Opinion | Susan Faludi Thinks ‘Barbie’ Is a Delight. She Also Thinks It’s About Abortion.

Susan Faludi steered we present as much as the “Barbie” film in a pink Corvette, however sadly, the one automobile accessible was a pickup truck. In order that was how one of many world’s main feminists and I confirmed as much as her native mall: in a 2002 Black Toyota Tacoma, with tickets to Auditorium 2 for “Barbie.”

I’d requested Ms. Faludi, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and creator — whose 1991 guide, “Backlash,” turned an instantaneous traditional — to see this summer season’s most joyful and profitable blockbuster with me as a result of I hoped she would possibly assist me make sense of its morass of sizzling pink contradictions.

There are few toys fairly so confounding as Barbie. Even her origin story: She was based mostly on a intercourse doll for males, however one way or the other marketed to moms for his or her daughters. Barbie has been a protest slogan (“I’m not your Barbie”), a bimbo (bear in mind “Math class is hard” Barbie?), an consuming dysfunction accelerant. In one particularly clever protest towards the doll, she had her voice field swapped with G.I. Joe’s, so all of the sudden she mentioned, “Vengeance is mine!” and he mentioned, “The seashore is the place for summer season.” However Barbie has additionally been a lawyer, a pilot, an astronaut and the president. She has by no means married, lives alone and doesn’t have youngsters.

The film appeared as stuffed with contradictions because the doll. It was promoted by way of a advertising and marketing marketing campaign that had extra licensing offers than Barbie has outfits: There have been Barbie garments and Barbie make-up and ice cream and trip packages and a takeover of the Google house web page, which is at the moment filling my display screen with pink explosions each time I attempt to fact-check this essay. But it surely additionally had a director — Greta Gerwig — with indie avenue cred, and early critiques targeted on the movie’s subversiveness. Ms. Gerwig, it appeared, had managed to make Barbie satisfyingly self-aware, likable and mockable; she referred to as out the hypocrisy of the producer — Mattel — whereas getting its blessing on the venture. After which, one way or the other, she — and the corporate — marketed all of it again to us.

“This seems like a kick!” Ms. Faludi mentioned, once I first steered we would watch the film collectively. She didn’t need to be a feminist moist blanket on the entire thing, however she was ready to ship a sober report, ought to or not it’s required. We settled into our seats. “You recognize, asking a feminist to touch upon a Barbie film is like asking the Depraved Witch of the West to critique Oz,” she mentioned with fun.

I used to be interested by Ms. Faludi’s perspective as a result of her pursuits appeared to trace with the complexity on the coronary heart of the “Barbie” film. Final yr, within the wake of the Supreme Courtroom resolution to overturn Roe v. Wade, she wrote an essay bemoaning how feminists had made a Faustian discount with well-liked tradition. Whereas we’d been carrying “Smash the patriarchy” T-shirts and leaning in at work whereas singing “Who run the world? (Women),” Donald Trump had been packing the Supreme Courtroom and gutting the Equal Employment Alternative Fee. Feminism had turn out to be cool, enjoyable — and within the course of had taken its eyes off the ball.

This appeared to make her a perfect viewing companion for a movie that appeared the right distillation of those tensions: Might a film at the moment fueling Barbiecore throughout America truly be a automobile for a significant political message?

In fact, Ms. Faludi additionally understands the ability of leisure. In “Backlash,” she traced not solely how politics and the media had tried to undermine the features of feminism but in addition how movie and tv did, too, by way of movies like “Deadly Attraction” and “Distress,” which turned ladies into man-eating she-devils or unhappy sacks fretting about their organic clocks.

I’ll cease along with her bona fides in a minute — however after “Backlash,” she went on to publish “Stiffed,” concerning the breakdown of conventional masculinity and the crisis of the American male. Two and a half a long time later, echoes of that guide are in every single place — from Richard Reeves to Andrew Tate — and so they present up in Ms. Gerwig’s Ken, who struggles to seek out an identification other than Barbie. (Because the slogan goes: “She’s Barbie. He’s simply Ken.”) Ken turns Barbieland right into a sweaty man cave after the actual world teaches him concerning the notion of the patriarchy, a time period that was used not less than eight occasions within the film.

“I imply, you couldn’t write the script with out 30 years of ladies’s research,” Ms. Faludi mentioned because the lights got here up, and we emerged from the theater right into a swirl of Barbie pink. She was wearing all black, although she insisted her velvet prime was truly extra of a deep purple, chosen due to its proximity to pink.

