How Barbie's Cutting Satire & Loving Fan-Service Prove Cash-Ins Can Be Clever

There are many brilliant things about the "Barbie" movie, and one of them is, without question, Ken. Played to perfection by Ryan Gosling, Ken starts the narrative as Barbie's emotional support animal, for all intents and purposes, but when he joins her in the real world, he realizes that over there, men run things — not women. Ken, unsurprisingly, loves this. After grabbing books from a school library that focus on everything from trucks to horses to the patriarchy, Ken returns to Barbie Land without Barbie and transforms the landscape, brainwashing the Barbies alongside the other Kens and forming a new government called the "Kendom." (It involves a lot of video screens playing footage of horses on a loop, and a bunch of mini-fridges stocked with what the Kens call "brewski beers.")

The Barbies ultimately return Barbie Land to its rightful state, but in the process, Ken admits something crucial to Barbie: he didn't really like Kendom all that much. (In one of the movie's best lines, Ken tells Barbie that when he realized patriarchy didn't have as much to do with horses as he hoped, he basically lost interest.) What Gerwig does, through Ken's character, is make it clear that the patriarchy isn't good for the Kens either. Ken and Barbie need to be on a slightly more equal footing, a conclusion Barbie eventually reaches by the end of the movie. As she admits, not every night "needs" to be girl's night, but there can be balance while the matriarchy remains.