What does Barbie want to be? No, I mean the film. Maybe that’s the point?
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Barbie was a bad film, that I didn’t laugh at the jokes (because I laughed at all of them), or Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu’s homoerotic dance-off didn’t make me giggle with everyone else in the theatre. Because it did. And I loved it.
But as the local bummer, I felt plagued by the movie I was watching, because it was impossible to forget that I was watching this movie in the Real World. Not once in the movie did I know what it wanted to say about anything. I considered that maybe it wanted to say nothing. That maybe it was just supposed to be the Chanel-inspired outfits, the pink, and the plastic. A celebration of the brainless when we are being weighed down by self-consciousness and the world on fire around us. Barbie is plastic, but that’s okay. Barbie’s not supposed to be real, but a concept, an ideal, a possibility (to be blonde and white, but let’s not go there). She can be anything and anyone, TO anyone. Barbie isn’t complicated, and that’s the point. Barbie can be president, an astronaut, a mail carrier, and also just be a Barbie. It’s about what we strive towards. Life isn’t perfect except in the imagination, but that’s what imaginations are for.
Buuuut it’s also clearly not trying to say that, because there is a push for a “normal” Barbie and a phenomenal sequence with “Depression Barbie” that I desperately want to be real, and further, the film also wants to discuss the contradictions of womanhood (and maybe corporate consumerist culture? but not really) that Barbie embodies. Most of the film feels like the second half of playing any Sims game, where the well-being if your Sims becomes a job in itself, rather than being an escape from one.
Alright, so was the movie trying to be about mother-daughter relationships? I don’t have a great one with my biological mother, and my adopted mother isn’t big on Barbie (and likely has a bit of trauma built up from childhood being called Barbie as a Barbara). Still, I find that emotional mother-daughter scenes DO get to me, as evidenced by the 20 minutes of perpetual crying I do at the end of Everything Everywhere All at Once (it starts at the rocks and doesn’t end from there). But in Barbie, every mother-daughter note fell flat, even when the movie was screaming at me to care as Barbie pulled a Pinocchio and became a real woman (vagina included) as her “mother” held her hands and a somber, ponderous Billie Eilish crooned over them in a mystical liminal space made of vibes. The actual mother-daughter pair comparatively do nothing and change nothing, really, about each other. They don’t seem to come to a middle-ground, just their familial issues shelved in lieu of more pressing issues. The daughter still called Barbie a fascist (and isn’t necessarily wrong, according to the film)— the mother still sits as a secretary for a company supposedly about the uplifting of women.
Buuuuut… if it was about mothers and daughters, why were the execs involved at all? In all honestly, I thought it would turn out that the old woman was Skipper, who herself made the choice in several hand-waved incidents, to stay in the Real World, unbeknownst to the Top Floor and had returned, or discovered Barbie and was helping her come to the same conclusions. Things like: how life is worth sorrows because you can feel happiness — the happiness of love? Of a family? Something America Ferrera and her daughter could have shown her? No? Okay.
Okay, so does it want to be an internal critique of how even in Barbieland, ultimately it was all built by the patriarchy? Clearly not, because surely then discussion of Mattel’s high-ups mostly being men would be more than a throw-away joke? (Surely?)
WAS the film, in fact, about the destructive nature of patriarchy? What is the implication the film is trying to make, then, by reality being what shields the Barbies from patriarchy? Reality IS patriarchy — the film told us this! And the inverse doesn’t make the world okay, as we leave the Kens to fruitlessly hope for the type of “equality” women get in our world, said with a dry wink I have to assume. This isn’t me reading into the film, this is WHAT THE FILM SAYS. Is that were the executives were for? I legitimately thought that Will Ferrell was going to come out as trans towards the end (being that a transwoman is probably the most threatening thing to patriarchy that has thus far existed), but instead he gives a pathetic speech about the need for them to have tickle fights? About being the Barbies’ mother? Buuuut a decent amount of the film is the intense contradictory rejection of the Kens being incels, and only incels at all because they were living in a world that was unfair to them (with no places to live, only existing next to a Barbie, etc). And there was nothing patriarchal about Gosling and Liu’s chests creating a sparkle force so intense that a dream dance off sequence a-la Singin’ in the Rain happened.
It felt like five ideas were fighting, Ken-style, over the entire script.
So what is it? Is the movie about the plastic blandness of Barbie? About the worthiness of humanity? About patriarchy? About how corporations make us all into idiots?
Yes?
I’ve thought about this through the whole movie and though the whole night and maybe tomorrow I wake up and think: maybe that’s the point. The film is a mishmash of several different ideas, a hodgepodge of part activism, part indulgence, and all Ken, but also not Ken at all. Just like Barbie.
Someone get me the “i am Kenough” hoodie immediately.
