The Maker of Meaning: The Image and the Subject in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023)

Yerang Park

Abstract

In the ending of the comedy film Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig, the main character Stereotypical Barbie fulfills her desire to be liberated from her object status and relocates from the Barbie Land to the Real World as a human, following these lines: "I want to be a part of the people that make meaning. Not the thing that's made. I want to do the imagining. I don't want to be the idea.” Without realizing it, she performs a critique of Barbie dolls, a representation of an objectified female body in a reified commodity form, only to remodel the promotional image of Mattel’s Barbie as a figure of a woman who decides and makes her meaning. This ominous moment of Stereotypical
Barbie’s transcendence leaves the possibility of this proper meaning-making subject unresolved as a historical aporia for feminist thinkers. I argue that the main character’s self-consciousness, her negation of her manufactured object-status, and the essential irony in her transcendence—being rebranded as a neoliberal postfeminist icon by allegedly becoming the maker of meaning—constitute a self-reflexive critique of the problematic subjectivity depicted in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, instead of endorsing such representation. Firstly, I compare Barbie’s ending scene with two visual artworks, Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). Both seminal works greatly facilitated the core discussion in feminist art history: identifying the presence or the absence of female self-consciousness in visual art as a critique of the male-centered systems of representation, while the very forms of representation may still render the fetishized images of female bodies as objects of spectacle. Next, I examine how the film questions the possibility of representing “reality” by setting up the Real World, distinguished from the imaginary Barbie Land but no less “unreal” than its counterpart. However, instead of claiming that the postmodern doubt of the “real” is the primary critical method of the film, I argue that the Baudrillardian superficiality and theatricality of the Real World enable us to problematize the main character’s fantasy of creating meaning in such world, within and beyond the film’s narrative. By doubling down on the hallucination of the meaning-making subject, Stereotypical Barbie’s transcendence in the film serves a caveat for such manifestations of utopian feminist imaginations.