I published this on Facebook in July, after seeing the film in the midst of the pink tsunami. Reposting here (with minor updates) in the wake of the Oscars kerfuffle. People are indignant over Ryan Gosling getting nominated but not Greta Gerwig of Margot Robbie, but, as I suggested in July, that’s kind of on Gerwig. Because her Barbie is all about Ken. The mystery to me is Gosling being nominated in the supporting category. It’s his movie!
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There’s nothing smart left to be said about Barbie. Certainly not now that Greta Gerwig is done with her. Barbie, her very, very pink hit film, starts from the proposition that it can’t conceivably separate its vinyl heroine from her Day-Glo baggage—and leads with it instead. The result may be an entirely new film genre: the self-satirizing political manifesto.
Like I said—there can’t possibly be more to say about the old girl. But I might as well take a stab.
Gerwig’s movie isn’t perfect, but it’s delightfully witty and occasionally kind of brilliant. I can’t think of another IP-driven blockbuster that’s this provocative and surprising. At its best, it achieves the giddy-bizarre, high-low anarchy worthy of a 7-year-old’s playdate. Really: Imagine a bunch of second-graders dumping a huge toy chest out in a vast soundstage to shoot The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. That’s about what Gerwig has done.
Her most ingenious choice is setting the bulk of the movie in a sort of Romper Room—the parallel reality of Barbieland—so she can stage all the action from the perspective of the dolls. As actual dolls. They move like dolls, think like dolls, and interface like dolls. As Barbie (Margot Robbie) explains when she and Ken (Ryan Gosling) get some unsettling catcalls from humans in the real world (because obviously Barbie has to come to the real world, it’s called plot!): “I do not have a vagina and he does not have a penis—we have no genitals!” OK, then!
The screenplay keeps up that same juvenile POV all the way to the end. Gerwig flips blithely from slapstick to meta to earnest and back. Anything goes in the maximalist script (her description), co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach—any sentiment, gag, political point, or send-up. The director dispenses with the careful character development and finely orchestrated emotional arcs of her last two, rapturously good, films, Lady Bird and Little Women, but it’s fine. These are dolls. (And unfortunately, the movie mainly exists to sell said dolls. More on that below.)
This lack of logic or basic continuity has a downside. The film is something of a shaggy mess, kind of like an SNL sketch that stops and restarts for two hours. But I’d argue that was what Gerwig was after. Isn’t that what playtime was like? Along the way, there are a hundred of daffy and delightful digressions. The improvisational flexibility allows her to steal, for example, a whole rollerblading in Venice Beach scene—from Xanadu.
Nothing illustrates this better than the sets: You may wonder if production designer Sarah Greenwood, best known for polished work in Atonement, The Darkest Hour, and other period beauties, is out of her element. Things are kind of disjointed, cheap, and, well, plastic-looking. (No doubt, Wes Anderson and designer Adam Stockhausen would have had a field day with Barbieland.) But hasn’t Greenwood put it all together just as a 7-year-old would? The Bollywood dance numbers and climactic battle scenes look just like they would have if I’d staged them with my Legos and stuffed animals in 1976.
The same tweenish glee ripples throughout the cast, from Robbie and Gosling down to the smallest cameo. Everyone involved obviously had a blast making this movie, and it’s a blast to watch.
However.
The filmmaking ethos may be childlike, but there’s nothing childish about Barbie. The doll has always been a time machine to adulthood. Ruth Handler, who conceived her in the late 1950s, claimed she purposely made Barbie buxom beyond belief—she’s a biological impossibility; no human skeleton could support her curvy contradictions—not to browbeat girls into accepting male expectations of beauty, but to excite them about all the marvelous ways their bodies were about to change. A hilarious prologue, borrowed from Stanley Kubrick and narrated by the droll Helen Mirren, shows just how revolutionary it was for girls to have a doll that wasn’t modeling the babies they were expected to give birth to in a decade’s time, but the women they might become.
Except, no. Handler didn’t really “conceive” Barbie; she ripped her off from a German doll, Bild Lilli, marketed to men as a racy gag. That’s why she crossed the Atlantic stacked with that bod, forced into high heels, and given a demurely seductive sideways glance. (Seriously: It was the 1970s before Mattel allowed Barbie to meet our gaze. You can read about all of this on Wikipedia.) She may indeed be Handler’s blank canvas, awaiting all the fears and fantasies a girl can project onto her. But Barbie is also still Lilli—every child’s not-so-subtle introduction to the male gaze. Doesn’t matter if she’s a floral designer, fashion model, or marine biologist, her No. 1 job is sex appeal.
