Earlier this year, my friend insistently recommended the Barbie movie to me having watched it herself at a time when we were . “I wasn’t particularly a fan,” she was telling me, “The plot was complicated and it didn’t make sense to me in the end, but it’s really feminist and stuff, so I think you’ll really like it.”
Whilst a little jarred by my friend’s simplistic view of my tastes in film, the phrase ‘feminist and stuff’ (as with any phrase with the adjective ‘feminist’ in it) equally piqued my curiosity. It was on a seven hour sleepless flight that I decided a convoluted plot wouldn’t prove too much to deal with. At least I wouldn’t have to buy cinema tickets.
The film’s premise was Barbieland, a landscape laden with beaches, dream houses and women in all its pivotal roles. Conventional Barbie (Margot Robbie) hosts girl’s nights and is lapped by other Barbies and a puppy-eyed Ken. The reality here is that they, and as such girls in the real world, can be anything. Which of course is threatened by Barbie's abrupt thoughts of death and realities of cellulite, which she has to venture to the ‘Human World' to rectify. She returns crestfallen to see that girls cannot, in fact, be ‘anything’ (due to something strange called the 'patriarchy'), and invigored to change this when the dolls of the ‘Barbieland’ begin to fall into submissive roles.
The film left me rapturously engaged and emotional at certain stages. What I gathered from it mostly however was a realm wherein slim and (predominantly) white Barbie’s were shoving their moisturized fists into the air and shouting for women’s liberation. Being a woman is ‘messy’ the movie argued: a clause intentionally juxtaposing the matriarchy inhabited by the dolls. The film ingeniously conveyed that even Barbieland not free from the pressures faced by women to maintain a composed front, using ‘sweet-talk’ and an appealing image, rather than knowledge and skills, as tools in professional roles. The detrimental disintegration of this is embodied accurately (and I thought comically) by Ken's dystopian Mojo Dojo Casa House.
Throughout, I was instantly reminded of a movie I’d watched the previous year called Moxie. The two, ironically, couldn’t be more different. Far from the sun-baked pink Dreamhouse premise of Barbie, the landscape of Moxie was gritty, swathed with sweat-drenched lockers, American high-school cliques and jarringly self-unaware jocks ranking girls under obnoxious sexual categories. The main character, Vivian is ‘head-down’, unquestioningly familiarised to these practices and ranked ‘most obedient’ (of course). It is after the entrance of a new student, Lucy Hernandez, who is the first to actively challenge such ingrained sexism, that she ultimately delves into her mother’s rebellious past. She ends up risking suspension from school to publish a magazine exposing the its sexist norms- much to the consternation of the mollycoddled jocks and passive teaching body.
Both films' messages are well-intentioned but fraught with contradictions. Is the Barbie movie trying to argue for the corporation’s progressive ‘girls can do anything approach’; or was it pointing out the hypocrisy of ‘anything’ applying to the dolls’ meager range of body types and skin tones? Moxie too, despite a more realistic backdrop was not free of such conflicting portrayals. Its view of feminism, apart from its largely black-and-white antagonisation of men (with a measly two feminist male characters in the film) does more to polarize than to unite.
Both movies reflect the second-wave feminist movement which focused on the empowerment of the individual rather than the collective liberation of women. The movement was instrumental in bringing attention to women’s reproductive rights, access to divorce, and protection from sexual assault and saw the idolization of women ‘beating’ the capitalist patriarchy to find success, such as Margaret Thatcher. It however treated female oppression as a homogenous entity negated the influence of cultures and social class on oppression and resistance. The focus on individual acts to symbolize female success meant that even Thatcher’s policies (coming to the detriment of working class women) and female CEOs mistreating their female workers were aspired towards: a phenomenon known as Girlboss feminism.
Forms of ‘Girlboss’ feminism can be traced within several films of today. Modern day tropes are excruciatingly susceptible to homogenization and cultural assimilation. Powerful are both the affluent young adult marching for equal pay; and the mother who takes leave from work by choice to raise their child. Powerful too is the mother in a low-income-country who leaves workplaces sexism undisputed to provide for her family. In fact, controversy is garnered by the ‘sweatshop’ conditions that Mattel has notoriously known to keep its female workers in its factory bases of middle-income countries such as China, Indonesia and Thailand- leaving the film to arguably exude a hollow and hypocritical message.
The privilege embedded within the ‘protest’ and ‘girls can do anything’ ideals is an idea floated only briefly in Moxie. In a scene perhaps more powerful than the film’s ending, Vivian’s American-Chinese best friend, Claudia, having taken the suspension on Vivian’s behalf, tells her with pent-up frustration that the situation is different for her. She explains that her comparative deference to the sexist norms of their school was because her first-generation immigrant mother had sacrificed everything for her family to settle in the USA. This reality is acknowledged neither by the Moxie movement at school, nor the Grrl Rock movement of the 1980s referenced throughout. The crux of the film’s controversy, and many parts of the second feminist wave, are their reflection of only a certain demographic: white and middle class women. It garnered criticism from the Harvard Crimson, stating that whilst it included diversity, this was explored inadequately.
Later on (on the same flight), I decided to further spite my bleary-eyed sleeplessness by putting on Polite Society: a film with equally iconic visuals and soundtrack. The setup was once again unnerving in its surrealism, yet plausibility to exist. The plot surrounded a young British Pakistani girl, Ria Khan, whose temper and dreams to become a stuntwoman (both subtly looked down upon by her loving first-generation immigrant parents), is as fierce as her love for her older sister, Lena, an ex-student of art college grappling with artist’s block and depression. Early on in the film, Lena agrees to marriage to the well-mannered doctor son of an affluent British-Pakistani family, abandoning her art career and leaving Ria to plot the marriage's (and surely by extension patriarchy's!) sabotage. Sympathy is garnered for Ria throughout the film: both for her Fury (the mantra of her Youtube channel), and the suspicious light in which the to-be in-laws are shown.
As a British Indian, I experienced an affinity with the film, not least due to its creative amalgamation of both British and Bollywood film conventions. It was, for me, a spirited release of a rage pent-up within many females of the Asian British diaspora amidst cultural dissonance and relationships with others fraught with expectations to make the ‘right decisions.’ The ending left me quite literally muttering ‘yes’ in satisfaction- but not without inkling some sympathy even for Lena’s to-be mother-in-law (the film’s “villain”) who merely sought to overcome a helpless situation.
Polite Society was another film which many would instantly, along with Barbie and Moxie, describe as ‘feminist and stuff’ with the adjective as glaring to them as its scintillating color scheme. Women are placed into three categories: the FURY; part of an exploitative and antagonistic scheme against it; or submissive to both. A prevalent conflict between women and men (few of whom are portrayed as role models) can also be seen- however with a focus on female characters complying to, or even enforcing originally patriarchal structures. Whilst a film with (in my opinion) more than a few loopholes, what it represented were different forms of female oppression and protest: from universal expectations to ‘fit in’ and remain submissive, to those caused by immigration, educational pressures and enforced marriages.
If there is an outlook to be explored by YA feminist film, it is one which leaves us to deem film more than just ‘feminist.’ It is one which explores intersectionality and shared experiences rather than hollow products and slogans.
