Notes on Notes on Camp on Barbie
Since the big premiere of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie last weekend, you may have been hearing a lot about this hoodie that we all love. At the end of the film, Gosling’s truly incredible performance is punctuated with a pastel, tie-dyed, plush hoodie that reads, I am Kenough across the chest. I will admit, when it flashed across the big screen my first thought was: Where can I get one? So why do we love it? It’s camp. Camp in its most satisfying state. Actually, we might be able to say the whole Barbie aesthetic and a lot of the humor in the film is 'campy'. But is it a campy movie? That's a whole question...
Anytime, of course, by nature of the idea, or rather, “sentiment” of camp comes up, it is inherently challenging to put language to. That is a problem Susan Sontag both created and solved in her pivotal essay, “Notes on Camp,” using just that format (notes) to create something of a cultural thought journey to move through in a satisfying-kind-of-gray-area way. So that’s what we’ll do here.
These notes are for Susan Sontag whose notes were for Oscar Wilde
I would say that Barbie, the film, is not, itself, “camp.” It’s much too intentional, and in a way, much too ‘serious’ or maybe ‘true’ to be ‘pure camp’. But it uses camp aesthetics, camp humor, and camp ideology to reach us in such a satisfying and powerful way.
We keep making ironies out of our own trends. Gerwig and costume designer, Jacqueline Durran did so much to start this movement of reclaiming that bold femininity in ‘Barbie-core’. But then why are there so many Barbie merch collaborations with anti-aging and general ‘perfecting’ beauty products? Of course, all of these are targeted mainly toward women. Meanwhile, the main Mattel product targeted to men? Probably the I am Kenough hoodie. Ironic, right? By revisiting the idea of Barbie through a new, complex lens, didn’t we want to dissect beauty standards in their relationship to capitalism, consumerism, and misogyny?
Interesting, and… oops, maybe actually “pure camp” in that it’s entirely (I think?) naive. (Though maybe less so than I want to believe).
Sontag tackles this idea of camp and artifice stating, “Nothing in nature can be camp”... Well this one is simple: Barbie- plastic and perfect and artificial- invites this level of exaggeration. We see it highlighted and juxtaposed throughout the entire film.
Here’s where, I think, things become really interesting… in her “notes,” Sontag pokes at the androgyny of camp. Pointing out, at the very same time, “a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics.” Which kind of comes up in the whole gender-fuckery of the Barbie film. The reversal and exaggeration of gender norms, when placed on ‘men’ or ‘Kens’ in Barbie Land is made to seem so absurd until we realize outside of Barbie Land it is the reality for women…
Sontag goes on to write: [Camp] is not woman but “woman”. Yes– Barbie, exactly Barbie. Then this: “It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater,” and I imagine Margot Robbie pouring an empty cup of tea into her mouth.
“Camp is a consistently aesthetic experience of the world” … Barbie Land.
Sontag clarifies that pure camp is always naive… “a seriousness that fails.” Well, this is Ken wearing the “I am Kenough” hoodie. This is why we love it so much. This is why it’s so satisfying. But the sentiment does not apply to Gerwig’s Barbie as a whole.
Here’s Sontag’s #34:
OKAY THEN IN 35, SHE WRITES THE LINE I THINK ABOUT ALL THE TIME! Sontag rightly points out that since antiquity (and through our lasting obsession with it to this day), we stubbornly value, when it comes to ‘taste,’ “... the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.” WHICH, by the way, is an extremely patriarchal ideal. This is where Barbie is so smart: it doesn’t use that ‘pantheon’! But it’s still, truly, a “good film.” Folks went in thinking it would be a silly comedy to lighten the mood after a viewing of Oppenheimer (definitely serious in all the ways we think of a ‘serious,’ ‘good’ film to be), only to be confused when it was silly, and it was fun, but it was also a very important journey through something incredibly serious.
“One cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture.” - Sontag note 36
Okay so this brings me to my other favorite parts, notes 41 and 42:
Being ”serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious” was one of the most powerful choices that could have been made in making a Barbie film.
Barbie was not “good because it was awful,” as Sontage says of camp, it was good because it was good. And it was good because it leveraged humor and aesthetics that were good through an exaggeration of the “awful.” Ken’s ‘I am Kenough’ hoodie did both: camp in humor and aesthetic. It’s funny cause it’s stupid, stylish cause it disregards “taste” as far as “the pantheon of high culture” is concerned.
And if the only reason you opened the article was this, I don’t blame you. And yes, I did find the hoodie. Should you understand the irony of being influenced to purchase Mattel merch after seeing the film (honestly, same) you can buy it here: and btw you really are Kenough <3
