Barbie’s Capitalist Critique Will Make BlackRock Millions

Dress up. Have fun. But let’s be realistic about what the film actually represents.

by Lindsay Lee Wallace

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The hype for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, is truly heartening. It’s been years (read: at least a couple weeks, or since the last person I know attended the Eras Tour, whichever is more recent) since I’ve seen the girlies come together so enthusiastically to buy themed outfits, gargle glitter, and paint the town pink.

And in tune with the outpouring of support for the film—which has come largely from queer people enchanted by its campy aesthetics and women with fond, nostalgic, sexually charged Barbie memories—there has been a wave of excitement about the film’s messages. Assertions that this Barbie is Feminist, Socialist, Queer, and other exciting labels have cropped up across the internet. People have celebrated Barbie’s subversive critiques of capitalism, consumerism, and patriarchy. Ben Shapiro, Fox News, and Ted Cruz have decried the film for its allegiance to the “woke leftist transgender agenda” or something—endorsements more powerful than anything marketing dollars can buy (or maybe Ted sells slots on Cameo for that kind of thing nowadays). 

So not to be a buzzkill—and please still let me into the queer bar—but it’s time for a reality check.

In a move that’s safely in lockstep with recent hits like White Lotus, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, and Glass Onion, as well as tried-and-true business practices in times of societal upheaval, the buzz around Barbie commodifies anti-capitalism. The film and its marketing leverage our awareness of these concepts—which has grown in recent years as the pandemic has both exacerbated economic inequality and thrust it unavoidably into our fields of vision—to an overt and precisely calibrated degree. You might even argue that a film about a doll that learns to question its patriarchal, consumerist reality is the inevitable endgame of a media ecosystem created by and for generations weaned on, superhero content explicitly designed to sell dolls. We’re all grown up, and, sure, we still want our toy movies, but now we want our toy movies to say something. 

And yes, Barbie as a figure has critiqued the patriarchy—in service of a second-wave feminism that purports she should be allowed to work for the oil man the same way Ken can. Barbie has always been a woman with a revolving door of jobs, and her ability to achieve things women were previously counted out for has been cited as inspirational by literally millions of people. And she should be able to do whatever she wants! In a country with a persistent income gap and workplace discrimination affecting women, queer people, and Black and Indigenous people of color, such calls for equal work opportunities are not a bad thing. They’re just… not anti-capitalist. 

Which should be fine. This is, after all, a Barbie movie. “Anti-capitalist” isn’t the bar a toy movie with a staggering marketing budget should be trying to reach. 

If these companies thought that there was anything in Barbie that genuinely threatened to harm their bottom line, they have the playbook ready.

It’s only when people start guilelessly claiming that this film contains ideas that are new, or subversive, or potentially change-making, that it feels necessary to point out that while movies from major studios can be a lot of things—inspiring, heartbreaking, terrifying, too long, too quiet, and really boring, to name a few—their ability to change the world has limits. While representation of certain groups has been proven meaningful to an extent (for example, seeing gay people on TV was undeniably huge for little gay me), each “groundbreaking first” also represents a tipping point wherein the depiction of a certain identity has been deemed worthwhile, in a money-making way. Someone, somewhere decided that gross gay people would pay gross gay dollars to see themselves on-screen, and normal straight people wouldn’t be too grossed out to show up—and now we get Brokeback Mountain and But I’m a Cheerleader’ and, wonderfully, Pariah, and unsettlingly, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.”

But this calculus degrades when it comes to ideas, which are harder to quantify because they can’t buy movie tickets. And it grinds to a halt when it comes to the idea of anti-capitalism. Clearly, subversive aesthetics can become “zeitgeisty” enough to put on the big screen, but I’m hard-pressed to believe it will ever be profitable to genuinely encourage social change. Mattel wouldn’t let Barbie “critique capitalism” unless the projections said that Barbie critiquing capitalism would pay.

