This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk announced that he would be rebranding his social-media platform: Twitter is now, simply, X. Speculation abounded as to why Musk would trade a well-known brand for a letter typically associated with rejection and porn: spite, maybe. Or maybe—the most absurd theory, and therefore the most likely—the man who had named his car models “S,” “3,” “X,” and “Y” was doing it, once again, for the lols. Soon after Twitter became X, employees reported, the conference rooms of its headquarters were rechristened. The staffers Musk hasn’t yet fired can now plan the future of democratized conversation from a meeting room named “s3Xy.”

X was released, as it happened, the same weekend that the Barbie movie was. The coincidence was eloquent. Barbie is a film about its namesake, definitely, and an exploration of impossible womanhood. But it is also a film about Ken—a Ken who, in the director Greta Gerwig’s rendering, sheds his status as Barbie’s bland accessory to become … a power-addled man-child determined to turn the world into his plaything. No element of Barbie’s aggressive marketing campaign could have bought the relevance created by a 52-year-old tech titan who, when he is not moving fast and/or breaking things, amuses himself by finding new ways to write “69” into the public record.

Americans live under gerontocracy, many pundits have argued: Too many of our leaders, having tasted power and then spent decades consolidating it, refuse to cede their spoils to anybody else. The broader truth is even more lamentable, though, because it involves leaders who, unable to contend with power’s responsibilities, treat our future as their toy. Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have spent weeks fueling speculation that they will settle their business differences by way of a televised cage match. Americans gave our nuclear codes to a Brioni-swaddled toddler. We may well do it again. We live in the thrall of impetuous boy-kings. No fictional figure has captured the absurdity of that situation, and the tragedy of it, better than a doll who looks like a man but inflicts himself on the world with a boy’s impish glee. Ken demands attention. He throws tantrums. He sows chaos. He threatens the whole order of things. He is the plastic core of Barbie’s world—and a bleached-blond satire of ours.

Barbie Land is, allegedly, a place of childish dreams, safe and happy and sterile and pink. “Girl power,” in the land of the dolls, is not a well-lit lie; it is, on the contrary, the only truth that exists—the scaffolding that supports every wall-less Dream House. It shapes not only the Barbies’ professional lives (President Barbie, Physicist Barbie, Doctor Barbie) but also their sense of the world they occupy. The Barbies are self-confident and self-actualized and just generally delighted, and of course they are: They have never had reason to be otherwise. In Barbie Land, the Barbies are fond of reminding themselves that every day is “the best day ever.”

[Read: What’s the matter with Barbie?]

There are Kens in Barbie Land, but they are, like the doll himself, variously decorative and superfluous. Where do the Kens live? What Dream Cars do they drive? Such questions are moot. In a place that treats possessions as proxies for personal fulfillment, the Kens seem to have none. Nor, in a society that equates profession with identity, do they have apparent careers. The Kens do have a job, though: to serve as reliable extras in the Barbies’ shiny show. The Kens are there when they’re needed. They’re cheerful. They’re patient. They’re always ready to don sequins and smiles for an intricately choreographed dance number. They are, like pretty much everything else in Barbie Land, aggressively uncomplicated. They are also, as a result, extremely boring.

Except, that is, for one of them: the Ken who is paired, per the two-by-two logic of Barbie Land, with Stereotypical Barbie. This Ken, played—inhabited—by Ryan Gosling, chafes against his class status. Barbie Land may look like a Paradise Island–style matriarchy whose Amazons are 11 inches tall and molded of polyvinyl chloride; Ken, though, is a reminder of the brute limits of its utopia. The film’s most obvious problem comes early on, when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) finds herself afflicted by the assorted insults of the human condition (imperfectly browned toast, thoughts of death, cellulite). But Barbie Land’s prefab perfections were imperfect well before Barbie’s crisis. Ken bears the brunt of its errors. He is not merely Barbie’s plaything; he is also the recipient of her casual cruelty. “You can go now,” Barbie tells him, flashing a smile as his face falls. Later: “I don’t want you here.”

