The movie alludes to his smooth nether region, that time he inadvertently became a gay icon, and, ultimately, Mattel’s own tendency to think of him as superfluous. “Dealing with all the strangeness of it is a way of honoring it.” For the character of Ken, that meant engaging with a people’s history of the doll rather than the one you might find in a Mattel press release. “I think all the dead ends are a reminder that they were just trying stuff out,” Gerwig said of Mattel in a recent New Yorker story.

But as diligent students of the Barbie-verse, Gerwig and Baumbach are also incorporating the cultural conversation that has surrounded Mattel’s Ken doll since his 1961 inception: his obsessed-over introduction, makeover snafus, and Mattel’s shifting strategy in his marketing that add up to his current-day persona as an afterthought. Through Ken’s evolution, Gerwig and her cowriter/partner Noah Baumbach are no doubt gesturing at a yearslong discourse that suggests “men are lost” in a society in which it’s increasingly hard to get ahead, and women can surpass them in earning power and professional accomplishment. He trades in his pink cotton shorts for a hyper-masculine ninja-slash-biker(?) outfit and a floor-length fur coat he installs an excessive amount of giant flatscreen TVs all over Barbie’s Dreamhouse, as if it’s a sports bar he starts singing about wanting to take Barbie “for granted” in an acoustic rendition of Matchbox Twenty’s “Push.” Finally, his tyranny dissipates into self-pity during an elaborate musical soliloquy called “Just Ken,” in which he asks: “Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blond fragility?” After stowing away with Barbie on her quest to the real world, Ken gets a taste of the patriarchy, and his alienation mutates into a childish misogyny. Always an Instagram boyfriend, never an influencer. He ruminates in the shadows, just outside Barbie’s disco spotlight. Played with an innocence that could only come from the cobwebbed Mickey Mouse Club corners of Gosling’s mind, Ken struggles to find his own self-worth. The Sheer Scale of ‘Oppenheimer’ The Often Wacky, Sometimes Wicked, and Always Wondrous Eras of Barbie The Complete Guide to Everything Barbenheimerįrom this unsatisfying environment emerges the most complex Ken to date.

Shadow of a doubt movie 1995