![]() I think they're really playing on the sort of, not tension, but the twist of the trope, which is that very often we have superhero movies or we have, whatever the story is, and it's all about the guy.Īnd he has this girlfriend who's not a really fully fleshed-out character, and who really only exists or matters insofar as she has this boyfriend. Tamkin: With euphoria, with obsession? No, I think it's great. Do you remember reacting to that in any particular way? Klimek: There's a big reaction to the first appearance of Ken, Ryan Gosling's Ken, in the trailers for the Barbie movie. Klimek: I wrote a companion piece to Emily’s article about different Ken dolls through the years, and I wanted to compare notes about this simultaneously iconic and overlooked doll. Robbie (as Barbie): What's going on? Why are these men looking at me? We had both just seen the trailer for the new movie. Klimek: We spoke with Emily Tamkin just before the Barbie movie hit theaters and just after her article came out. Today, we turn our attention to the Ken doll … Someone should do it! Klimek: From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, welcome to “There's More to That," a podcast where journalists around the world bring you history, science and culture through the lens of Smithsonian magazine. He's an accessory-and not even one of the cool ones. Gosling: I was, uh, surprised how, you know, some people were kind of clutching their pearls about my Ken as though they ever thought about Ken for a second. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon last summer, Ryan Gosling talked about what it was like for him when the world found out he was playing Ken. And Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, learns about something called “the patriarchy.” ![]() ![]() But everything changes when Barbie–played by Margot Robbie–has an existential crisis. If Barbie was presented to girls as an aspirational ideal of womanhood, what does that say about Ken? Greta Gerwig’s new film Barbie opens in a pink plastic utopia called Barbieland. So even if he was the father or the boyfriend or the husband or the professor or the teacher, whatever he was, it wasn't like, “Today we're going to play this really great game and it's all going to be about Ken”–ever. I can't remember ever having a Barbie game where the plot centered around the Ken. Tamkin: I think that my Kens sort of fell into the traditional Ken paradigm where, you know, he was always in relation to Barbie. She also said that in her own play, the character of Ken took something of a backseat in Barbie’s pink convertible. Klimek: Emily recently wrote about the history of the Barbie doll for Smithsonian magazine. Klimek: What was the outcome of the case? Tamkin: In the ’90s, when a sexual harassment case came before the Supreme Court, I somehow as like a 9-year-old found out about this and had my Barbie take her boyfriend Ken to court for sexual harassment. And in all her imaginary plotlines, Emily can only remember her Ken doll playing one featured part. Klimek: Barbie was always the star of the show. They had the trailer that we would load the Barbies up into for road trips. They took extended family trips together. Chris Klimek, host: When writer Emily Tamkin was little, she created a whole imagined life for her Barbie and Ken dolls.Įmily Tamkin, Smithsonian magazine contributor: We sent these Barbies to college. ![]()
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