I saw 'Barbie' with Susan Faludi, and she has a theory about it

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Susan Faludi suggested we show up to the "Barbie" movie in a pink Corvette, but unfortunately, the only car available was a pickup truck. So that was how one of the world's leading feminists and I showed up to her local mall: in a 2002 Black Toyota Tacoma, with tickets to Auditorium 2 for "Barbie."

I'd asked Faludi, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and author — whose 1991 book, "Backlash," became an instant classic — to see this summer's most joyful and lucrative blockbuster with me because I was hoping she might help me make sense of its morass of hot pink contradictions.

There are few toys quite so confounding as Barbie. Even her origin story: She was based on a sex doll for men, but somehow marketed to mothers for their daughters. Barbie has been a protest slogan ("I am not your Barbie"), a bimbo (remember "Math class is tough" Barbie?), an eating disorder accelerant. In one particularly clever protest against the doll, she had her voice box swapped with G.I. Joe's, so suddenly she said, "Vengeance is mine!" and he said, "The beach is the place for summer." But Barbie has also been a lawyer, a pilot, an astronaut and the president. She has never married, lives alone and does not have children.

The movie seemed as full of contradictions as the doll. It was promoted through a marketing campaign that had more licensing deals than Barbie has outfits: There were Barbie clothes and Barbie makeup and ice cream and vacation packages and a takeover of the Google home page, which is currently filling my screen with pink explosions every time I try to fact-check this essay. But it also had a director — Greta Gerwig — with indie street cred, and early reviews focused on the film's subversiveness. Gerwig, it seemed, had managed to make Barbie satisfyingly self-aware, likable and mockable; she called out the hypocrisy of the manufacturer — Mattel — while getting its blessing on the project. And then, somehow, she — and the company — marketed it all back to us.

"This sounds like a kick!" Faludi said, when I first suggested we might watch the movie together. She didn't want to be a feminist wet blanket on the whole thing, but she was prepared to deliver a sober report, should it be required. We settled into our seats. "You know, asking a feminist to comment on a Barbie movie is like asking the Wicked Witch of the West to critique Oz," she said with a laugh.

This seemed to make her an ideal viewing companion for a film that seemed the perfect distillation of these tensions: Could a movie currently fueling Barbiecore across America actually be a vehicle for a meaningful political message?

Of course, Faludi also understands the power of entertainment. In "Backlash," she traced not only how politics and the media had tried to undermine the gains of feminism but also how film and television did, too, through films like "Fatal Attraction" and "Misery," which turned women into man-eating she-devils or sad sacks fretting about their biological clocks.

I'll stop with her bona fides in a minute — but after "Backlash," she went on to publish "Stiffed," about the breakdown of traditional masculinity and the crisis of the American male. Two and a half decades later, echoes of that book are everywhere — from Richard Reeves to Andrew Tate — and they show up in Gerwig's Ken, who struggles to find an identity apart from Barbie. (As the slogan goes: "She's Barbie. He's just Ken.") Ken turns Barbieland into a sweaty man cave after the real world teaches him about the notion of the patriarchy, a term that was used at least eight times in the movie.

"I mean, you couldn't write the script without 30 years of women's studies," Faludi said as the lights came up, and we emerged from the theater into a swirl of Barbie pink. She was dressed in all black, though she insisted her velvet top was actually more of a deep purple, selected because of its proximity to pink.

"It seems to me that a big theme underlying the movie is shock and horror over what happened to us — what happened to women — from 2016 on, with the double whammy of Trump and then Dobbs. And in particular, I thought abortion was the subtext to a lot."

She thought "Barbie" the movie — with a series of choreographed dances, a ballad performed by Ryan Gosling and so much pink that there was a national paint shortage — was actually not just subversive but … about abortion?

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Faludi explained her position. "I mean, it begins with little girls playing with dolls learning the origin story of Barbie — and the rejection of the idea that women can just be mothers. It ends with her going to the gynecologist."

Indeed, Barbie begins with a homage to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," with little girls playing with baby dolls — which, as the narrator explains, were the only dolls available to girls back then. So when Barbie — an adult doll — comes along, it's an epiphany: There's more to life than motherhood! The girls smash the baby dolls.

It ends with Barbie in the real world, in pink Birkenstocks and a blazer, heading to what appears to be a job interview, except, we learn, it's actually the gynecologist. (Ostensibly, now that Barbie is a human, she has a vagina instead of her infamous nongenitals.)

In an early montage introducing viewers to Barbieland, lawyer Barbie speaks before the Supreme Court about the idea of personhood — "which immediately made me think of attempts to create the unborn as 'persons,' " Faludi said.

Later, the Kens attempt to change the Constitution, amid Barbie lamenting how hard they had worked to create Barbieland, and "You can't just undo it in a day." (To which Ken responds, "Literally — and figuratively — watch me.") Faludi's take? "I mean, that's what happened on Election Day of 2016."

We see the Kens band together in a kind of hunky beach army, trying to occupy Barbieland (when not performing choreographed ballads), with Ken adopting a mink fur cape that did not not resemble the one worn by the QAnon shaman during the Jan. 6 uprising.

And then there's Midge, the doll once marketed as Barbie's best friend, and the one pregnant doll in the Barbie universe, before she was discontinued. (You could remove Midge's belly and baby intact from her body and then magnetically reattach it. It was weird.) Midge and her bump are in the film, too, repeatedly — a ghost that the fictional Mattel executives, and everyone else, just wish would go away. She's there for laughs, but squint hard enough, Faludi suggested, and you could also see her as "the specter of Dobbs."

We are back at her house now, drinking Aperol and soda — "It's sort of pink, right?" she said — in honor of "Barbie," prepared by Faludi's husband, who has also cooked us dinner.

Faludi was aware that parsing "Barbie" for answers about the state of feminism is slightly absurd. Or maybe it's not. At the center of the movie is a story about a daughter and a mother, played by America Ferrera. It is Ferrera's long monologue about the endlessly contradictory expectations of being a woman that deprograms the Barbies, who've been brainwashed into servitude by the Kens. On the opening day of "Barbie," the news was filled with the story of another mother and daughter, whose Facebook messages about administering the abortion pill had been seized by the authorities, resulting in a jail sentence for the girl and an upcoming sentencing for the mother.

"Barbie" offered not only some escape from that reality but also genuine catharsis. "Perhaps what's going on," Faludi wrote me in an email a few days after the screening, "is that women are finding a way to explore their anger about recent history without feeling like they have to drown themselves in the bathtub (in real water)."

What is it that they say — disempower the patriarchy by laughing at it?

"Only Barbie could say, 'By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power!' and turn it into a laugh line," Faludi emailed.

Of course, she wasn't about to go out and buy her daughter a Barbie or anything. (She, like Barbie, doesn't have children.)