Let’s hear it for Ken.
Yes, I’m talking about the Mattel doll or, as my son called him in his day care days, “Barbie’s action figure.”
My wife and I saw Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” in the theater a few nights ago, seeking something therapeutically light after seeing “Oppenheimer,” and I now see Barbie’s perpetual boyfriend with new eyes.
Typical of members of our generation, my wife loved Barbie like a member of her family, she told me, especially after Mattel widened its choices of Barbie’s complexion, which is why I took her to see the “Barbie” film. Gerwig and her co-writer, Noah Baumbach, are two of their generation’s most interesting filmmakers, and besides, I didn’t want fellow moviegoers to see me and wonder why an old guy had come to “Barbie” by himself.
As a fan of G.I. Joe toys in my younger days, I wondered in particular how this film would handle Ken, whom I recall as a perpetual second banana to Barbie’s stardom.
In the movie, Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, uses a song early in the film titled “I’m Just Ken” to sing and dance like John Travolta in “Grease” and reveal his own inner Ken. It’s an all-male Busby Berkeley-style dance extravaganza, in which Ken tries to smile his way through his frustration over his seemingly shallow existence at Barbie’s elbow on his way to Malibu Beach.
“Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blond fragility?” he wonders. “I’m just Ken. … What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?”
Poor Ken. It’s got to be tough to fight your way out of the glare of Barbie’s celebrity, which fills almost every other scene with seemingly endless shades of Barbie pink.
“I just don’t know who I am without you,” he says to Barbie.
“You’re Ken,” she tells him.
“But it’s Barbie … and Ken,” he points out. “There is no ‘just Ken.’ ”
Of course, he’s right, as he emphasizes in his song: “Doesn’t seem to matter what I do. I’m always No. 2,” Ken croons.
Alas, ’tis so true. What will it take, he wonders, for Barbie to see the real him? Well, no spoilers here. Let us leave the man behind the tan – full of Ken-ergy, as he is – to ponder how his lament resonates with members of today’s young generation who are navigating the real world, mostly without a musical soundtrack.
Interestingly, I have found a number of female commentators who seem to find some redemption of Barbie, from the days when, as feminist icon Gloria Steinem said in the 2018 documentary “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie,” she was “everything we didn’t want to be, … everything the feminist movement was trying to escape.”
That was an earlier wave of feminism when the movement and its standards were less tolerant of cultural and lifestyle diversity than they are today. Women couldn’t even get a credit card in their own name before 1974, activists point out.
Over time, masculinity such as that which Ken represents was defined increasingly as being in direct conflict with the rise of equal rights for women, as Susan Faludi pointed out in her now-classic 1991 book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.”
As Rodney King famously said, “Can’t we all get along?”
In today’s polarized politics, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, charges, “The left wants to define traditional American masculinity as ‘toxic.’ They want to redefine traditional masculine virtues like courage, independence and assertiveness as a danger to society.”
Not even. But we do have a lot of male frustration about changing economic conditions since the 1960s that offer demagogues plenty of mud to sling in pursuit of votes and political clout.
It’s not news anymore that women have been making progress academically and professionally at a faster pace than men in recent decades – and a lot of men, bless our hearts, are responding in the worst way. Witness the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, to name one example.
My own dad offered the right response to such dangerous, self-defeating folly:
Grow up.
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