The movie lays all this right out, and the frightening reverse—adult projections onto children. It’s downright unsettling when Sasha (the charmingly salty Ariana Greenblatt), a girl Barbie meets in the real world, asks her about life in Barbieland: “Do giant hands come in and play with you?” Same, when the Mattel CEO—Will Farrell, doing his usual funny befuddled schtick—muses about loving to be around prepubescent girls, “but not at all in a creepy way.” (It’s a miracle that Mattel—which Gerwig reads to filth from start to finish—greenlit this script. I mean, kudos to that corporate board.)
And consider the film’s greatest creation, brought to life by that fearless freak Kate MacKinnon: Weird Barbie—the other Barbies call her this behind her back “and to her face!”—is what happens when a child “plays too hard” with their doll. Her hips have been yanked almost out of their sockets, so she perpetually falls into a split; her hair’s been uprooted into a ghastly fright wig; her makeup’s a mess, scrawled over with angry magic marker.
There’s an unsettling whisper about the character, living away from the other dolls on a hill, her own personal Island of Misfit Toys. But she’s been transformed by her pain into the shaman of Barbieland. She knows all about real-world traumas—thoughts of death, cellulite, and especially sex: Weird Barbie is definitely PG-13, musing about Ken, “I’d like to see what nude blob he’s packing under those jeans.”
When Barbie needs to go to the real world, Weird Barbie knows the way—and sends her off in a pair of Birkenstocks.
Now, critics on the right aren’t totally wrong when they call Barbie “one of the most woke movies” of all time. (They are especially upset about Doctor Barbie, played by trans actor Hari Nef. Shocker.) But what else was Gerwig gonna make? Her heroine began life as the least woke character imaginable, a bimbo bombshell birthed just before the dawn of Women’s Lib. Barbie’s whole life story, from the late 1960s on, has been a feminist redemption campaign.
But no number of exciting, challenging careers (in 2022, Mattel gave the doll dozens of jobs, including farmer’s market stall owner, para alpine skier, pet photographer, tooth fairy, and every young girl’s fantasy, “chief sustainability officer”) can quite eclipse the bimbo. As Sasha snaps at her, “You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented.”
But here’s the thing. We may hate Barbie, but we love her even more. Because somehow this doll, standing permanently en pointe, consigned to a palette of infantile candy colors, trapped in a plastic Malibu dream jail, and doomed to an insipid eternity by the side of bottle-blond Ken—somehow this 11-and-a-half-inch-tall totem of misogyny has been reborn as a feminist goddess.
I would parse it this way: Barbie is a two-way mirror, showing little girls all the things, good and bad, they can become, and showing grownups exactly how hollow their childhood dreams and expectations were. And this makes her very powerful. As she herself tells us in the film: “Giving a voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy robbed it of its power!” Yes, Barbie is woke, but she’s also very deft at mocking her own wokeness.
Bottom line, we have a whole lot of feelings about this doll.
Who the hell could possibly play her? Margot Robbie. She is, after all, a goddess herself. Brassy, hilarious, utterly fearless, and breathtakingly beautiful. And humanizing monstrous blondes, from Tonya Harding to a Fox bombshell, is her specialty. But her Barbie is no mere bombshell. Yes, she is “Stereotypical Barbie”—a sexy fashion plate who has no actual career, unlike her pals Doctor Barbie and Journalist Barbie and President Barbie—but she knows her worth and exults in her possibilities.
Unfortunately, the character as written is simply impossible for any actor to play. Like the doll she’s based on, Barbie has to somehow be every girl’s worst enemy and her best friend. She has to be intimidating but approachable; strong, but vulnerable; smart, but a bit dim. She has to contain multitudes—every possible success and every possible failure. She’s the ingenue and the villain. It’s all too much, and in the end, the character registers as nothing at all.
The movie doesn’t hide this inconvenient truth. It has two climaxes, and Barbie doesn’t get either one. The first—call it the political climax—goes to Sasha’s mom, played by the wonderful America Ferrera, who lets rip a roof-raising cri de coeur at least as long and fiery as Hal’s Agincourt speech in Henry V: “It is literally impossible to be a woman,” she roars. Maybe they should have called the movie Sasha’s Mom.
But Barbie’ biggest problem is Ken.
