Kenergy: a Tale of Redemption
In his review of Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster hit Barbie, Stuart Heritage of the Guardian recognised Ryan Gosling as the true centerpiece of the movie, with his over-the-top portrayal of the perpetual Number 2 in his girlfriend’s pink kingdom. There are a lot of real-world equivalents, perhaps most fittingly Prince Philip who was never allowed to steal his wife’s thunder. The difference may be that Ken has no balls to speak of, while Philip was royally castrated. That’s why, under all the plastic feminism of the script, there’s a narrative about Ken’s journey to find a purpose and a role beyond glorifying Barbie. Or as Hellen Mirren put it in her background narration, he’s only got a great day if Barbie looks at him. The rest of his rivals and wingmen are also called Ken, which creates a very entertaining confusion.
There are hidden references and dolls like Allan, who is supposed to be Ken’s best friend yet has the vibe of every Barbie’s BFF that never gets laid. That’s more in the domain of Sugar Daddy Ken, a discontinued model that makes an appearance to remind us just how much effort Mattel puts into making sure Barbie mirrors the time and space she inhabits, even though in her version of it, there’s no rain, tears or anxiety and everyone is living their best life until a lightning bolt of real world depression shatters our girl’s rose-tinted glasses and the only one who can help her out of the pickle is Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie. She instructs her how to solve the issue, and it involves Birkenstocks that must be flying off the racks as we speak.
Ever since the film’s release there’s been something of a pink tsunami: fashion, food, make-up, interior design and any other field of life you can possibly think of. I’ve been watching movies for quite a while now but rarely have I seen a marketing campaign of this kind. Not least because it’s a heritage brand most people have an attitude about, so their work was practically cut out for them. Or as Margot Robbie poignantly announced, whether you love or hate Barbie, this movie is for you. After seeing it, I can confirm this. Primarily because so many of us, due to American cultural influence after World War 2, were aware of the doll in one way or the other.
It was a source of dreams and desires for little girls, and it communicated a vision of the world as a matriarchal utopia grounded in consumerism as its visual manifestation and narcissism as its modus operandi. It was an early, diluted introduction into a phenomenon from Erich Fromm’s 1976 book To Have or to Be? In other words, can we be something without having it? Language teaches us that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. But something tells me Fromm wasn’t referring to food. The consumerist labyrinth we’re collectively stuck in suggests you need the whole package to truly participate in this Dreamland: the candy-colored house, the boyfriend with plastic abs and a walk-in closet the size of Pentagon.
Gerwig gives a nod to the Jacques Demy’s classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with production design full of sunny pastels and costumes so impressive it deserves an Oscar nomination. Ken’s job is “beach”, but he might as well be a linguist, because his lines are a delightful wordplay almost throughout the whole movie, like turning the noun “beach” into a verb and patchworking his name into everything, like “kenergy”. Helena’s face might have had sunk a thousand ships, yet Ken’s has spawned a million memes by now. What makes this role stand out is how much Gosling seems to have enjoyed the process. The GQ editorial with Ken’s favourite accessories is so hilarious because he stays firmly in character without feeling scripted.
America Ferrera plays the woman with a special bond to Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie, who inadvertedly caused all this chaos through her own existential distress, which goes all meta when it collides with Mattel’s corporate mother ship and its greedy CEO played by Will Farrell who wakes up his fashionable villain once again, though not nearly so charismatic as Jacobim Mugatu, with a pink tie instead of a power poodle. Although Barbieland is designed like a bastion of feminism, some of the best scenes are in the real world, where Ken encounters patriarchy and all its perks as an antidote to his position of permanent tokenism at home. His thunderous battlecry “I’ll see you on the Malibu Beach” makes it sound as a place where you’d find Clint Eastwood with a gun and a cigarette dangling from his lips.
The problem with Barbie is that it’s too much fun to spoil it with ideology, as attempted by Gloria’s monologue about the demands and troubles of being a woman in front of an assembly of Barbies. However you try to turn it around, they are toys, and toys have a pretty basic task defined by the boundaries of their owner’s imagination. They’re meant for entertainment, unless they’re vodoo dolls. In that case parental supervision is advised. Overthinking this confection ruins its essence: no, it’s not about empowerment, but escaping into a world where the party never ends. And Ken is always a ten, as he points out. Margot Robbie’s observation about their lack of genitals turns something obvious into a brilliant punchline.
Her ability to dish out lines like these without breaking character is a sign of serious gift I doubted she had after forcing myself through Damien Chazelle’s neverending abomination called Babylon. If Brad Pitt decided to retire from acting, it’s a bad choice for the end of a brilliant career. Margot Robbie is on a steady rise and something tells me we’ll see them together on screen again, maybe even in a new story that Ken gets to tell. He’s proven he’s good at doing stuff and having the guts to wear those neon rollerblades in a public place as an adult deserves a standing ovation. Then again, there’s no such thing as aging and death where he and his army of Kens come from. It’s not Cherbourg, but to quote our hero, it’s kenough.
The media discourse keeps praising Barbie as a symbol of diversity and inclusion, which is mirrored in the cast where her friends cover a wide variety of skincolors and shapes, including obesity and pregnancy. If they want to be truly open to everyone, they should apply the same rule to Ken. Most of those we get to see are athletic or slender, even if his rivals like Simu Liu are Asian. What I’d like to see is someone more relatable: the average-looking guy, or god forbid, a Ken with a gut. It would be probably be discontinued before you say cut and that’s where you come across an another issue the movie failed to adress sufficiently. What’s missing is much more definitive in terms of its message than what’s actually there.
If we consider that, most of the time, Barbie truly does mirror prevalent social values, a lack of representation of motherhood is something we need to talk about. The global rise of conservative populism is a form of cultural counteroffensive that’s about putting the doll back in the box, to paraphrase Farrell. In Gerwig’s fantasy, there’s hardly any room for women outside the American identity radar. No pink hijabs here, though Muslim women aren’t exactly extraterrestrials, nuns and none of the Kens are men of the cloth, but it makes sense since there are no churches at the beach. There are no MAGA hats either but internet trolls already took care of that.
Gloria’s teenage daughter Sasha is character-wise as flat as a pancake with her rebellious sermon about unrealistic beauty standards. Tensions between the two make no sense because both have the exact same attitudes about femininity. If she were a true rebel, she’d be a housewife with kids and a drinking problem. I’m afraid this is the one box Mattel is still afraid of. It makes Ken all the more compelling. When you pull back the glittery curtain, this is a story of a man’s redemption with the anthemic Just Ken as his own Declaration of Independence. There’s not a damn thing you can do to stop the Kennaisance. I can already hear the hooves in the distance.
