“Surface <italic>and</italic> depth: ambivalence as postfeminist ideal in <italic>Barbie</italic>”.

Of the multiple instances of feminist ambivalence present in <italic>Barbie</italic>, perhaps the most poignant for cinema studies concerns the affirmation of both descriptive and interpretive practices. Across its narrative and aesthetic features, <italic>Barbie</italic> develops a logic that equates matriarchal culture with “wonderful” surface (Greta Gerwig 2023), and patriarchal culture with paranoid depth. As for the former, Greta Gerwig (2023) has characterised Barbie Land through reference to the original toy Dreamhouse: as a space of openness, where “nothing is obscured because there’s no depth, there’s no shame, there’s no aging, there’s no pain.” In contrast, the returned gaze of the real-world effects depth in the form of self-awareness; as Stereotypical Barbie remarks upon entry, “I’m conscious but it’s myself that I’m conscious of.” This opposition is redolent of recent critical debates concerning modes of reading that pit feminist and queer oriented approaches foregrounding surface against older, masculine models that assume the latency of meaning. Relative to this tension, it is interesting that <italic>Barbie</italic> has it both ways: by the film’s ending, its project to restore matriarchy to Barbie Land is realised just as Stereotypical Barbie comes to terms with her desire to join the real-world, to “be part of the people that make meaning.” This essay interrogates the surface/depth binary tendered throughout <italic>Barbie</italic>, arguing that the film’s value for contemporary feminists, specifically those working in the field of cinema studies, hinges on the unification of these levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]