Within months of releasing the hit single “Barbie Girl” by the Danish-Norwegian dance-pop group, Aqua, MCA Records was sued by Mattel for the former’s alleged infringement of the latter’s copyright. As most international corporations are wont to do, Mattel attempted to claim ownership over the un-ownable. Such is the fantasy of intellectual property which, under scrutiny, reveals the fundamentally precarious nature of all property. Ownership is but a name on a piece of paper respected by people with guns. In reality, you can’t own Barbie any more than you can own the wind.
The case was, thankfully, dismissed, but it was nonetheless a harbinger of the heightened corporate greed that would come to define 21st century cultural and economic life. In her book, No Logo, Naomi Klein cites the case in her argument that globalization globalized nothing but monopoly. It is not difficult to imagine that the lyric “I am a Barbie girl in a Barbie world” struck a nerve on some level with the executives at Mattel, who recognized in the kitschy masterpiece a searing indictment of the ascension of commodity fetishism. Like its spiritual predecessor, Madonna’s cheekily anticapitalist anthem “Material Girl,” Aqua’s hit synthesized its contemporaneous zeitgeist into a pitch perfect critique of the brand, as well its chokehold on the collective global imagination. Is there a better Orwellian phrase than “life is plastic, it’s fantastic”?
In the conclusion of the hit television program, Succession, ostensible Waystar-Royco CEO frontrunner Kendall Roy is devastated to learn that he, once again, failed to take over the position once promised to him by his father. For four grueling seasons, we watched and groaned as this manchild flailed about demanding his so-called birthright. We watched him repeatedly try to “kill” his father, the oedipal implications of which were stressed by his rabid-yet-impotent younger brother, only to return to his arms crying as the old racist man cooed “you’re my number one boy.” Beyond the position, the money, and the prestige, this is all Kendall ever really wanted. He even frames it as such when he feebly attempts to regain his sister’s vote in the climax of the series finale: “I am the oldest boy.” His failure to inspire confidence in his own siblings, let alone the shareholders of a massive publicly traded company, reveals the bitter truth that Kendall finally seems on the precipice of swallowing in the park in that last shot: he is neither a king nor the number one boy—he’s just Ken.
But he is, of course, not the only Ken around. Ryan Gosling is set to play the iconic man-doll in the forthcoming Barbie, the third entry in the burgeoning oeuvre of the Greta Gerwig. Promotion released thus far for the film indicate that Ken is less of a partner to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, and more of a romantic sidekick; a himbo in the purest and most technical sense of the word. The feminist implications of this decision are self-evident, but what requires more active exploration is the intricate relationship between the (meta)text of the story and the media landscape in which it finds itself. Namely, its striking, and shockingly underdiscussed, relationship with the popular, albeit shallow, rumination on the entertainment industry presented in Succession.[1]
Despite differences in tone between their performances, both Ryan Gosling and Jeremy Strong understand full well the tragic pathos of their respective Kens, as well as the tragedy of their limitations. The former’s Ken has fully resolved himself to the fantastic life of plastic ominously promised by Aqua, accepting that he is nothing but product and intellectual property. It is clear that his character arc in the film will concern the trauma of being yanked out of Barbieworld and forced into the violently dull existence of ours. It is there that Gosling’s Ken will have to figure out who he is outside the confines of a cardboard box or a television screen. The inevitable answer, of course, is nothing, for he is a man who can only exist in media, only when he is mediated.
In contrast, Strong’s Ken is a man who wishes to mediate the media, to ascend a throne that doesn’t exist. Much like the hubristic Mattel executives of the 1990s, he seeks to own the wind. He is therefore the darker Ken, the one who believes himself to be raging against the dying of the light when in reality he is the one extinguishing it. His sister glimpses this darkness within him, and is mortified. No wonder Ken tries to gouge out his brother’s eyes following the siblings’ betrayal. Unlike Oedipus, he is not horrified by sight, but by being seen. He cannot find the surrender, a kind of quiet death, that Gosling’s Ken has found in Barbieworld. Nor can he venture out into the world and exist as a man free of the lure of the culture industry. He must dominate or he will die.
As though the connection between these two heartbreaking characters wasn’t clear enough, the naming of Strong’s Ken emphasizes the way in which they are no more than two sides of the same coin. It is not simply that he goes by the nickname “Ken,” but consider what it’s short for: Kendall. Not Kenneth, Kenan, Kendrick, Kennedy, Mackenzie, Kenson, or Kenelm. It’s no wonder then that Kendall Roy, despite literally being responsible for someone’s death, inevitably goes through a babygirlification process, achieving resounding popularity with teenage girls. He is but the edgier facsimile of the Ken Dolls they had just been playing with five years prior. They see within him a masculinity that we might call post-toxic; enmeshed in its own suffering, its Sisyphean pursuit of number-one-boy status, and its desire to find a woman, like Barbie, to whom it can surrender.
About a year into Succession’s run, this dialectic between the two Kens was prophetically explored by one of the few tolerable SNL sketches of the last decade. While a simple reading might render the panel foolish, the more astute viewer will understand that their confusion is the natural result of the impossibility of grasping a singular Ken Doll as explained by Kenan Thompson’s character. Mattel wants Ken to be both “Wall Street…and surf,” but this cannot be. The performers reenact history in this scene, the executives shutting down the suggestions the same way that Mattel attempted to censor Aqua’s brave anti-corporate statement 30 years ago. In reality, of course, the center could not hold, and it is collapsing from underneath them as we speak. What was under the jacuzzi? Simple: what Mattel has been desperate to sweep under the rug for all of its existence, the very unravelling of American masculinity. Much like the Ken in the sketch, we grow up in a world in which the name plastered all around the house is not ours. We delude ourselves into two choices: the defeatism of Gosling, or the inflated grandeur of Strong. A better Ken must be possible if a better world is to be possible, one that is just as fantastic without the plastic.
Horatio Fatoushccine is wust el-balad’s critic-at-large. A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, he studies the temporalities of resistant ruptures to (post)colonial epistemic violence.
[1] It has “a lot” to say sure, but not much of it seems very interested in saying anything about real news or media organizations in our own world.