Academic Andrea Dibben and film-maker Jon Mallia share contrasting views of Barbie, the film, in a chat with Mark Laurence Zammit. Warning: this article contains many spoilers

The anticipation was big, but nothing prepared the movie world for Barbie. Since its release last month, the Mattel comedy has become a cultural and commercial phenomenon, selling out cinema theatres around the world, including Malta.

The film has made more than $1 billion worldwide at the box office so far, making it the highest-grossing film directed solely by a woman in history. 

Many critics have lauded its portrayal of men and women and contemporary society, but others completely lambasted it, describing it as one of the worst films ever made. One US political commentator even began a review of the film by burning a bunch of barbie dolls in a parking lot. Should a film be so incendiary?

‘The film shows patriarchy doesn’t serve men either’

Andrea Dibben – Social policy academic at the University of Malta

If people watched the film and thought Barbieland is a feminist utopia where the world’s problems have been solved, they got it wrong, because it was a nightmare society.

A society that replaces patriarchy with matriarchy is not what feminism is about and I don’t believe the producers intended to tell people that it was a perfect reality. Rather, that it was a flipped reality.

So, if anyone feels uncomfortable by the way men are treated in Barbieland, then they should feel uncomfortable about how women are treated in the real world. But the film is not saying the world should look like Barbieland.

In fact, at the end Barbie too realised it was not a utopia and that she was treating Ken simply as an accessory, and she apologised to him.

One thing that is clear from the film is that patriarchy runs the real world and that is not good for anyone. And when the Kens briefly took over Barbieland, they were not happy either. Because patriarchy does not serve men either.

Patriarchy is built on power, competition and domination – in the west driven mostly by capitalism – and not only stifles the potential of most women but also oppresses men who always feel they have to compete with more powerful or wealthier men.

And when men become very frustrated with the system and the patriarchy stifles them from expressing their emotions healthily, they either take it all in and become lonely, depressed and self-destructive – that is why men are by far the biggest victims of suicide – or else take it all out and become aggressive and sometimes even engage in criminal behaviour – which is why most incarcerated people and most perpetrators are men.

At the end of the film, even Ken admitted to Barbie that he did not really like the patriarchy when he realised what it was all about.

If anyone feels uncomfortable by the way men are treated in Barbieland, then they should feel uncomfortable about how women are treated in the real world

And contemporary society is portrayed quite realistically in the film. It’s satirical, but cat calling does exist as all women know, and women seldom occupy the highest positions in society.

And Mattel was brave enough to admit it too made mistakes – not least with the portrayal of its highest officials as a bunch of idiots. And it also acknowledges the angst among teenagers nowadays. It shows they are over Barbie.

They see it as a symbol of oppression and will not admit they play with it because they are rebellious and angry at the world.

The film culminates in Gloria’s monologue, which effectively sums up the modern world struggles for women and which creates a cognitive

dissonance that shakes the Barbies back to their senses and empowers them anew. But even male viewers can relate to that message, because men too are expected to reach impossible standards. And together with Barbie and Ken we should all wake up, admit that this is not on and move towards a more egalitarian society.

But unfortunately, rather than blaming the system, many men blame women.

Feminism was never about women taking over, but about having a society in which gender roles are not prescribed stereotypically. That is why I loved the character of Allen above all, because he didn’t prescribe to the stereotype and was emotional enough to feel comfortable with the Barbies but masculine and strong enough to fight other men when he needed to.

Thanks to feminism, we have made great strides forward in the last century. But we still live in a patriarchy, and the current situation is summed up really clearly when Ken is told, in hushed tones, that it’s still a patriarchy but the men hide it better now.

I am not saying that if women ran the world we would all be better. But a society that embraces the feminine more, that is gentler, not based on domination and competition, where neither women nor men are dominated by gender stereotypes and can express themselves freely and have equal opportunities would be far better.

There is a lot to criticise about the movie but if there is a message that we should take from it is that this is what we should all be striving for.

‘I had high hopes for this film. I was wrong’

Jon Mallia – podcaster, writer and film-maker

I thought the film would mount an intelligent, scathing critique of a vacuous set of values imposed on impressionable girls for consumeristic ends. Wrong!

I mean, it’s a fun film for the first two acts, but in the third it falls apart into a clunky piece of rubbish writing and confused propaganda.

Rather than painstakingly peeling away at the complex gender-based disputes of our time, it succumbs to being a cheap, regressive (and at times resentful) mouthpiece for kindergarten style contentions about boys being better than girls and vice versa.

They are not. They are different. Male and female are opposite poles to the same beautiful fusion.

Since the dawn of humankind, a dynamic tension has existed between men and women. The energy that emerges from this perennial game of tug and pull is what has fuelled the survival and eventual dominance of the species.

For millennia, this dynamic male-female polarity was represented in the roles men and women took in the world as individuals. Women administered domestic affairs in the form of child rearing and family nurture, while men largely took on public affairs in the form of hunting, warfare and performing other life-threatening work outside of the home, such as construction.

Women held down the fort, while men made the outside world a less threatening place in general. Both sexes played to their strengths and the strategy paid off.

But with public life becoming far less requisite of masculine aggression and physicality, many women are now stepping forward, wanting to explore this dimension of the human experience.

The third act of the film falls apart into a clunky piece of rubbish writing and confused propaganda

This slingshots humankind into a civilisation-wide social experiment where traditional roles that have brought us this far are being made to squirm under the microscope.

And to be honest, I think that while this is causing a fair degree of psychological unrest at a societal and personal level, it is a good thing.

Large-scale societies that have not integrated creative female energy into public life seem to be largely beholden to social structures that are stagnant, repressive, regressive and not aspirational.

But here’s the rub with Barbie. Firstly, it frames the sexes as being enemies rather than collaborators. That message is no different to Andrew Tate’s divisive diatribes on the subjugation of the opposite sex.

Secondly, it presents men as pathetic, egomaniac dolts. If my son acted that way outside of the home, there’d be consequences. I identify with the men in Kendom just as much as my wife (a Phd in adult education) or my sister (one of Malta’s foremost film directors) identify with Nicki Minaj.

Thirdly, while I’m not entirely sure what anyone actually means when they use the word ‘patriarchy’. I’m sure the writers would have been better served by replacing the term with chauvinism and misogyny, which of course exist and are intolerable.

Fourthly, the metaphor it presents seems to be that Barbieland is an analogue for the actual Western world of today, where men enjoy all the power and privilege while women are mere decoration.

If that’s the case, then where are the Barbies dying en masse on work sites? And why aren’t any Kens the leaders of some of the greatest nations in Barbieland? Why aren’t any of the Kens university lecturers and film-makers like my wife and my sister?

And as a side note: in which universe is there a utopia, where it is ideal for women to be working at a construction site as the film suggests? And if ‘patriarchal’ power was such a trump card, then why wasn’t Ken simply allowed to become a doctor just by virtue of his sex? Why was he turned away by a qualified female doctor?

The film also completely brushes off the possibility that motherhood is a goal worthy of female aspiration.

I’m very confused by what the movie is trying to say and I suspect the writers are too.

The central and insurmountable problem with this film is that the writers clearly started out wanting to make a political point and encased that intention within a film.

And that’s not art, that’s propaganda.