Barbie's Battle of the Kens Is Liberal Feminism Trying and Failing to Tame the Warrior Male

Thoughts on a very silly movie scene

“If the film has a serious weakness,” I wrote in a recent review published elsewhere of the strange summer hit Barbie, “it is [director Greta] Gerwig’s understanding of Kens.” In her film, “‘patriarchy’ is not really analyzed or explained so much as transmitted from the real world to Barbie-world by mere knowledge of its existence.”

The battle of the Kens in the third act is cartoonish, a lampoon of intergroup violence scenes in the age of Marvel superheroes. Gosling’s Ken and the Ken played by Simu Liu are set up as antagonists from the beginning; Barbie stirs the rivalry of all the Kens, and the rest of the Kens simply fall into line behind Gosling and Liu.

Thus the newly-violent politics of the Kens derive from individual jealousy, but rather than every Ken for himself against all the other Kens, they divide into teams of Kens and battle collectively. This is a yawning plot hole — not just in Barbie, but in feminist analysis of war. War is just a dumb thing boys do. Kens are interchangeable and so are their wars. Who cares about that stuff when there are fashionable outfits and glitzy earrings and vintage boots?

To be clear, the battle scene is hilarious. It is meant to be a comic moment in a movie for little girls. But it is also a window of the feminist view on the beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan, and by extension, every combat narrative ever portrayed on film. Watch the scene and try to imagine it happening with, say, GI Joes. It only works because Ken dolls do not come with weapons; the scene uses random playtime accessories instead.

Kens (they are all Kens) ride hobby horses into battle because the Gosling Ken has confused horses with manhood (“they’re just man-extenders,” he later quips.) It is Gerwig’s way of trashing John Wayne and remarking on the glorification of masculine violence through film. If only men would stop trying to be cowboys, her film suggests, then the whole world would be happy and at peace. What rot.