After some friends went to see the “Barbie” movie, they complained that they didn’t like the ending; they thought that the Barbies should have been more “fair” to the Kens and let them have a greater share in running Barbieland.

My response was that the Kens were not yet ready for that responsibility, because they were not yet fully-fledged individuals. As Beach Ken laments, he only exists when Barbie notices him; he has no inner life, no sense of self as a separate person.

I’ve written before about how most of us land somewhere on the neurosis continuum between narcissism and borderline personality. We may not be fully-fledged as either, but still have certain tendencies. Those who tend toward the borderline side often lack a strong sense of self. As a result, they look for a strong personality and try to get that person to notice/like them as a way of feeling okay about themselves. All too often that strong personality is a narcissist who is only too happy to receive adoration, because that’s how narcissists feel good about themselves. And so a codependent relationship results where each partner needs the other to feel good.

Ken is very much a borderline type. But Barbie isn’t a narcissist. She doesn’t need Ken, and he knows it. Yet he keeps on trying to please her, because he doesn’t know any other way to be. He wants her to need his adoration, which is all he has to give.

I was married to a Ken. He looked good–the typical “tall dark & handsome” man–and he was extremely intelligent, so I didn’t understand for quite a long time that he didn’t have a strong inner life. But he knew, and he told me outright: he said “I have no land of my own, so I look for someone who does and I try to move onto theirs.” He moved in with me in a matter of months, over my objections that I wasn’t sure I was ready to take that step. His adoration, expressed daily in words and in gifts, made me uncomfortable, and I had to ask him many times to dial it down. But eventually he got me to marry him.

He not only moved onto my land; like Ken, he took it over. Lack of boundaries soon became an issue in our marriage, including the times I heard him telling a story about something that I had done or experienced as if it had happened to him. When I challenged him on this, he replied, “well, your story felt so real to me it was like I’d done it.” He had no sense of himself as separate himself from me, or me from him. He wanted me to stop pursuing my own career and instead run his business for him; he didn’t want me to so much as read a book while we were in the same room because “then you’re not really with me.” He got rid of things that belonged to me, without permission, if he didn’t like them, or “accidentally” broke them.

Eventually, the adoration stopped. Instead he started undermining my sense of self by criticizing my family, my friends, my choices, and eventually my personality: I was too much this, too much that–all the things he said he adored and needed when he was wooing me became problematic. When I would not give up my career to run his business, he left me for another woman.

And left her for another, and left that woman for another . . . typical borderline behavior, always in search of the perfect partner who would “make” him feel okay about himself. All his friends and counselors told him he needed to take time alone to figure out who he was, but he never did.

Once Beach Ken goes to the real world and realizes that men there relate very differently to women there than they do in Barbieland, his response is to take Barbieland over. He moves into Barbie’s own house and changes everything–telling her she’s welcome to become his “long-term long-distance low-commitment casual girlfriend.” Now that he has taken her land, he thinks it means they’ve switched roles. He thinks she will now start basing her identity on him as he saw women doing with men in the “real world.” He sings the 90s-era song “Push” by Matchbox Twenty:

Said I don’t know if I’ve ever been good enough
I’m a little bit rusty, and I think my head is cavin’ in
And I don’t know if I’ve ever been really loved
By a hand that’s touched me
And I feel like something’s gonna give

And I’m a little bit angry, well
This ain’t over, no, not here
Not while I still need you around
You don’t owe me, we might change, yeah
Yeah, we just might feel good

I wanna push you around
Well, I will, well, I will
I wanna push you down
Well, I will, well, I will
I wanna take you for granted

The author of the song, Rob Thomas, says he wrote it after a bad relationship. “It was about emotional manipulation. It was just about this idea that it’s so much easier to find someone you can take advantage of than it is to actually put work into a relationship.”

The other Kens copy Beach Ken, and for a while, many of the Barbies go along with this concept. Critical thinking has not been a feature of Barbieland–which after all, is based on the dreams and hopes of children–and the idea that some people are to be adored while the others do the adoring is deep in the cultural psyche. So it’s not surprising perhaps that the Barbies accept the idea that it’s their turn to be the adorers. But just as Beach Ken has brought ideas back from the real world, so has Stereotypical Barbie, in the persons of Gloria, who in a way is still “playing Barbie” and is the one who caused Stereotypical Barbie to start thinking–and her daughter Sasha, a tween girl who is seething over the misogyny of her world. Sharing their truths, they wake the rest of the Barbies out of their trances.

The Barbies defeat the takeover of Barbieland by giving the Kens exactly what they think they want–their unstinting attention–and then switching their attention to other Kens, triggering the Kens’ deep insecurity. The Kens start fighting each other, because whether they’re in charge or not, it’s still all about getting the Barbies to validate them.

The Barbies agree that the Kens can start to take on more roles in the community, but they’re not ready to hand too much power to the Kens just yet. As Stereotypical Barbie tells Beach Ken at the end, he needs to find out who he is for himself. Like all borderline types, he needs to build his own internal landscape. I would have liked to see the Kens all start building their OWN dream homes–the perfect metaphor for the kind of psychological work they need to do to become fully individual. At least, at the end, we see Beach Ken waving goodbye to Barbie while wearing a shirt that says “I am Kenough.” He has grown to recognize that Barbie can have a separate life, and so, maybe, can he.