The Paradox of Weird Barbie: Girlhood, Weirdness, and Agency
It’s been a little while, folks, but I’m back with another thought™.
This week, I want to talk a little bit about Barbie (2023) and the paradox of Weird Barbie, the character played by the brilliant and funny Kate McKinnon. There will be whole movie spoilers in varying degrees of detail, so here is your warning to stop reading and return to it! This piece is not a real critique of the film, as with anything I post on this substack, these are my thoughts, feelings and opinions.
The story of Weird Barbie is thus: She was pretty and perfect until a child played too hard with her. In the beginning of the film she’s ostracised by Barbies in Barbieland for being weird, a trait that doesn’t stop at her external looks but that permeates her entire character. She resides in her "weird" dreamhouse and is largely ignored by everyone except when they need her advice when something odd happens.
By the end of the film, she is canonically accepted and reflexively accepts herself as Weird Barbie.
I keep thinking about just how many kids had weird Barbies. I keep seeing tiktoks and memes about people’s weird Barbies that they played with, some with no head, some with no body, some with the body of a toilet roll, even one that survived a house fire. After the release of Barbie (2023), people have come to social media in droves to show of and or talk about their own messed up Barbies, how they came to be, how long they’ve been owned, and if they did in fact smell like basement. It’s such a common girlhood activity, yet Weird Barbie is treated as… weird.
Margo Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie talks about how her child “can’t be sad” because they “fixed everything so that all women in the real world would be happy and powerful”. This line struck and hung with me for the duration of the film, because in a world like Barbieland, where the Barbies are women, are happy, and hold all the power…. Not even all Barbies in Barbieland are happy and powerful.
Weird Barbie seems to be kind, helpful, and good-natured. She helps everyone who comes to her, even though they don’t like her all that much, and judge her for the way she looks. In a society that was supposed to empower women, the empowered women seem to find it easy to look down on the few barbies who don’t fit the norm, like perpetually pregnant Midge. This is of course, partly the lens of the real-world patriarchy that manufactures them, but I don’t know if we can completely remove the Barbies and their own minds from this outlook, especially when, in the end of the film, it hardly changes.
Now, it’s been a while since I saw the film, and I don’t have it yet to rewatch it with a more watchful eye for this topic, but the vibe I got (wow, so academic and professional) was that even in the end of the film when the Barbies apologise to Weird Barbie and bring her into the fold, she’s still somewhat set apart from them. She, like Midge, still feels like the butt of a joke, and they find her desire to work in sanitation to be, for lack of a better word, weird. Obviously, it takes some time to unlearn systemic prejudice and judgement, so I can’t really fault the movie for including that, but I did finish the movie feeling conflicted on her character for a few reasons.
A lot of children had "weird Barbies" who were actively played with and no longer looked like they did when they were in the box, so it's a bit odd to me that weird Barbie is ostracised and set apart from the rest of the Barbies when she feels like a relatively normal thing to have occurred. Actually, let’s change “child” to “girl”, since the movie and canonical Mattel keep saying “girls”, and I feel like the specification of gender here is important.
From a basic storytelling standpoint, I understand that Weird Barbie is the [literal] strange mentor figure for Barbie, our hero, to seek knowledge from. But I have feelings about how it relates to the story’s context and overall attempted messaging re: women’s empowerment and agency. She does have a unique perspective, and that’s interesting to play with.
The moment a girl takes a “normal” Barbie from the box, exercises agency, creativity, and fun in cutting her hair, giving her a sharpie make-over, and dressing her in duct tape, is the minute that Barbie loses respect. The Barbies are so into being happy and empowered, so into the belief that they brought that happiness and empowerment to women in the real world, and yet are working against each other in this way. I also think it’s interesting that they judge one of their own for looking or doing something ‘weird’ when power, to me, means being able to look and do ‘weird’ things (like cut my hair, do the splits wear a funky-coloured elbow brace) without facing damaging social repercussions or judgement. I’m using ‘weird’ here synonymously with ‘out of the expected norm’.
The Barbies value power and agency, but when they see a Barbie who is the product of that, they lose respect for her. Little girls exercise agency in making their dolls look the way they want, but then that devalues them.
It’s an interesting paradox to me.
To conclude this little segment, I feel like this could be possibly read as a metaphor for the ways women in the real world try to exercise agency and are subsequently ostracised or judged for it. I’m not sure how the women-loving Barbies ostracising her is supporting that reading, and it actually instead makes me think about how we treat abuse victims, and even autistic women, who are often targets of bullying and ostracization, but that’s a whole other tangent.
