Hi! I’m gonna talk about the Barbie movie now. I’m not going to spoil jokes, but I will spoil plot points. If you care about that, please read at your own risk!
I saw Barbie. I liked Barbie! I am not alone or unique in this. The showing I went to, an outdoor set-up with both drive-in space and lawn seating, was crammed with people (mostly young women) in pink, sequins, fringe, spandex, hot pants and embellished hats. It was The Movie Event of The Summer (or one-half of it1).
I think the reason I liked Barbie is because I knew exactly what to expect. As a fan of pink sparkly stuff and Greta Gerwig, I took the pre-premiere interviews with a grain of salt. I expected the movie to Do The Thing (the “thing” being Barbie), not Subvert The Thing. And I was right! The Barbie movie is not subversive – at least, not to me. I might seem like the target audience for Barbie’s thematic ideologies as a twenty-something college-educated “coastal elite,” but people in my demographic group are some of the most vocal critics2 of the movie. Granted, there was much hype about Barbie: The Movie being the be-all end-all of Branded Feminist Discourse. Life advice: never fall for that.
As a Taylor Swift fan, I know when someone says, “This [piece of media] is going to be the BIGGEST thing for women’s rights since Seneca Falls,” you are just going to get a T-shirt.
The media that moves the needle and radically changes your viewpoint is almost always quiet, or unexpectedly loud. It sneaks up on you. It does not have a partnership with a shoe company OR a soundtrack with its own separate marketing team3. Barbie has beautiful, manicured actresses who frequently deliver an intelligent script full of fresh, modern, self-aware commentary. And other times it’s a movie that tries to do that and falls short (more on this later).
This isn’t to say that Barbie’s thematic foundations are ill-developed, though some major reviews (and debates on Twitter) would challenge me on this. One of my favorite parts of the movie is also one of the most unevenly criticized: the story arc for the Kens. The easy “gotcha” in Barbie is to say the Kens get all the best jokes, they get the best fight/dance scene, they even get the best tie-in product, so really, how are you not supposed to walk away from the Barbie movie thinking “Wow, yeah, Ken rocks!”
The short answer is: Ken has nothing else. As I’ve written before, Greta Gerwig’s films are all explorations of identity, and they all view identity through a lens of labor and capital. In Barbieland, a Barbie can be anything. And she can be good at anything. The Barbies are doctors and lawyers and journalists and Supreme Court justices. Meanwhile, every Ken we encounter (kencounter) (hehe) is, essentially, an influencer (kenfluencer!!!!!). His job? Well, it’s just beach.
Even in Barbieland, there’s a crisis of identity, where the dolls only know who they are based on how they’re seen in society. That’s why, when the movie begins, all the Kens seem so anxious; they can’t conceptualize meaning for themselves except in relation to Barbies. And the Barbies are trapped in the same framework. A Barbie can only really see herself as the Barbie role she’s assigned to play. That’s why when Margot Robbie, our Stereotypical Barbie, loses her carefree attitude and flawless doll-body, her immediate question is: who am I?
It’s also why so many of the facets of representation we see in the movie’s casting don’t get in-universe, which, at first, struck me as clumsy. The diversity in Barbieland is not addressed. For example, the fact that President Barbie is a Black woman is never commented on. After some reflection, I understood this was not a textual failing. Why would the movie comment on those things? They matter to us, as an audience – we can project our own experiences of sexism, racism, ableism and other discrimination on the cast – but Barbie and Ken don’t care. Identity, in Barbie’s world, is exclusively dependent on how you participate in society, the job you have and the house you host parties in. Other factors aren’t accounted for.
Identity, in Gerwig’s cinematic universe, has always been hooked on capital. It’s addressed more explicitly in Lady Bird and Little Women, and it’s easy to see Barbie as an extension of that conversation. At one point in the film, America Ferrera gives a speech that functions as an extended, modernized version of Saoirse Ronan’s speech in Little Women:
The major contrast between the two speeches, and the two films, is that Barbie does not have any romantic storyline. Sure, there are the repeated entreaties Margot Barbie hears from Ryan Gosling’s Ken about their lack of a relationship4, but those are resolved for good by the end of the film. Instead of focusing on questions of companionship and loneliness, Barbie focuses on what it is to be happy in and with yourself. Which is probably why the speech didn’t do much for me. At around 300 words long, it functions as a major catalyst for the heroic Barbie spy montage in the third act of the movie. America Ferrera delivers the monologue as Gloria, a Mattel employee who accidentally summoned Barbie into the real world by making her depressed. In the parking lot where I watched the movie, I could hear people around me sniffing and weeping as Ferrera spoke, and they broke out into cheers and applause when it was done. In the movie, Margot Barbie cried, too. But much more importantly, the speech visibly moved Gloria’s daughter, Sasha, played by Ariana Greenblatt.
