67: Barbie, Patriarchy, and the Culture Wars with Professor Caroline Bainbridge

Edgy Ideas

Barbie, patriarchy, and the culture wars with Professor Caroline Bainbridge
This podcast came about in relation to Caroline and Simon’s personal reactions to the Barbie movie and in recognition that this movie is a 'cultural event' that demands some thought.
As Caroline says, 'this movie needs psychoanalysis': Freudians would say it's all about death, desire, and sexual difference. For anyone interested in object relations, themes of play, transitional spaces, and phenomena, aggression and pain make up the substance of the plot. For Caroline, a key part of the movie's pleasure is linked to its radical owning of the patriarchy as a fact, a given of contemporary society. It's the first time she can recall having seen this depicted on film in a mainstream movie in such a bold, incontrovertible way. This, in itself, makes the movie radical, she argues, despite its unevenness in parts. Caroline talks inspiringly about how her repeat viewings of the film revealed the extent of its play with ideas, and she shares her deep and thoughtful views on why this movie is important.
Simon watched the movie once and found himself both very impressed and also very troubled: while he admires the outing of the patriarchy that Caroline mentions, this doesn't outweigh his concern about the portrayal of men as degrading, and he found the depiction of seemingly binary differences between men and women troubling. For Simon, this potentially feeds into the right-wing populist agenda that, in turn, feeds off the gender and culture wars.
Caroline sees it a little differently, suggesting there are some subtle nuances built by director Greta Gerwig, especially in her play with the distinctive absence of genitalia in Barbie and Ken dolls. She suggests that the film centers this idea, the better to open up space to explore what non-binary, trans, and more fluid ideas of gender might be like. Similarly, Caroline notes that critics sometimes describe Barbieland as a matriarchy, but Gerwig actually does something novel here. There are no mothers in Barbieland, and no children either - in fact, the film goes to great lengths to show how maternal versions of the doll such as Midge have been discontinued, and narrator, Helen Mirren, plays with the idea of smashing associations between doll play and being a mother from the very beginning. The implication is that Barbieland is not so much a matriarchy as a woman-to-woman sociality, and this has important implications for how Gloria (America Ferrera) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) are able to find one another afresh and to re-navigate their complex relationship.
Simon's Substack blog on the film which led to this podcast can be read here.
Bio
Caro Bainbridge is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis and Culture and a former editor of Free Associations and of the film section at the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She co-edits a book series on psychoanalysis and popular culture for Routledge. She's a Fellow of the RSA, a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, Research Associate at the Freud Museum, London, and a member of ISPSO and Opus. Caro has recently co-founded the MiNDings consultancy (www.mindings.org), where she works in the organizational processes and leadership space. She is also a member of the Eco Leadership Institute, and she practices as an executive and personal coach. Outside work, she makes the most of living close to Another Place, an art installation on a beach that evokes edges and possibilities in equal measure.