As if on cue, just a couple of days after the State of the Union and Alabama Senator Katie Britt’s eyebrow raising Republican response (which I unpacked in this space last week), the Academy Awards ceremony included a deliciously subversive performance by Ryan Gosling reinventing his showstopping dance number as Ken from Barbie. Gosling’s sparkly pink outfit and emotive singing was a welcome contrast to Britt’s beige kitchen and fundie baby voice.
Our popular culture is an ocean of discursive currents in which we swim. Britt’s and Gosling’s performances struck me as embodying twin strands of our society’s confused and confusing angst over femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and power. And they represent radically different worldviews—a Christian Nationalist one that slots people into rigid, hierarchical, patriarchal gender roles and a liberal/progressive one which has been working hard to undermine the powerful prison of those traditional gender and sexual identities over the last century at least.
If this seems like a heavy framework for something as frothy and pink as Barbie and Ken, I’d argue it’s not. In our current context where whole lives are experienced through a pervasive media lens, the messages that culture spews out are centrally important.
Thus, as Gosling sings in the opening lines “Doesn't seem to matter what I do/I'm always number two” we are reminded that number one is Barbie and he is her subordinate, that his identity is literally defined by her—which is an unusual place for a man to be in our culture that has a long history of defining women through their relationships to a man.
Gosling/Ken goes on to bemoan: “'Cause I'm just Ken, anywhere else I'd be a ten/Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?/I'm just Ken.” Typically women are denoted by their fragility and defined by their looks. These lyrics disrupt our notions of both femininity and masculinity. They meld into each other here, and in so doing, their manifestations become absurd, and we laugh.
And that’s the most seductive thing about Gosling’s performance: our laughter. Both the Academy Awards dance number and the over-the-top scene in the Barbie movie itself are hilarious.
In laughing at Ken and the Kens we’re laughing at ourselves. Gender roles and identities are, ultimately, silly. And they’re performances…always.
I’m reminded of Susan Sontag’s classic “Notes on ‘Camp,’” and her observation that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp has actively been used to interrogate gender and sexuality by underlining their artificiality.
Gosling simultaneously revels in and makes fun of his sexiness, and, much like Marilyn Monroe, upon whose performance of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes his performance was based (all the way down to the specific shade of his pink suit), he offers himself up as gorgeous eye candy while inviting the audience to guffaw at the whole spectacle. It’s one delightful joke, a true pleasure to witness.
And that, ultimately, is its power. Unlike the doom-laden drag (and not the queeny kind!) of Katie Britt’s Christian Nationalist world order, Ken, Barbie, and their pals are fun.
Thus, I’ll take the playful, the frothy, the deliciously unhinged aspects of Gosling’s anti-patriarchal performance any day over the dreary buzzkill of the puritans.
I Am Just Ken
Doesn't seem to matter what I do
I'm always number two
No one knows how hard I tried, oh-oh, I
I have feelings that I can't explain
Drivin' me insane
All my life, been so polite
But I'll sleep alone tonight
'Cause I'm just Ken, anywhere else I'd be a ten
Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?
I'm just Ken
Where I see love, she sees a friend
What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?
I wanna know what's like to love, to be the real thing
Is it a crime? Am I not hot when I'm in my feelings?
And is my moment finally here, or am I dreaming?
I'm no dreamer
Can you feel the Kenergy?
Feels so real, my Kenergy
Can you feel the Kenergy?
Feels so real, my Kenergy
I'm just Ken, anywhere else I'd be a ten
Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?
I'm just Ken
Where I see love, she sees a friend
What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?
I'm just Ken (and I'm enough)
And I'm great at doing stuff
So, hey, check me out, yeah, I'm just Ken
My name's Ken (and so am I)
Put that manly hand in mine
So, hey, world, check me out, yeah, I'm just Ken
Baby, I'm just Ken (nobody else, nobody else)
Songwriters: Mark Ronson / Andrew Wyatt