Movies | Society
Barbie is A Threat
The world’s most famous doll film is more than just another film. Barbie is a political satire, a product placement film that simultaneously praises and criticizes its product, a mother-daughter relationship, an investigation of gender and its presentation, and a road trip film about the quest for identity and purpose. It’s an existential dystopia disguised as a child’s fantasy.
This is a wonderfully strange film. Much of it is silly, but it’s the type of silly that comes from embracing absurdity wholeheartedly. Even with its humor, meta commentary, and campiness, it never loses sight of its primary aim, which it achieved.
Barbie examines what it means to be human, and it does so through the eyes of a doll living in a dream world based on the fantasy ideal embodied by Barbie: a world of unrealistically beautiful women who can be anything. More particularly, it explores what it means to be a woman, shattering that ideal when it drops its main character into our world, where she realizes that everything she believed she represented doesn’t appear to signify much in a patriarchal society.
There is a thoughtfulness to the film that puts the nihilism at bay. This is, at its core, a fundamentally humane narrative that uses the iconic toy to illustrate the enduring worth of human delight in the face of adversity. And it achieves all of this while being a completely insane, belly-achingly funny comedy led by amazing performances from Robbie and Gosling.
It is wonderful because it feels like Barbie is getting away with something by looking and feeling so different from previous huge blockbusters. It is inspired by films from another era, notably those of Demy and Tati, with a dash of Godard thrown in for good measure. It’s a strange, very corporate endeavor that rattles its shackles, strives against its bonds, and creates something unusual that will undoubtedly offend a lot of people.
Margot Robbie is electric as our beloved Barbie. She IS Barbie. Ryan Gosling is also fantastic as Ken. He gives an entirely fitting himbo energy to the part, which helps him to stay appealing and sympathetic throughout the story.
What impresses me about Greta Gerwig is how well she inserts topics within her works, and, in a way, reconciles them. Gerwig (with her Ken and co-writer, Noah Baumbach) discusses existentialism, death, and misogyny while also criticizing consumerism, materialism, and hypocrisy in our culture. The film has a direct interaction with the useability of the Mattel brand on screen. There is a great deal of metalanguage in interaction with reality.
A nostalgic aura also prevails, because we’ve all encountered a Barbie doll at some point in our lives. The costumes, dreamhouses, and plastic items? I can’t think of any production in the last decade with such a high degree of actual handcrafted craft. The painted backgrounds! Barbie’s clothes! My inner child is screaming! It’s all incredible. In an interview, Gerwig stated that she wanted to create a world that you’d want to touch, and she absolutely succeeded.
I look to the films that Gerwig was heavily influenced by, such as Singin’ in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Truman Show, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and these films simply would not be made today. We couldn’t have Barbie without the history that came before us, but no film like those could exist alongside Barbie right now.
This film is not conservative-friendly. Piers Morgan described Barbie as an assault on not just Ken, but all men due to women’s dominance in the film. It was predictable. I am sure some of you have read about conservatives or Republicans trash talking the film. It’s not a surprise. Conservatives want the whole world to cater only to them and their beliefs.
They are saying Barbie is an attack on men as if the male perspective has not been represented enough in the film. Even women’s dominance only takes place in the Barbies’ reality, yet they are upset and call this movie anti-man, misandrist propaganda. When they said this, I was thinking about the countless films and TV shows that glorified degrading women as a norm and no one had an issue with that, but seeing men whose world revolves around women is an attack on men? Cry me a river.
It fascinates me that, on the one hand, conservatives scoff at liberal arts degrees as worthless and a waste of time. On the other hand, it demonstrates why a lack of this sort of education leads to a total incapacity to think critically or perform fundamental media comprehension. You can’t be a critic if you don’t comprehend the background.
If you think Barbie is too feminist, I suggest you watch almost any other movie ever made. Barbie has always been a feminist. Any movie that gets conservatives to wet themselves in anger and tears is a movie I wanna see.
“In creating Barbie, my philosophy was that, through the doll, girls could become anything they wanted to be. Barbie has always represented a woman who chooses for herself”.
— Ruth Handler
