removed]]

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_ Is Barbie out to change the world or just her own life? _

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I finally got what director Greta Gerwig was up to in her
movie _Barbie _that features Margot Robbie as the adult doll Barbie.
She’s out to give a lesson in Marxism, the candy-coated kind that
she thinks is palatable to Gen Z. At one level, _Barbie_ is a film
targeted at the coming-of-age demographic, works out their
“existential crises,” and resolves this with a stereotypical
Hollywood ending. But there’s another, deeper level, and this is
aimed at Gen Z’s subconscious. For the most part, the two levels
proceed in a congenial, parallel fashion, until the end—but let’s
leave that for later.

To fully appreciate what Gerwig is trying to do, you have to use a
companion text, Marx’s _Theses on Feuerbach_, the seminal text
where Marx critiqued the thought of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach
who had weaned him away from G.W. Hegel’s idealism, which saw
empirical reality as a pale reflection of the “Spirit,” a
philosophical tradition that goes way, way back to Plato.

Let’s start with Thesis Four. Marx wrote:

_Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of
the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one.
His work consists in resolving the religious world into tis secular
basis. But that secular basis detaches itself from itself and
establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be
explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular
basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in
contradiction and revolutionized in practice._

Barbieland is the religious world that Marx talks about, the
“independent realm in the clouds” where all the contradictions
that exist in reality magically vanish. It is the human subject’s
projection of the real world that leaves the conflicts,
contradictions, and crises of the latter behind.

Let’s move on to Thesis Eight, where Marx asserts, “All social
life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to
mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the
comprehension of this practice._”_

Even though it’s an ideal world, Barbieland is not seamlessly
constructed. There’s a crack in Barbie’s world—she wakes up and
finds out she has cellulite and flat feet—and she is forced to come
down to earth to be “fixed” and discovers that the world is full
of contradictions and conflicts that the elite, the black-suited
directors of Mattel, don’t want people to grapple with and solve
collectively by focusing their attention instead on the ideal
relationships of Barbieland. Barbie’s unexpected appearance
threatens the long-standing equilibrium between the ideal and the
real.

In Thesis Eleven, Marx’s most quoted text, he says, “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The
point is to change it.”

Barbie’s trip to the real world enlightens her, and she returns to
the ideal world in order to fix the world of ideas to reflect the real
world. She stages in Barbieland the equivalent of the Protestant
Reformation. She wins, but she’s no longer interested in just being
Martin Luther, in simply winning the theological battle. She decides
to return to the real world to change it. She wants to be Martin
Luther King.

This is where the two levels of the movie come into conflict. The
movie ends with Barbie returning to earth to see a gynecologist. Huh?
There’s something wrong here. But it’s not Barbie. It’s Greta.
This is, after all, still Hollywood, and Gerwig can’t resist the
temptation of a Hollywood ending that will rake in all those
dollars—and beat _Oppenheimer_ at the box office as well. But by
this time Gen Z doesn’t need Gerwig to follow Barbie to the logical
conclusion of her political development. They actually know she will
use the visit to the ob-gyn as a decoy, leave by a side-door, walk
over to the HQ of Mattel, the capitalist behemoth that created Barbie
and her ideal world, her jaw clenched to convey her determination to
carry out her mission as she disappears in a slow fade-out.

_Walden Bello [[link removed]]. FPIF
commentator Walden Bello, an adjunct professor at the State University
of New York, occasionally engages in pop sociology._

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* Barbie
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* Marxism
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