I’m Allan, and I’m More Than Kenough
It can be fun and fulfilling to be Allan, but it can also be traumatizing to be reduced to a plot device in someone else's movie.
For my entire life, I’ve been, at some level, asking myself, “Are you Barbie or Oppenheimer?” About a month ago I realized that I am Barbenheimer. In other words, I’m nonbinary.
And then Hollywood released Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day, pitting not just the two films, but Man and Woman, against each other. It’s giving internal conflict!
I’ve not yet seen Oppenheimer, but I did see Barbie. It was a decent movie — not great, but pretty good. We can laud Mattel for making us laugh as it shoots itself in the corporate foot, but we should remember that the fish rots from the head down. I imagine Barbie is the whitewashed film Betty Friedan might create today if she were a filmmaker (oh, and alive) and owned pastel paints and a post-George Floyd dollhouse.
My main gripe with the film? It spends so much time constructing the matriarchy of Barbie Land and the patriarchy of the real world in ways that are zeitgeist-digestible that it doesn’t — probably can’t, maybe even shouldn’t — do the necessary work of transcending the toxic gender binary the film purportedly seeks to deconstruct. (No, casting Hari Nef does not a trans film make.)
And so I propose we turn our attention to the discontinued dolls who don’t fit neatly in either a Barbie or Ken box — in particular, Allan, the blatantly bland and adorably awkward character who made me feel the most seen. That is to say, I would argue that Allan is nonbinary.
Some have speculated that Allan is gay. No, Allan is not gay. Absolutely none of the dolls are gay. They are spayed and neutered objects; projecting your sexual confusion onto them is only going to give Margot Robbie more cellulite. Do you really want that, dear reader?
Indeed, just because Barbie not wanting to fuck Ken does not make her a lesbian. Ken wanting to kiss Barbie doesn’t make him straight either. He wants to kiss her because he hopes that being her worse half will make him whole. In reality — or whatever that means in a surreal world — he’d rather mount a horse than mount Barbie.
The true heroes of the film, as Katie Pickles writes in The Conversation, are not Barbie or Ken, who show us just how toxic both matriarchy and patriarchy are. They’re not the helpful humans: Ariana Greenblatt’s Sasha or her mother Gloria (America Ferrera), who show us that real women have not just curves, but cognitive dissonance.
The film’s true heroes? The outcasts. Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, Emerald Fennell’s Midge, and, of course, Michael Cera’s Allan.
No, Cera does not have Ryan Gosling’s abs or Robbie’s, well, anything. But everyone sees themselves in Allan. As Tariro Mzezewa writes for The Cut, “he doesn’t quite fit in with the impossibly fuff Kens” or with “the all-powerful Barbies.” The only thing aggressive about him is how aggressively average he is.
Except he isn’t average. While Ken’s job is, put simply, “beach,” he can’t even surf for the female gaze without injuring himself. He unabashedly lacks lifeguard training. Allan, his defective sidekick, is the kickboard who saves Barbie Land from drowning in its selfish sea of Barbies and Kens.
It is this sort of invisible labor that I must perform as a nonbinary person every day. For my coworkers, friends, romantic and sexual partners, parents, and everything in between, I must be a toy, therapist, comedian, compass, mirror, and soundboard. As Claire Friedman wrote in her popular New Yorker article “The Electable Female Candidate,” I must be “everything to everyone” — and yet I am routinely treated like a man who does the bare minimum, especially in the moments I refuse to play the part of self-sacrificing heroine.
I am meant to be a perfect object, even though I, like anyone else, am an imperfect subject. Before realizing I am nonbinary, I felt like an extra in my own life. Now, I am learning that while it can be fun and fulfilling to be Allan, it can also be tiring and traumatizing to be reduced to a plot device in someone else’s cookie-cutter movie.
People tell me they love me, but they often do not show it. Allan is newly beloved. We’re all seeing ourselves in Ken — how could we not? He is regular and relatable clay you can create in your human image.
The day before Barbie hit theaters, original-issue Allans were as low as $35 on eBay. In the four days since the film’s release, the starting price for many Allans had climbed to as much as $300, according to TMZ’s calculations.
Barbie‘s ending has been so polarizing, I think, because while Barbie is the film’s cinegenic protagonist, she is not Barbie Land’s future. I’d argue that the Barbie universe’s future isn’t female, but instead nonbinary — as queer theorist Judith Butler writes, we can dismantle heteronormativity only by “disidentifying” from the gender binary.
For now, I will hold onto my hope for an Allan-centered sequel, and the knowledge that an appointment with a urologist does not a man make.
Rudy Malcom is a contributing writer for Metro Weekly. He has been spending far too much time thinking about Barbie.
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