Last weekend, I had the beautiful experience of meeting someone for the first time and hitting it off so well that after a leisurely lunch, we spontaneously went to watch Barbie. She wouldn’t have watched it except as a lark, and hadn’t known anything about the film’s narrative premise; I wanted to, but was waiting for it to reach streaming platforms eventually. The glow of this promising female friendship was a pink glow that day, made so by the movie’s signature aesthetic. It was a fun, feminist movie for us both.

            Having watched it, I can see why anti-feminists hate it so much. The film’s overt theme is literally about gender equality. It’s about how patriarchy hurts men too, and somehow it manages to convey this message while also offering punchlines about fragile masculinity (as well as about decorative femininity). It has a transgender Barbie who’s there with a casualness and subtlety that is more meaningful than an obvious statement about presence would be. The film provokes political and even philosophical reflections in its own way. It also has a genuinely touching ending, does not rely on romantic predictability and other template happily-ever-afters. It is sly, too – poking self-deprecatory fun at Mattel’s missteps, without addressing capitalism, plastic usage, corporate domination and so on. For some, all this is too much. For some, it still isn’t enough.

Some feminists aren’t happy with Barbie either, because they read the film as being not being sufficiently radical, as relying too easily on gender tropes, or else as being nothing but a long advertisement for Mattel.

            But does any one piece of art have to cover it all? Expecting or demanding such flawlessness risks much, and deprives of even more. That happens to be the film’s deepest theme. Barbie may be simple, but it is not shallow.

            At the cinema theatre where we saw it, the crowd – of mixed genders and ages –  whooped at two points: when Ryan Gosling’s Beach Ken first came onscreen, showing off his torso, and when John Cena’s Merman Ken appeared in a cameo, also showing off his torso. No Barbies, or any other characters, received such a reception. The male objectification in that theatre was so interesting. It was the reverse of what happens during every item number and every titillating scene, when roars in masculine voices and wolf whistles fill Indian and other cinemas – all the time.

It isn’t that Barbie, which presented mostly stereotypically attractive people in general, designed it that way. The audience reacted that way. That reaction, for its unusualness and its subversiveness (the loud admission of female desire, that too in public), was heartwarming to me. As for the muscled Kens, my own tastes are a little less chiselled – but I loved that others enjoyed them. I noticed, and enjoyed, that I was in a space where women and young adults felt comfortable whooping out loud. The reclamation of an Indian cinema hall was my experience, not the reclamation of a doll that has been many things to many people, some of them problematic. As far as symbols go, that day, at that screening, she was something encouraging indeed.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express in August 2023. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.