by Jackie Kohl

Greta Gerwig presented Barbie to us in a moment where questions of gender are more unsettled than ever. Examples abound. Biological males are allowed to compete in women’s sports. Teenagers identify as non-binary or transgender at unprecedented rates. Famously a now-sitting supreme court justice refused to answer a seemingly simple question: what is a woman? If the sexual revolution was an earthquake, the aftershocks continue decades later in the form of the Me Too movement, efforts to “smash” the patriarchy, and transgender ideology that rejects the binary nature of human sexuality whole-cloth. In response, far-right commentators from both Christian and agnostic or atheistic backgrounds are growing large platforms by reasserting and doubling down on the assumed sexual politics their grandfathers perpetuated.

Like with every serious cultural debate, our moment’s tendency is to set-up battle stations manned by those on the fringes. Meanwhile, more moderate men and women are left with questions unanswered. Men displaced by the triumph of women’s liberation look around, uncertain of their place. Women are excelling past their male counterparts by almost every metric but feel anything but victorious. And those prone to gender confusion are further unmoored by the culture’s inability to recognize some of life’s most basic realities about our bodies and identities. We are swirling and confused and quick to find enemies on every side. 

A Barbie movie that takes up arms for the reliably progressive Hollywood faction would have been expected and profitable: give voice to the frustration women feel, condemn the patriarchal male voices in the far-right, repent of the past sins of Mattel and baptize Barbie in the 21st century, fourth wave feminism with the right sprinkling of intersectional representation. Easy as pie.

Greta Gerwig, the film’s 39-year-old co-writer and director, chose another way. 

Barbie is a celebration of girlhood and femaleness from top to bottom. And it is so with no apologies and no restraint. Like the Barbie empire itself, the film embraces and employs the hyper-feminine nature of the toys. Barbie Land, where the film’s Barbies and Kens reside, is drenched in pink, operates as a sisterhood, and erupts in squeals and dance parties. Fans hoping to relive their childhood delight in Barbie’s Dream House, career options, convertibles, and unlimited outfits will not be disappointed on the surface-level tribute to the cultural icon. The film is a fun feast for the senses that happily inhabits a girly aesthetic. More significantly, though, Gerwig, through multiple montages of girls at play, honors the sweetness and earthiness of girlhood. The viewer feels a twinge of sadness as the film reminds her of what it was like before body consciousness, external expectations, and crushed-dreams take away those childhood liberties. The film also manages to celebrate motherhood, aging, and imperfect bodies. All things Mattel struggled to do with its most popular toy franchise. Barbie is a movie that places girls and women at its center without hesitation. 

Squarely and sharply, the filmmaker also acknowledges the misogynistic thread ever-present in human history. Gerwig rebukes the exploitative and violent tendencies of too many of the opposite sex. She does so by giving voice to the vulnerability with which every woman is intimately acquainted. The plot includes a departure from the safety of female-centric Barbie Land and arrival in the Real World, where Barbie suddenly becomes aware of the limitations of her physicality. But even here, Gerwig manages to make viewers laugh while refusing to apologize for feminine embodiment. Barbie runs like a girl, climbs like a girl, and never transforms into an action figure, legitimizing how women move through the world. Many have criticized the film for infantilizing men, which is true superficially. However, attentive viewers will see that this is also a tool in Gerwig’s toolbox. The dim-witted men of the film’s Real World are caricatures of what a male-dominated society that belittles and disregards women will often produce. And the role reversal of Barbie and Ken puts our cultural constructs of gender into sharp relief, aiding viewers to see them more clearly. Ken’s storyline includes the need to see himself as his own person, independent of Barbie—a plot that mirrors the journey that real-life women have been on for more than a century.

As the arc of the story unfolds the frustrations many women experience by virtue of their femaleness take center stage. The character of Gloria, a wife/mother/employee who represents the average woman, delivers a Dorothy Sayers-esque monologue¹ and then leads the ensuing rescue of Barbie Land from the Kens. Their occupation of the former female utopia presents audiences with the film’s most hilarious moments. But it’s here also that Gerwig smartly depicts the ways men are diminished and weakened when women are subjugated. The height of action in the film functions as a cathartic fantasy. The comedic awakening of the Barbies and the rejection of all things excessively male is accomplished, and Barbie Land returns to its former state. Some viewers will come away thinking this is the message Gerwig wants us to hear: reject the patriarchy, insert the matriarchy. The future is female.

But the closing montage disabuses audiences of that fantasy and forces its viewers to grapple with some of life’s deepest questions. One could focus on the film’s commentary on life and death, generational impact and the difficulties of mother-daughter relationships, or the grand scope of what humans are and why we exist. Barbie subtly and artfully tackles each. Most poignantly, however, the film speaks loudly into the gender wars by simultaneously rebuking the perennial mistreatment of women and refusing to go along with the culture’s pendulum swing in the other direction. Gerwig asserts confidently that neither sex is meant to rule over the other, as the words patriarchy or matriarchy would suggest. Further, Gerwig asserts that, despite the confusion and blurring of once-obvious distinctions, to be a woman is to have a female body. By inviting Margot Robbie’s character to leave behind the plastic world of her old life and embrace the flesh and bones (and yes, genitalia) of the real world, Gerwig calls the culture back to some of life’s most fundamental and obvious truths. It’s complicated, anatomical, and beautiful to be a woman. 

Barbie was a gift to this woman who has often struggled with the various Christian and secular expectations of women, but the men I watched it with thoroughly enjoyed it too. We’re hungry for clarity, forgiveness, and a future together. After all, it’s true that “male and female he made them,” and something inside us won’t rest until this telos is achieved in perfect peace. Christians will find things to quibble with from Gerwig’s story, and no film is without flaw. However, whether she intended to or not, Gerwig presents us with a Christian anthropology where men and women can look to one another and see a co-heir, co-worker, and sibling in Christ. The murkiness of how we operate together is for us to work out in humility and grace toward one another. Some things, nevertheless, are not options for followers of Christ. We must, as Jesus would, affirm the goodness of creation, embrace the embodied nature of humanity, see the image of God in all people, and seek to build up those around us. All things that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie points us to. 

 1 This moment in the film reminded me of Are Women Human, Dorothy Sayers’s brilliant essay which includes these lines, “Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man – there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about woman’s nature.”

Jackie Kohl is the managing editor of Humble Orthodoxy and earned her BA from Moody Bible Institute in Theology with an emphasis on Systematics. She has taught secondary Bible, theology, and church history classes at a Christian school and in church contexts. She now works as a high school career counselor and is currently earning an MA in theological studies at Emmaus Theological Seminary. Jackie was born and raised in Chicagoland and has lived in the western suburbs of Cleveland since 2020. She and her husband Jim have been married since 2008 and have four kids.