In my previous post on Barbie (Thoughts on Barbie (2023) and The Romance of Patriarchy), I posited the idea that the Barbies all buy into Girlboss Feminism. I wonder if this is why Weird Barbie is so ostracised—because she makes no strides to be anything but herself. I love her for her colour and her confidence, and her unapologetic personality.
I don’t know that the movie take many steps to support it. Like I said earlier, progress in unlearning socially conditioned prejudices can be slow. However, I did feel a little underwhelmed with the progress that we got. We value the Barbies for their smarts and competency (she’s so empowered!), and their amazing looks, and the movie plays on this for a joke (see cellulite, flat feet), but even when Weird Barbie helps deprogram everyone, shows how kind and brave and good-natured she is, and she’s brought into the community… she’s still lowkey judged for wanting to work sanitation. Someone has got to do it. And why is Barbie looking down on menial labour?
As soon as Barbies are not pristine anymore, whether they’re Kate McKinnon or just flat-footed, they're seen as "weird" in the pejorative. By the end of the film, there is not a real, broad acceptance of ‘weirdness’ or outside-the-norm beauty.
Is it meant to be reflecting how the real world often makes bare-minimum changes and acts like they're huge (ie. Will Ferrel’s character saying they've had not one female CEO but maybe TWO WHOLE WOMEN! EQUALITY!) and so we are meant to notice how it's not really much of a substantial change? I’m not sure.
Now we’re getting into “what I thought was going to happen” or “what I’d have liked to have seen” territory.
Unfortunately, though Weird Barbie is awesome, seems to have more agency than most Barbies, and is extremely knowledgeable, I don’t think she was given enough agency in helping to deprogram the other Barbies. She doesn’t do nothing, to be clear. But I think her not being used more in this sequence is a shame for a couple of reasons. Firstly, she obviously knows a lot, and is helpful in working out what deprograms Margo Robbie’s Barbie. She offers a unique point of view that I felt was underutilised, especially when we talk about the themes of beauty, expectations, girlhood, and agency.
Weird Barbie is not seen as traditionally beautiful. We know she’s smart and capable, and she is one of the Barbies with the most agency and broad perception of the world. I think I was kind of hoping she would be the one to lead the revolution against Kendom by encouraging all the Barbies to be “weird” – even just in small ways. Make some of them choose to be flat-footed (or maybe they realise they were walking like that because they thought they had to!) make some of them cut their hair, and make them accept cellulite. Because it’s the ‘weirdness’ that grants Margo Robbie’s Barbie more agency and knowledge—without her flat-footedness and her thoughts of death, without seeking out Weird Barbie, she wouldn’t have gone on this journey in the first place. She doesn’t want it; she refuses the Birkenstock at first. But it’s what she needed.
Disentanglement from patriarchy doesn’t just come with challenging the imposed beliefs of patriarchal figures. America Ferrera's speech was great, but re-empowering the Barbies by snapping them out of Ken’s patriarchy brain-washing only through that lens and not really reckoning with any other perpetuating force felt a little bit disappointing, and maybe even shallow. It’s meant to be, to some extent, because it’s very hyperbolic and in reality, there is no on/off switch.
However, my reading of the movie was such that I saw the potential for the women to start to do away with their own conditioned ideas of power and beauty, which were built into them by the patriarchal Mattell’s manufacturing, but that didn’t seem to play much of a role in their deprogramming and ultimate re-empowerment. In fact, Midge is still the butt of a joke in the end.
Weird Barbie is unburdened by the narrow confines of Barbie’s femininity (at least in the personal, individual sense), which I thought was something the other Barbies might come to desire, too, since the crux of the climax was about getting out from under patriarchy’s confining thumb. In recognising one system of oppression, and also how they were oppressing the Kens, I think they could have also recognised how they were confining themselves, too.
Jokes. I love Weird Barbie and think she’s a great character, not just for her humour but for what she represents: a bunch of weird children wanting weird dolls that were fun to make and fun to play with. I see myself in her, as a woman who grew up wearing knee-high socks, not knowing I was neurodivergent, or why I felt so apart from everyone else all the time. I’m sad the Barbie Movie didn’t use her more in its exploration of womanhood, agency, power, and individuality, but hey.
Maybe I also just really wanted a kick-ass montage of women getting together and finding joy in being weird.
What did you think?
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