No One is Kenough

yes I'm doing Barbie discourse three weeks too late

no you aren’t

I liked Barbie just fine. I thought it was consistently entertaining and found clever ways to be the kind of franchise-starting blockbuster it was always conceived to be. The politics were a little incoherent, but that was baked into the cake from the beginning - Barbie has been targetted as a symbol of patriarchy by feminists since at least the 1970s, and there was no way the movie could avoid commenting on that. If the result are kind of bland girlbossy empowerment politics, that just demonstrates the natural constraints of this kind of filmmaking. Yes, the movie is an advertisement for a toy company. But the production design and style are as inspired as everyone says, the casting and performances are great, and it’s just generally a good time. I enjoyed it.

I did walk away from it thinking, once again, that the cultural options available to us now are conservative individualism and social justice individualism. While left and right seem totally polarized, they share one thing: the worship of the self.

At the climax of the film (so spoilers, I guess), Barbie has finally forced Ken to understand that they don’t share a destiny and that her purpose is not to be one half of Barbie & Ken. Ken has struggled to grasp this for the entirety of the movie, as he was literally created to be a partner to Barbie. (The metaphysics of all of this are a little bit muddled.) In emphasizing that Ken needs to look past romantic love and search for satisfaction within, Barbie is of course also staking a claim about her own identity and value. In doing so, she’s joining with a broad trend in kid-friendly entertainment: we no longer make movies where a heroine’s destiny is to fall in love. If you look at Disney movies in particular, the classic storyline of the protagonist getting her man in the end has been pretty definitively retired. The last movie of theirs that could be said to hold romantic love as the fundamental goal of the protagonist is Tangled, and even that’s debatable. Frozen and its sequel very directly reject that story structure, while films like Moana and Raya and the Last Dragon are indifferent to it. And, you know, that’s all fine; there’s lots of different good stories out there. But I do think that the out-and-out abandonment of the notion that love is the noblest pursuit of human life says a lot about our cult of self-worship. Because once you’ve dropped the romantic ideal, that’s all our culture really has to offer.

Barbie relays this message explicitly through the lecture Ken receives: you can’t base your value on romantic love, and so you must make yourself the locus of your own emotional life. You have to be (K)enough. This presents, I think, both social and personal problems. The social problem is that we don’t need to be even more relentlessly individualistic! Individualism is the American religion, and one of the many sins of the social justice era of progressive politics is that its adherents have finally dropped whatever remaining vestiges of communitarianism and collectivism remained in left politics. In their place they’ve advocated for the supremacy of the individual, expressed (of course) through therapeutic language and the clod mysticism of yoga pants culture. I’m sure Greta Gerwig intended to make a 21st-century feminist tale, and I think she succeeded, but perhaps not in the way she means. Because by portraying therapeutic individualism as the only alternative to patriarchy, Gerwig has underlined the degree to which individualist capitalism now undergirds both sides of the American ideological divide. Ken absorbs a childish idea of patriarchy, which he assumes has a lot to do with horses, an amusing nod to the conservative masculine ideal of the wandering cowboy, the Marlboro man. But the film teaches Ken that, indeed, rugged individualism is the right direction. After all, he is “Kenough”; he doesn’t need anyone else, and certainly not a partner in romantic love.

Like I said, there’s two problems with that. The social problem is that rugged individualism degrades the kind of communal responsibility for each other that inspires people to (for example) end poverty. The individual problem is that telling people they are enough is a cruel thing to do, because they aren’t enough. None of us is enough. I don’t know you, personally, but I can still say with great confidence that you are not enough. If you go through life uncritically accepting the Instagram ideology that you can #manifest everything you deserve because you practice #self-care and are #valid, on a long enough time frame you’re going to end up alone and miserable and profoundly aware that the idea of total emotional self-sufficiency is a transparent lie. Human beings need other human beings. All of us. You might be inclined to lament that fact, and you’re entitled to if you want. But you don’t get to choose to be self-sufficient, any more than you can choose to not require oxygen or water. We’re all interconnected in these vast webs of social influence and causality, whether we want to be or not, and very very few of us can last for long without relying on other people. The connections that save us don’t have to be romantic, but they do have to be connections. Pardon me for engaging in crude evo psych, but I think most of us are just built that way by evolutionary forces we barely understand and can’t control.

Of course, the “you are enough” crowd will say that they don’t mean that you don’t need other people or that they’re antagonistic to romantic love in general etc etc. But I think that, if true, this just reveals “you are enough” to be a deepity, an empty placeholder for a message. If we acknowledge that we need other people and always will, that mantra ceases to have any meaning at all. And those who take it too seriously will suffer, like those who take self-care or astrology or manifesting too seriously eventually suffer. Sometimes when people look at everything that’s gone wrong with our culture, and ask if there’s any path out of this mire, I’m inclined to answer that the only hope is to return to the romantic ideal - intensity, authenticity, connection to nature, living life with a sense of purpose and drama, and most of all the pursuit of transcendent love. We live in a world where technological change has rendered everything trivial and commercial; we reveal our most ridiculous selves for fleeting attention, trading dignity away so cheaply. Perhaps we can restore the cultural value of personal nobility and remember that the only way towards progress is towards each other.

Of course, it’s a pleasant and profoundly understandable fantasy, the notion that we can be enough, that we need no one else. But it is a fantasy.