Sasha is a surly tween who has one of the best throwaway lines in the film5 and dresses like a Bratz doll. She’s an unlikely human deuteragonist, introduced delivering a monologue of her own, giving Margot Barbie a dressing-down that includes the phrase “fascist bimbo.” She knows all the language that smart girls of Gen Z and below have internalized by being Very Online. But she doesn’t really get it until the moment in Barbieland where she sees her mother and Barbie both open up, get vulnerable, and admit just how difficult their lives are and will continue to be.
The reason I liked the Barbie movie is that I know it’s not for me. It’s for Sasha. Shrewd marketing made it seem like this would be a more adult movie than it is – and I get that, because millennials and Gen X have more money to spend6 on bright-pink branded collabs. It’s better to approach the Barbie movie as you would a particularly good episode of Daniel Tiger or Saved by the Bell. There are some great jokes for adults, to keep us occupied. The didactic component is for tweens, though, so don’t get mad when it says stuff you learned years ago.
With that in mind, here’s the really important part I think everybody else is missing. Barbie had one of the biggest opening weekends of all time. Soon, that won’t matter. Do you know where this movie is going to live? Sleepovers. This was a “movie event” for me, an adult with disposable income. But someday, it’s going to be on heavy rotation at every middle-school birthday party in America (and probably some fourth- and fifth-grade parties with lax parenting). All the things that seemed reductive to me are going to be revaltory to someone.
The Barbie movie will make some teenage girl out there say, “Oh.” She will re-watch the scene to hear America Ferrera say “Always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged,” because she won’t have heard it before. There will be little girls who watch the first main dance scene – which features a Barbie who’s a wheelchair user – and it will be the first time they see a disabled person seamlessly integrated into a big-budget movie’s elaborate choreography. Or they’ll see the Barbie cabinet member in the all-pink Oval Office who has a prosthetic arm with a rose-gold belt to match. When the girls who watch this movie at sleepovers grow up and go to college, it will save at least one of them from an asshole with a guitar.
Perhaps most importantly, it will teach all those girls that they are the only ones who can define who they are. And it will teach them that it’s a hard journey. The Barbies and the Kens aren’t stupid; they’re not vapid or ignorant. But they all fall victim, at varying points, to the easy way out, which is defining yourself in opposition or alignment with someone or something. The Kens don’t have a real role, so they only define themselves in relation to Barbie; later, the Barbies only see themselves as beer delivery services for Ken. And, yes, to be an empty vessel for a partner’s endless droning is certainly easier, in some ways, but it is not a life.
Ultimately, Barbie realizes that what she craves is creativity. She wants to make something. She wants to have ideas. And that base impulse is more important than any job, any relationship, or any comfort she could’ve had. It’s so clearly Gerwig’s voice, as an auteur, speaking to the basic drives that created cinema in the first place. While money is the reason Mattel made Barbie7, imagination is the reason little girls play with her. And as those little girls get older, holding tight to their imaginations is going to be how they figure out who they are. If all of that seems juvenile to you, good. You don’t need Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
Somebody does.
Oppenheimer was nowhere to be seen at the drive-in – the other screen on the premises was showing Mission Impossible to a much smaller audience
Second only to reactionaries, most of them very conservative who have leveled bad-faith criticisms against the movie. I don’t feel a need to acknowledge these arguments, because they aren’t arguments, and they don’t matter.
Baby Driver, for example, is not a life-affirming piece of cinema but it has the coolest soundtrack since The Big Chill.
And if you consider this a “romantic plotline,” HR has some questions for you!
A Stephen King reference – or, like the opening sequence, a Kubrick one.
By a slim margin.
And a large part of why Greta Gerwig made Barbie