The movie has her name, but we spend an awful lot of time and energy on her “long-term-distance, low-commitment-casual boyfriend.” Great storytelling requires great characters, and, like I said, Barbie isn’t that great. She’s too iconic to be interesting; her challenges are often of the political-intellectual variety, so she’s just not much fun—especially for a doll! But Gosling is lllloooooooottttssss of fun. His Ken seems to have very little vinyl flowing through his veins—he’s a flesh-and-blood devil played with camp abandon. Gerwig seems more than happy to let him fill the vacuum.
For starters, he’s smoking hot, with a body that would have made Michelangelo swoon. (The biceps, the abs, the glutes and quads—it all had an audible effect on the audience of be-pinked girls and gay boys I saw the film with. A young woman behind me surrendered over and over to Gosling’s charms, moaning “I caaan’t eeeeven” every time he primped or pumped. It would be icky, in a feminist dolliagraphy, to ogle over Barbie’s famous curves, but Ken is fair game. The camera lingers on every inch of exposed skin like glaze on a Krispy-Kreme.
Barbie never expresses a sexual impulse in the film of any kind, but Ken—though he doesn’t know what would happen if he and Barbie did get around to their sleep over—seems to always be thinking with his nude blob. As Mirren tells us in the narration, every day is a great day for Barbie, but “Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”
Barbie isn’t the only doll he’s hot for, either. Nobody gets him going quite like his pal Tourist Ken, played as a another sexy goofball by Simu Liu. They start the movie with a stand-off on the beach. (This, as it happens, is Ken’s job: He is Beach Ken.) After hurting himself diving straight into a rigid plastic wave, he gets into a tiff with Tourist Ken. Nose to nose, he snarls, “If I wasn’t severely injured, I would beach you off right now, Ken.”
Half the theater gasps when he says this, but we quickly figure out the spelling he means. Gerwig is only letting us know that she understands the essence of Ken: He’s at least a little bit gay. (This isn’t something my brother and I ever discussed at Landmark Apartments in Irmo, South Carolina, in the 1970s, when we played with our dolls—G.I. Joe, of course; he’s a real man—but every 6-year-old knew Ken was light in the loafers.)
If Barbie and Ken never seemed to get hot and heavy in the dollhouse, well, it wasn’t Barbie’s fault. In the cinema, though, she’s the problem. Until the movie’s very last moment—one of the greatest last lines you’ll ever hear—she’s utterly asexual. She has to be! So Gosling runs away with the movie—he’s hot and hilarious, and Gerwig gives him all the funniest and most emotional bits. (Yes, there are emotional bits.) He can be sexy-hysterical-sad because he approximates a real person.
This is my theory. (2,000 words in and I’m just getting to my theory. Sorry, Maryellen!) Gerwig made Barbie all about Ken on purpose. Barbie can’t surrender to a man and still be an independent modern woman; she can’t be vulnerable and still exude self-esteem; she can’t learn anything new and still be the smartest gal in the toychest. What does she get to do in the movie?
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
She becomes a real woman, something that wasn’t any more thrilling when it happened in Splash, Pinnochio, or the aforementioned Xanadu. Yes—it satisfies certain notions we have about the doll’s relationship to the culture, but it’s a bit ho-hum. (Except for that final line. Killer.)
Ken, on the other hand, gets to wrestle with rejection, purposelessness, and low self-esteem; he gets to flirt with an all-too-familiar reactionary embrace of the patriarchy; he gets to sing and dance and rip his shirt open and flex his muscles and basically be a big, sexy, hilarious mess. He gets the journey because he is the one who is totally lost.
Gerwig knows. Girls are fine. It’s the boys who need to take a journey.
When I first published this piece, I gave it four Maryellens—but after a week I took one off. Most assessments of the movie (including my own) have been entirely focused on its dissection/satire of gender politics. We’ve overlooked or excused its position on the ultimate question of our age—the survival of the planet—and on that score Barbie is totally infuriating.
In short, in our culture, whether you are male or female or both or neither, there is only ever one answer to any problem: Shopping. And set aside anything else you may believe about Barbie, she has only ever existed to get children’s mommies and daddies into toy stores.
There is something especially disturbing (if honest) about the movie serving up Barbieland as a utopia—it’s an entirely plastic playpen, a petroleum paradise. The movie’s boffo box office—largely thanks to its triumphant marketing campaign, but also because it’s a riot—isn’t going to do anything to lower our fever of consumerism. How many millions of extra dolls will Mattel sell? How many gaggles of moviegoers bought special polyester-pink outfits to go see it?
Fun as it is, Barbie leaves an unpleasant vinyl aftertaste.
Margot didn’t play Megyn Kelly. That was Charlize Theron.