These are the types of lines that have earned Barbie, in the days since its release, some indignant accusations of man-hating and sexism and “toxic femininity.” What the criticisms miss, though—or perhaps ignore—is that irony might be present even in a film about toys. The dynamics of Barbie Land are both complicated and simple: Barbie, insulated in its confines, represents—in real-world terms—the beneficiaries of patriarchy. Ken represents, essentially, everybody else. Barbie, in her dismissals of Ken, doesn’t mean to be mean; she treats him thoughtlessly because she has simply never considered that words—or anything, really—might cause hurt. She has never needed to. Comfort, in her society as in ours, is a luxury. The slogans of the human world—and the bleak dynamics that have transformed kindness and empathy from kindergarten lessons into political pleas—make no sense to those who cannot imagine other people’s pain.

They make a lot of sense to Ken, though. He is, at the outset of the film, the most messily human feature of this plastic world, a tangle of need and hope and, eventually, rage. In the land of hard-set smiles, he winces. Surrounded by endless cheer, he aches. He senses that something is very much amiss. But sensing is all he can do. Barbie Land may have a president and a constitution and a supreme court, but it is, in practice, aggressively apolitical. (Politics is a response to humans and conflicts; Barbie Land allows neither.) And so, having no language or outlet for his frustrations—beleaguered, you might say, by a problem that has no name—Ken simply feels his way through his plight. His want leaves him afflicted with something else that is foreign in Barbie Land: vulnerability.

Much of Barbie’s magic comes down to Robbie and Gosling and their ability, as actors, to blend the plastic and the human, the earnest and the camp. Robbie’s performance, for its part, is a matter of distillation. It captures many of the elements that have made the Barbie doll both an enduring icon and an endless controversy—among them her unattainable beauty, her blithe naivete, her whiteness, her thinness, her reminder that even children are stalked by the shifting demands of womanhood. Gosling finds similar nuance, but from the opposite direction: Ken is, infamously, a plus-one who is defined by his absence. Gosling fills in the blanks. And he does so by weaving one of the dolls’ elemental ironies—Barbie and Ken are teenagers who are routinely mistaken for adults—into his performance.

[Read: The myth of the ‘underage woman’]

Ken, in Gosling’s rendering, lives in a stew of emotions that are always just beyond his control. He is by turns petulant and teeming with possibility, impulsive and self-conscious. Which is also to say that this chisel-jawed doll is, in many ways, a very typical adolescent. Barbie, newly beset by human-borne feeling, shocks herself by crying—first a single tear, and then a flood of them. Gosling’s Ken cries too. But his discord has a stereotypically masculine edge. He erupts into anger. He feels entitled to sex, despite and because of his ignorance of it. He cares, deeply, what the other guys think of him. “You can’t make me look uncool in front of Ken!” he wails at Barbie, panic flashing in his eyes.

Ken, in the film’s early scenes, takes his tumult out on Barbie. There he is, radiating look-at-me longing. There he is, like Romeo with his poems or Lloyd Dobler with his boom box, turning love into a show. He orients his life around Barbie so thoroughly that, before long, he is becoming the one thing a Ken must not be in Barbie Land: a hindrance.

Ken resents his neediness as much as Barbie does. But Barbie Land offers him no other option. She is everything; he’s just Ken. That is the way of this world. Gosling’s performance channels all of that. And then, powerfully, it escalates the matter: Ken’s need for Barbie becomes so consuming that it curdles into violence. Soon, his hopeful smiles are twisting into sneers. The stubbornness of his desire for Barbie—and his inability to accept her disinterest—begins to evoke the grim entitlements of the incel. His plight becomes everyone else’s threat.

It’s unsettling, the doll made dangerous. That’s what makes it so effective. The bulk of the film finds Barbie and Ken on a journey that mimics adolescence: Having left the land of protection and play and easy dreams, they are plunged into the realities of the human world—and the hard transactions of adulthood. The dolls must navigate a place that has no shortage of language for its political condition: patriarchy, marginalization, objectification, oppression.

