The One Part of Barbie I Absolutely Cannot Forgive (2024)

For the most part, Barbie’s cultural references were pretty on point: Issa Rae’s pronunciation of The Godfather was an instant classic, and I’m not sure how the Snyder Cut mention will age, but it went over well in the showing I went to. I do have one bone to pick with the filmmakers, though: Did anyone else catch that NSYNC dig?

It comes midway through the movie, when the film’s resident beta male, Allan (played by Michael Cera), is attempting to escape Barbie Land because he doesn’t want to deal with the Ken insurrection. When Gloria (America Ferrera) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) discover him stowed away in the convertible they’re using to high-tail it outta there, he argues that he should be allowed to go with them because Barbie Land wouldn’t miss him. After all, he tells them, Allans have gotten loose before. In fact, all of NSYNC were Allans! “Yes, even him!” he adds, trying, no doubt, to preempt the very “Ahem!” of an article you are now reading. Because: Ahem! No, NSYNC were not all Allans!

Now, it’s best not to think too hard about the logic of Barbie Land. Where did the Kens live before they flipped the Dreamhouses into Mojo Dojo Casa Houses? No one really knows. If they’ve never been to the real world, how do the dolls know music by the Indigo Girls and Matchbox Twenty? Don’t worry about it. Rather than have everything in its pink, plastic world make perfect sense, Barbie tells audiences to just go with it, and for the most part, it works.

So why is this throwaway joke still bugging me? In my view, it falls flat on two levels. The first is that there aren’t supposed to be multiples of Allan. While there are dozens of Kens and dozens of Barbies, Allan represents a doll that Mattel discontinued, so there’s only one of him in Barbie Land. If that’s to be believed, Michael Cera would be the only Allan, so how could five other Allans previously have escaped? Before you stop me, let me just say that I know that thinking too hard about this is a Barbie logic trap. But I just can’t accept the idea of NSYNC being Allans. I won’t. I refuse.

To explain why, we must first discuss the essence of Allan. The best way to understand his personality type is by contrasting him with his friend Ken. Where Ken is a hunk, Allan is a dork. Where Ken is a himbo, Allan seems to actually have a brain. The casting says it all: While Ken is a co*cky Ryan Gosling, Allan is an awkward Michael Cera. Audiences liked him in the movie, despite, or maybe in some ways because of, his lameness. He’s been crowned the movie’s secret weapon and quiet queer heart. Barbie might be a corporate blockbuster, but Allan, his supporters might say, is a testament to the way the movie keeps it weird.

This is all fine and dandy, but it’s simply inaccurate to even suggest that NSYNC was made up of five Allans. Anyone who was paying the slightest bit of attention knows that NSYNC had at the very most three Allans. I would accept the classification of Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, and maybe even Chris Kirkpatrick as Allans, Lance being the most obvious of the three. The other two don’t fit super well into the Ken-Allan binary, but sure, let’s say they’re Allans. You know who very much aren’t Allans, though? J.C. Chasez and Justin Timberlake. They are two of the purest Ken specimens to have ever Kenned. They were the most conventionally attractive in the group, the two who sang solos most frequently. Timberlake dated a clear real-world Barbie analog, Britney Spears, which is very Ken. I know many of us have soured on Timberlake in recent years, partly due to his treatment of Spears, but that doesn’t make him an Allan, it makes him even more of a Ken. Boy bands are made of distinct types—the hot one, the bad boy, the sweet one—and the math of an all-Allan group just wouldn’t add up. Unless we’re talking flop boy-bands, in which case I would be happy to discuss the possibility of LMNT being an all-Allan operation.

Could there be something else going on here? Gosling was on the TV show The Mickey Mouse Club with none other than Justin Timberlake as a child. Did he lobby Greta Gerwig and her co-screenwriter and partner, Noah Baumbach, to rib his old buddy in the script? NSYNC also had a music video, for the song “It’s Gonna Be Me,” where they all played Barbie- and Ken-style dolls that come to life—are we supposed to think the script is referencing that “incident,” despite the video’s conception of dolldom being completely different than the movie’s? I would really love to know what was going on here. I wouldn’t say it’s tearin’ up my heart, but as another of the band’s hits put it, I can’t get it off of my mind.

Of the members of NSYNC, only Lance Bass has responded to the callout so far. He commented, “My question is… What’s an Allan doll???” Sort of an Allan-y thing to say, in that it is not remotely helpful or amusing. Thanks, Lance.

I don’t want to be all “The NSYNC defender has logged on” about this. (And it’s hardly relevant to this article that as a child I commandeered my family’s outgoing voicemail response to feature a recording of “I Want You Back.”) But the reason I’m dwelling on this is that I’m pretty sure Greta Gerwig knows all of the NSYNC lore I am speaking of. (Baumbach I wouldn’t trust to tell them apart from the Backstreet Boys, but Gerwig—she knows.) It’s our history, or rather, herstory, as elder millennials.

As someone whose tastes were formed in the early 2000s, I’ve sometimes lamented the lameness of the bubblegum pop music I liked as a kid. Why couldn’t I have come of age at a cooler time? But NSYNC for better or worse defined that period, and I don’t want them to go down in history as a bunch of Allans. The fact is that we all would have laid down our lives for Justin Timberlake, once upon a time. There’s a word for that: Kenergy.