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

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.