Ken loves it. Walking on a street in L.A.—clothed, through an accident of circumstance in the plot and inspired costuming choices beyond it, in fringe-covered Western wear—he begins to strut. He feels, for the first time, respected, admired, seen. Barbie, meanwhile, is the one made to feel—and then to fear—the vulnerabilities of her gender. One of Barbie’s best jokes finds Ken, having returned to Barbie Land, playing her a song on his guitar—singing not to Barbie, he makes clear, but at her. Ken croons and crows, entranced by the romance of his gesture, holding Barbie’s gaze and refusing to let it go. The absurdity of it all is punctured by the lyrics of the song he chooses—one that became, in the real world, a hit: I wanna push you around, well I will, well I will / I wanna push you down, well I will, well I will …

Adolescence is a time of extremes. And Ken, having experienced manhood in a man’s world, reacts to his new situation with juvenile glee. Soaking up his surroundings as a child might—alive, always, to the images and messages around him—he intuits first that manliness is everything in the real world, and second, that manliness must involve horses. (Patriarchy, he concludes, is the system “where men on horses run everything.”) He is entranced by images of Rocky Balboa and Bill Clinton, captivated by the guys who high-five one another at the gym. Back in Barbie Land, importing the lessons he’s learned from reality, he takes over Barbie’s Dream House. His Mojo Dojo Casa House is a bachelor pad and a bar and, in its overall aesthetic, a tribute to John Wayne’s influence on American tropes of masculinity. Its decor features, obviously, an abundance of horses.

Ken’s excesses are funny, and foolish, and, except for the house-stealing stuff, pretty relatable. Like any teenager, Ken is figuring out who he is, and trying the world’s possibilities on for size. But his immaturity is not contained, and this is its problem. His adolescent approach to the world, instead, inflicts itself on everyone else. Soon—a plot twist that, for anyone who has followed U.S. politics in recent years, doubles as a twist of the knife—Ken is trying to rewrite Barbie Land’s constitution.

There’s an ominous kind of justice to Ken’s attempts to inject himself into the political life of Barbie Land. It is a zero-sum solution to the problems of a zero-sum world. The Ken doll has been called, over the years, a “drip with seriously abridged genitalia,” “an uncomfortably freighted icon of anti-masculinity,” and—by Gosling, during Barbie’s promotional tour—“an accessory, and not even one of the cool ones.” When Ken was featured in 2010’s Toy Story 3, he found himself on the receiving end of the following line: “You ascot-wearing pink-noser! You’re not a toy … You’re a purse with legs!”

The insult was made all the more insulting because it was delivered by a tuber with detachable limbs and anger-management issues. But Mr. Potato Head was simply saying what everyone already knew: The defining fact of Ken is that Ken is defined by Barbie. That alone makes it hard not to feel bad for the guy. And for many of Barbie’s viewers, his plight may feel extremely familiar. A key moment in the film, as my colleague Shirley Li wrote, comes from one of its human protagonists, Gloria (America Ferrera), who summons a life’s worth of frustration into a speech about the challenges—and the utter irrationality—of being a woman in a world shaped by men. Another key moment, though, comes from Ken. It’s near the end of the movie, and he’s finally getting the one thing he’s really wanted: Barbie is listening to him. He’s telling her what it’s like to be dimmed so that somebody else might shine. And then he adds the kicker: “It doesn’t feel good, does it?”

[Read: The surprising key to understanding the ]Barbie film

The critics who have accused Barbie of misandry might want to watch that moment, if indeed they ever watched it at all, once more. Ken’s line gives punctuation, effectively, to Gloria’s speech. And it does what our current political slogans beg us, fruitlessly, to do: It empathizes. Ken doesn’t really want political power, he discovers; it’s a lot of work. (Plus, disappointingly, horses are merely “men-extenders.”) What he really seeks is the power to figure out who he is on his own terms. Does Ken want Barbie at all? Would he, as the film hints, rather be paired with another Ken? What would he choose to be were his identity broader than Barbie and Beach?

Ken is, by the end of the film, not merely a doll who has known life in the human world; he is also a guy who understands what it’s like to be treated as an extra in someone else’s story. In him, the debates that shape—and limit—our political possibilities become elegantly straightforward. Ken is a person who is denied the full dignity of his personhood. That—whatever your worldview, whatever your particular circumstance, whatever your feelings about the word patriarchy—is a blatant form of injustice.

But Ken is also, at the story’s conclusion, a guy who has escaped from his arrested development. He has come to embody one of Barbie’s core ideas: that patriarchy is a profound form of immaturity. It causes childishness. It results from it too. Here is one reason for hope, though, as our very real men-children keep trying to remake the world into their Mojo Dojo Casa House: For Ken, immaturity becomes what it is for most people—a phase on the way to something better. Ken doesn’t become human. He does, however, grow up.

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