This Barbie Didn’t Like the Barbie Movie
I’m a Barbie girl. I grew up playing with them, a bit longer than was acceptable, like director of the big screen imagining, Greta Gerwig, and for the most part found it an enriching and empowering experience. Barbie taught me I could be anything, and though I didn’t realise it at the time, or until very recently, to be honest, that meant being a child-free, independent woman.
This ethos is very much at the centre of Barbie, or at least Barbieland, the fantastical matriarchal society in which it’s girls night every night and Kens are superfluous, preening themselves on the beach trying to get noticed by Barbie (Margot Robbie), Barbie (Issa Rae), Barbie (Hari Nef) and lots of other Barbies as they go about their blissful lives where “all problems of feminism gender inequality have been fixed.”
If Barbie were made fifteen or even ten years ago I would have eaten it up like a perfectly toasted waffle with a dollop of cream. Instead, being feministsplained about the patriarchy and gender inequality every five minutes soured me to Barbie like a burnt, curdled morning meal to start a day of existential dread.
The basis of a good, even great, movie is there: the attention to detail in Barbieland is stunning, Barbie swatting Ken away like an annoying fly is perfection, and much of the gender commentary works. But when we have Barbie’s objectification explained to us, not like every majority-female moviegoer watching this hasn’t palpably felt what it’s like to be ogled in public makes the audience feel as stupid as people think Barbie is, despite her missives on gender relations and geopolitics.
Barbie could have benefitted from a few more rounds of workshopping. More to the point, it feels like Mattel’s red pen edits were left on the final copy of the script, with Barbie’s first tear feeling “achy, but good” — again, not like we all haven’t cried before, indeed, some watching this very movie! — as she tells us instead of letting Robbie’s acting speak for itself.
Either way, it’s clear that the man who wrote Marriage Story, the echoes of which reverberate through Barbieland, also wrote Barbie. Because, ultimately and unfortunately, Barbie is a movie about Ken. Even Allan gets a more fleshed out journey than every Barbie apart from Robbie’s and, indeed, his female counterpart, Midge. (Let’s talk about Michael Cera’s scene-stealing performance…) If the roles were flipped like they are in Barbieland, I would have no criticism of a story about a man ultimately being about women, like Fleishman is in Trouble or the recent trend in crime novels that center on the people left behind, and in a way you could say Barbie is a meta flip on that, but ultimately I don’t think it’s that deep. A smarter movie could have been, but alas.
Instead we get at least half if not more of the movie devoted to Ken’s emancipation from Barbie, being red pilled in the real world and bringing his newfound knowledge of patriarchy to Barbieland, or Kenland as it has since become. Unlike most critics, I think Ryan Gosling was acting a little too hard. A storyline about Ken finding meaning in his own life outside of Barbie is a valid and interesting one, and paired back could have coexisted as a contenting B-plot. Rather, restoring matriarchy to Barblieland or, as it’s framed, toppling the Kens, is the driving force of the back end of the movie, replete with a not one but two Ken songs and dream ballet that was doing the most and, while visually alluring, could have been cut along with an additional 20 minutes of Kenanigans. Yay, the Barbie’s reach their goal and ratify the constitution because the Kens are distracted by horses.
But where does that leave Barbie? Good question, because it’s as if after maxing out their autonomous storytelling on Ken, Gerwig and Baumbach remembered who brought them to the dance, and we get more exposition about what Barbie means. Did we get an answer? I’ll leave you to try to figure that out, but my reading into the final line is that Barbie is trans!