When corporations allow their subsidiaries to invest in anything, they do so with a risk calculation already undertaken. Not to foment change, but to court modern values just enough to turn the profit that helps them, ultimately, ensure nothing ever meaningfully changes. These companies don’t do anything that doesn’t pad their bottom line. And why would they? As we speed toward a climate apocalypse, they’re only incentivized to insulate themselves from the effects with as many layers of cash as possible. And at the end of the day, pink dollars spend just the same as green ones.

If you want to see the fallout of a toy company responding to a societal critique with teeth, check out how an officially unnamed corporate entity (widely considered to be Warner Bros. Discovery, which is owned by BlackRock and Vanguard and which in turn owns the rights to DC’s Joker and the 2019 Joker film starring Joaquin Phoenix), has reacted to Vera Drew’s trans Joker origin story retelling, The People’s Joker. The film uses the Joker and other Batman characters the way a fever dream might, clashing parodied versions of them against each other to create a dazzling, bizarre, genuinely tender spectacle. It also levels sharp and chaotic criticisms at the mainstream comedy scene, monopolizing corporations, American politics, the treatment (or lack thereof) of trans kids by our healthcare system and society, and the military industrial complex. 

After showing the film for a single-night engagement at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, Drew received what she’s described as an “angry letter” insisting she never screen the film again. Although The People’s Joker fits squarely within the fair use exception in copyright law as a parody, the letter insisted it constituted copyright infringement. BlackRock and Vanguard are also major shareholders in Mattel. Simply put, if these companies thought that there was anything in Barbie that genuinely threatened to shift perspectives or harm their bottom line, they have the playbook ready.

And sure, there’s an argument to be made that anticapitalist ideas becoming profitable signals a larger shift in our societal understanding of the evils of capitalism. They wouldn’t be able to sell us these things if we didn’t want them, after all. But this only exemplifies just how badly we want to be sold the idea that we refuse to be sold to. As the planet burns around us, a victim of corporations’ relentless violence toward the earth in pursuit of profit, we want to believe that we stand against our own extermination. This is particularly the case for those of us who have become increasingly aware of our own structural privilege relative to others (for example: me, a white cis woman), seeking media that affirms that we’ve taken whichever pill lets you see outside the Matrix and doesn’t align you with fascist Nazi TERFS or gender criticals or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays. 

I can still see, in Barbie’s stiff, pointed breasts and ever-arching feet, the womanhood that child-me thought I could and should one day achieve.

Ultimately, the legacy of the hegemonic norms embedded in Barbie is not so much challenged by this film as it is updated for a new generation. And yes, there is legitimate progress represented by the fact that these values are overt in the movie (and desirable to market based on). It is not lost on me that I can now rent an apartment, live there having queer sex out of wedlock with my trans partner, and maybe even get gay married before God and AOC and everyone one day. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful for this safety, conditional though it may be.

But I also understand it’s afforded to me not so much by progress as by what hasn’t moved forward—by my continued proximity, disavowals aside, to the work of protecting whiteness (and specifically white womanhood). Barbie is the ultimate white woman: always has been, was literally created to be. While the Barbie movie may introduce critiques, it doesn’t seek to change anything. While it may be someone, somewhere’s first consideration of the evils of consumerism, it is not changing lives as a capitalist critique. 

There is, of course, something camp about Barbie. Something queer. Her quintessential femininity is manufactured, and in that way it speaks to the holy deliberateness with which those subverting the gender binary, like trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people, craft their own appearances. 

I can still see, in Barbie’s stiff, pointed breasts and ever-arching feet, the womanhood that child-me thought I could and should one day achieve, wrapped in a towel I pretended was a wedding dress, humming my own bridal dirge with steam from a bedtime bath still rising from my shoulders. What I’m saying is, I get the appeal. 

At the end of the day, I just want my fellow eager viewers to remember that when a toy company signs off on a toy movie, it can only be because they knew it would help them sell toys. Have fun, wear pink (I’m planning to).

Just keep in mind that Barbie has already made $150 million opening weekend. That doesn’t mean it can’t strike a nerve, but it will never have the nerve to call for a strike.

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