I still understand why the line bothered the objectors. Trans people have been reading ourselves into narratives that don’t directly involve us as long as there have been stories, and this has happened with “Barbie,” too. Some nonbinary viewers have found common cause with Allan, a good-hearted doll who exists outside the Barbie vs. Ken duality. He eventually rejects the premise of the patriarchy and helps the Barbies defeat it.
Yet when the movie reaches its climax and the Barbies have retaken their world from the Kens, they return to the old divide, resubjugating the Kens and installing themselves as the good and just power.
At times, “Barbie” seems interested in the idea that this whole binary has been constructed for them by others. Thus that system is deeply broken and unfair to both Barbies and Kens. The characters know that they have creators at Mattel, that their world and its divide has literally been made by someone else and is fundamentally false. Instead of pushing against that, though, they prove largely willing to exist within it.
Fighting the creators might prove too difficult, and at any rate, it wouldn’t allow Mattel, which produced the movie, to sell more toys. Trans people understand too well that one way society pretends to accept us is by marketing to us, but “Barbie” doesn’t even bother to do that.
And yet part of me did find a lovely mirror of the trans feminine experience in the last 15 minutes. The war for Barbie Land over, Barbie realizes that life there is restrictive and false and that she wants to live in our world, with all its chaos and complications. She chooses to become real with the assistance of Ruth Handler, the woman who created Barbie in the first place. (Handler is played by Rhea Perlman from “Cheers,” which is a cosmology I can get behind.)
The moment reminded me, deeply, of when I realized how artificial my time trying to live “as a man” had been. When I came out, a lifetime of emotions and experiences I had been holding at bay flooded me, and I realized what it meant to be “real,” or, to put it another way, to be human. Humanness is inherently messy, and as the film embraces that messiness, it finds space outside its dualities, space where trans people can thrive.
