It’s not easy being the ideal woman’s ideal man. In Barbieland, where the winding, styrofoam-pebbled road of Barbie begins, women are perfect and all-powerful. They are presidents and physicists, all nine members of the Supreme Court, and every face on Mount Rushmore. It’s a world, Helen Mirren’s narrator informs us, where “women can be anything” and “all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.”
Good news for Barbie, but not so much for Ken. The Barbies’ Kens—they are all named Ken, just as all the Barbies are named Barbie—are sculpted Adonises with perfect hair and washboard abs, but they don’t serve any real function. Where the Barbies are individuated by their professions—Lawyer Barbie, Diplomat Barbie—the Kens are simply Ken. The closest that Ryan Gosling’s Ken, the designated mate to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, can come to defining his job is “beach”—not lifeguard, he explains, “which is a common misconception.” His real purpose is just to be, looking handsome and being nearby on the off chance that a Barbie needs something.
Barbies and Kens alike are under the impression that their matriarchal utopia is a mirror of the real world; surely, decades of playing with highly accomplished dolls must have overcome whatever biases existed in darker pre-Mattel times. But when Barbie and Ken make their way to Los Angeles in an attempt to track down the source of a disturbance in Barbieland’s perpetual bliss, they find themselves in a place that’s far less progressive, and far less pink, than their own. Barbie gets catcalled on the street and discovers that the company marketing her girl-power brand is run by an all-male board. But Ken discovers something different: a world where men hold power, where they are noticed and admired—a place where men matter.
Ken is the closest thing Barbie has to a villain, unless you count patriarchy itself. Upon returning to Barbieland, he and the other Kens (others Ken?) take control in a bloodless coup, and by the time Barbie makes her way back, she’s been literally displaced. Her dream home is now Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, and the Barbies who once ruled the world wear frilly maid outfits and serve cocktails. But Gosling doesn’t play Ken as a bad guy, just a boy in a world where every night is girls’ night. He doesn’t really understand how patriarchy works—except that it seems to involve horses somehow?—but he knows the feeling of only existing in relation to someone else. “I don’t know who I am without you,” he says to Barbie, with a plaintive simplicity that’s almost heartbreaking. “It’s ‘Barbie and Ken.’ There is no ‘just Ken.’ ”
If, as director and co-writer Greta Gerwig has strongly implied, Barbieland is Barbie’s Eden, then Ken is its Eve, created from Barbie’s plastic rib as her loyal companion. It’s a role that Gosling has extended to the movie’s press tour (at least, before it was curtailed by the Screen Actors Guild strike). As Gerwig and Robbie dig into the movie’s subtext and shore up its feminist bona fides, Gosling has played the good-natured dope, leading some to worry—or hope—that he’s wedded to the Ken persona as permanently as Austin Butler was to Elvis Presley’s voice. A lot of male actors, especially of a certain age (Gosling is 42), would devote the media cycle around a movie built on gags about their character’s inadequacy to reestablishing their own dominance, the way straight men used to soak up accolades for playing gay roles while seizing every opportunity to drop a mention of their girlfriends. But Gosling seems to be having the time of his life embodying a genial beta male. “I went on the ride and I’m still going on it,” he told the New York Times. “I don’t want to leave the park. They are kicking me out. ‘The park is closing, sir.’ But I ordered churros and they are coming, I swear.” (He’s even the consummate Wife Guy, posing for red-carpet photos with his wife’s first initial—in the Barbie font, of course—on a chain around his neck.)
Although one of his first leading roles was as the young Hercules, Gosling has spent much of his career complicating masculine archetypes, whether by undermining them or taking them to their hyperbolic and self-immolating extremes. His unnamed wheelman in Drive is the embodiment of cool, stoic, and silent as he slips past the police in a satin scorpion jacket. But his machismo is embryonic, not triumphant: In the light of day, and minus his sunglasses, his face is open and unlined, like a child’s. (Ken has his own pair of shades, which, Gosling explains, he uses to hide his sadness.) In The Nice Guys, he’s a private investigator in Los Angeles, but instead of a hard-boiled gumshoe, he’s a hapless flailer who has to resort to having his tween daughter drive him around town after a real tough guy, Russell Crowe’s burly enforcer, breaks his arm. Crowe warns him of the precise nature of the fracture he’s about to give him, and Gosling plays it cool until the moment Crowe twists, at which point he emits a high-pitched and decidedly unmanly yelp. In Barbie, Gerwig directed Gosling to cry the way her 4-year-old son does.
This isn’t even the first time Gosling has starred opposite a doll. In 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl, he’s a pathologically withdrawn man who can’t stand the touch of a human hand. So instead of finding a nice girl, he buys one, a life-sized sex doll he names Bianca. Although she, unlike Barbie (or Ken, for that matter), is anatomically correct, Lars’ intentions are entirely courtly. (Ken’s are fairly tame too, but he goes in for a smooch a few times and is soundly rebuffed.) All he wants is someone to lavish his attention on, but he starts to notice other men noticing her, including one at a party who, after inquiring about whether Bianca is “flexible,” proclaims her the ideal woman because “she doesn’t know how hot she is.” There’s no such leering in Gosling’s performance, though, just the plaintiveness of an actor with no hesitations about playing vulnerability to its most painful ends.
The closest thing to Ken in Gosling’s previous filmography is his character in Crazy, Stupid, Love, a self-styled ladies’ man who takes Steve Carell’s hapless middle-aged dad under his wing. (In certain circles of the internet, the pair might be known as a PUA and a cuck.) Gosling’s Jacob is Ken if he’d been born to male entitlement rather than stumbling upon it later, intoxicated by his own cocksureness, and with abs so chiseled that one astonished conquest says he looks like he was created in Photoshop. He’s just this side of irredeemable, but it becomes clear that he doesn’t get any more from the women he sleeps with than they get from him. He crows that “the war between the sexes is over, and we won,” but Gosling plays him like a loser, even if he is one who looks awfully good with his shirt off.
Crazy, Stupid, Love was released in 2011, the same year as Drive, and the year that gave birth to Feminist Ryan Gosling, the wildly popular Tumblr that paired dreamy photos of Gosling with references to feminist theory. (Sample: “Hey girl, I know how Judith Butler feels about subverting the dominant paradigm and rejecting the naturalization of heteronormativity, but I got you this flower.”) It might seem counterintuitive that two of his most toxic roles might lead to Gosling being elevated as a feminist icon, but it was clear from the way he played them which side he was on, even if the dudes trying to cop his scorpion jacket weren’t in on the joke.
In The Nice Guys, Gosling’s rumpled PI laments that “the days of ladies and gentlemen are over,” but Gosling is at his best playing men whose time has passed. Perhaps he’s just so at ease with his own present that it doesn’t bruise his ego to play also-rans and second fiddles, but the sheer enthusiasm he brings to those parts, the willingness to look like a goofball or a patsy, allows him to steal the show right out from under his ostensible superiors. Even the 20th century’s most iconic doll can barely match his Kenergy.
