Essay: 'Barbie' and 'Poor Things'
The striking similarities between these two hits from 2023
Barbie (2023), written and directed by Greta Gerwig, co-written by Noah Baumbach
Poor Things (2023), written and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Greetings from the end of 2024, a year of mixed feelings, a year when so many countries — not all, but too many — held elections that posed a choice between democracy and fascism. The U.S. chose the latter, and while the exact consequences won’t be clear for several more months, what is clear is that 2025 and its eponymous “Project” of the winning side will not go well for anyone — including those who voted for it.
It struck me this morning, waking to a gray, drizzly dawn of the first day of winter — happy solstice to all who celebrate — how much “Barbie” and “Poor Things” have in common.
Both of these hit films from 2023 were highly regarded. “Barbie” got 8 Oscar nominations and won once, “Poor Things” got 11 nominations and won 4 Oscars. And each features a female protagonist who begins the story at an extreme of naivete and gets an education, leading her to rebel against oppressive patriarchal structures. Each has fantastical settings, striking dance sequences, mind-blowing costumes, and — something that doesn’t receive as much attention — a problematic resolution. Each film has been characterized as feminist — mistakenly, in my view.
To begin with, neither the protagonist of “Barbie” — since there are many Barbies let’s call her Main Character Barbie (MCB) — and the protagonist of “Poor Things,” Bella, are regular human beings. One is the embodiment of a toy and never experienced birth or childhood; she emerged a grown-woman, fully formed. (Or almost fully; the doll famously has breasts but no genitals.) The other is a reanimated drowning victim with a fresh brain implanted into her skull — in other words, a grown woman with the literal brain of an infant. Each resides in an Edenic environment: Barbie knows only Barbieland, Bella knows only the home in which she was assembled.
These similar origins make each character a blank slate: a fresh, attractive young woman’s body with a naive mind ready to be written upon by others. This is a classic male fantasy, though this view is complicated by the fact — clearly documented in the movie — that Barbie is the creation of a woman designer, though she is owned by a corporation, Mattel, which is depicted as having an all-male executive leadership. (This is explicit in the film; in reality, Mattel has several women in leadership.1)
When they venture into the real world, MCB and Bella begin to be educated. The “real world,” relative to the place of their protagonists’ origins, is markedly different for each film. In Barbie, the real world mostly resembles our own, albeit a version where the third-act involvement of the Mattel Corp. is more like a Broadway musical frame for how plots are resolved. The outside world in “Poor Things,” on the other hand, is set in a Victorian era markedly fantastical in its architecture and design. Nevertheless, this differing approach to portraying the world is cosmetic and makes little difference in each film’s politics.
In their separate “real worlds,” each protagonist encounters a mixed bag of pleasant and painful realities. They experience a fall from innocence, to which they cannot return; the worlds in which they were created and initially fostered no longer exist. They are forced to deal with reality and to reassess what their position and power in society are and can be.
In “Barbie,” the main character is the physical embodiment of the classic American doll, and the others who populate her world are also Barbies, or Skippers, or Kens. (The multiplicity of Barbie types reflects the multiple options that were available over time: Barbies with brunette hair, red hair, dark skin, Native American features, and so on.) Main Character Barbie (MCB), played by Margot Robbie, appears as first among equals, leading the dance numbers and the eventual revolt against the Kens.
When the film opens, MCB and the rest of her co-Barbies rule the roost. The Barbies govern (in a structure that resembles American democratic-republicanism, but with autocratic features), and the Kens and other male inhabitants are strictly second-class citizens. To MCB, this is feminism, and seems completely natural. This view reflects a naive, indeed childlike, understanding of what feminism really is: a system that works for the just and equitable treatment of all, and the honoring and preservation of the environment that fosters us.