“It appears to me {that a} massive theme underlying the film is shock and horror over what occurred to us — what occurred to ladies — from 2016 on, with the double whammy of Trump after which Dobbs. And particularly, I believed abortion was the subtext to rather a lot.”

Maintain up.

She thought “Barbie” the film — with a sequence of choreographed dances, a ballad carried out by Ryan Gosling and a lot pink that there was a nationwide paint scarcity — was truly not simply subversive however … about abortion?

Warning: Spoilers forward.

Ms. Faludi defined her place. “I imply, it begins with little women enjoying with dolls studying the origin story of Barbie — and the rejection of the concept ladies can simply be moms. It ends along with her going to the gynecologist.”

Certainly, Barbie begins with a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Area Odyssey,” with little women enjoying with child dolls — which, because the narrator explains, had been the one dolls accessible to women again then. So when Barbie — an grownup doll — comes alongside, it’s an epiphany: There’s extra to life than motherhood! The ladies smash the child dolls.

It ends with Barbie in the actual world, in pink Birkenstocks and a blazer, heading to what seems to be a job interview, besides, we be taught, it’s truly the gynecologist. (Ostensibly, now that Barbie is a human, she has a vagina as a substitute of her notorious nongenitals.)

Ms. Faludi went on to stipulate a sequence of different allusions to our current second:

In an early montage introducing viewers to Barbieland, lawyer Barbie speaks earlier than the Supreme Courtroom concerning the concept of personhood — “which instantly made me consider makes an attempt to create the unborn as ‘individuals,’” Ms. Faludi mentioned.

Later, the Kens try to vary the Structure, amid Barbie lamenting how laborious that they had labored to create Barbieland, and “You may’t simply undo it in a day.” (To which Ken responds, “Actually — and figuratively — watch me.”) Ms. Faludi’s take? “I imply, that’s what occurred on Election Day of 2016.”

We see the Kens band collectively in a form of hunky seashore military, making an attempt to occupy Barbieland (when not performing choreographed ballads), with Ken adopting a mink fur cape that didn’t not resemble the one worn by the QAnon shaman throughout the Jan. 6 rebellion.

After which there’s Midge, the doll as soon as marketed as Barbie’s greatest buddy, and the one pregnant doll within the Barbie universe, earlier than she was discontinued. (You might take away Midge’s stomach and child intact from her physique after which magnetically reattach it. It was bizarre.) Midge and her bump are within the movie, too, repeatedly — a ghost that the fictional Mattel executives, and everybody else, simply want would go away. She’s there for laughs, however squint laborious sufficient, Ms. Faludi steered, and you would additionally see her as “the specter of Dobbs.”

We’re again at her home now, consuming Aperol and soda — “It’s kind of pink, proper?” she mentioned — in honor of “Barbie,” ready by Ms. Faludi’s husband, who has additionally cooked us dinner.

“Are you guys going to storyboard this?” he needed to know.

Ms. Faludi was conscious that parsing “Barbie” for solutions concerning the state of feminism is barely absurd. Or possibly it’s not. On the middle of the film is a narrative a couple of daughter and a mom, performed by America Ferrera. It’s Ms. Ferrera’s lengthy monologue concerning the endlessly contradictory expectations of being a girl that deprograms the Barbies, who’ve been brainwashed into servitude by the Kens. On the opening day of “Barbie,” the information was full of the story of another mother and daughter, whose Fb messages about administering the abortion tablet had been seized by the authorities, leading to a jail sentence for the lady and an upcoming sentencing for the mom.

“Barbie” provided not just some escape from that actuality but in addition real catharsis. “Maybe what’s happening,” Ms. Faludi wrote me in an electronic mail just a few days after the screening, “is that girls are discovering a method to discover their anger about current historical past with out feeling like they need to drown themselves within the bathtub (in actual water).”

What’s it that they are saying — disempower the patriarchy by laughing at it?

“Solely Barbie may say, ‘By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a girl underneath the patriarchy, you robbed it of its energy!’ and switch it into fun line,” Ms. Faludi emailed.

In fact, she wasn’t about to exit and purchase her daughter a Barbie or something. (She, like Barbie, doesn’t have youngsters.)

“After they give you Radical Feminist Barbie, let me know. Valerie Solanas Barbie, anybody?”