To get to the point of revolt, MCB has to undergo a classic consciousness-raising process initiated by her first experience of sexist treatment. And to get to that point, Ken has to be exposed to the everyday sexism and chauvinism of real-world modern American culture — a discriminatory, patriarchal system that oppresses women and girls as much by social negging, propaganda and gaslighting as by violence. He finds this new male-empowering system very awesome, and returns to Barbie-land to spread it to the rest of the Kens (a slew of male characters that echo the different iterations of the Barbies), who transform Barbieland into a patriarchal “Kendom.”
In “Poor Things,” the protagonist Bella (Emma Stone) starts from an even more extreme intellectual disadvantage: she literally has the brain of an infant, in a body which is about 30 years old.2 At the beginning of the story, she is infantile, with no muscular control or speech. Most of the remainder of the film documents her swift education, featuring a European tour and bracing bouts of food, dance, and sex, but even these pleasures don’t awaken her. Like Siddhartha, her real awakening occurs when she’s exposed to the suffering of the poor and consequently begins to grasp the true, bittersweet nature of the world. By the end, she’s a proper Eliza Doolittle: educated in the ways of the world and able to conduct herself in society, whose rules she constantly breaks — first ignorantly, later with intention.
Each character’s education and its consequences comprise each film’s character arc and dictate the story: Act 1, Eden; Act 2, Awakening; Act 3: Revolt.
In “Barbie,” a real-world mother and daughter (America Ferrera as Gloria, Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha) complete MCB’s consciousness raising and inspire her to lead a Barbieland revolt against the Kens. In “Poor Things,” a third-act twist compels Bella to return to the abusive marriage that made her predecessor — the woman who occupied her body before its revival — commit suicide in the first place; by means of trickery, she turns the tables on her oppressor and escapes the fate he schemed for her.
For each film, these successful revolts are not quite the story’s ending. MCB’s experience in the real world has made her realize that Barbieland is not enough for her; through an encounter with her own creator, Mattel designer Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), she reaches enlightenment and is able to become a real woman. Her first task: “I’m ready for my appointment with my gynecologist!” (This final line of the film typifies its layered approach to humor. As in many films that are written now, with both children and adults in mind, the line is both funny on the surface and meaningful on more than one level to adult viewers.) She not only has taken control of her own body; by implication, she now possesses something that a Barbie doll never could: genitals.
In “Poor Things,” turning the tables on her once-and-future abuser means taking on the methods of her own creator, whose given name “Godwin” she habitually shortens to “God.” Early in the movie we saw that Godwin (Willem Dafoe) experimented on humans and animals, putting one’s brain in the body of another. Taking on this role, Bella implants in a dog the brain of the man who would have abused her, forcing him to experience humiliation for the rest of his existence while she and the friends she made along the way relax into a bourgeois existence. A signal feature of the last scene is that the same household servants who have always worked there, still are. Granted, Bella must treat them in a more enlightened fashion, because they appear less servile; but they’re still serving her and her friends tea and sandwiches. This is certainly not feminism.
So both films depict a limited liberation that is personal, not structural. MCB has achieved a personal liberation of sorts, but one that continues to exist in the larger context of American patriarchy and capitalism, just as her real-world representative Gloria has achieved a rather minor thing: she still works for Mattel, but it’s one where her suggestion for the Barbie product is heard and approved, not ignored. Tellingly, the all-male bosses approve her idea not because it’s feminist but because a bean-counter says it will make the company lots of money. She doesn’t even get a promotion.
This is a somewhat contrained feminism. It’s clear that auteur Greta Gerwig, when deciding whether the success of the revolt of the Barbies would be echoed in the real world, chose to play it down. Gloria’s ending, and that of MCB, are realistic to viewers. This is a respectable choice, in the same way that voting Democratic is a respectable choice: even if the Democratic Party’s vision is limited, it is achievable. The only beef I have is that I want art to inspire me with a vision of what might be achieved if we only dared to aim a little higher.
Read my original reviews of “Barbie” (my final opinion was harsher than today’s) and “Poor Things.”
Screenrant, “How Old Bella is in ‘Port Things’?” 20 March 2024
Another enlightening review, Mark! Thank you!