Nearly every woman alive today has a story about her personal history with Mattel’s Barbie. As children, we dressed these dolls up and sent them on dates and then used them as hammers and wrenched their knees out of joint. They’ve inspired our hatred, critique and destruction but never our indifference.
So is it any wonder that the weekend box office take for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie ($155 million) set a new record for the North American debut of a female-directed film? Or that moviegoers dressed in their most shocking pink helped turn around a lackluster summer for the industry? Or that I decided to save Oppenheimer for next week?
Rest assured, the three-hour opus about the making of the atomic bomb will get its due.
The deal
Barbie (Margot Robbie) is living her best life in Barbie Land. Every day is about wearing cute outfits, making plastic toast in her Dream House, relaxing on the beach with Ken (Ryan Gosling) and partying with her girlfriends, who are also all Barbie. In this pastel world, Barbies are doctors, Nobel Prize winners, Supreme Court justices or president. Their male counterparts are arm candy.
One night mid-party, Barbie finds herself having intrusive thoughts of death. Next thing she knows, she’s experiencing body horror — her feet go flat! Scandalized, her fellow Barbies send her to consult Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), rendered a punk-rock outcast by rough play, who explains that Barbie can heal herself only by healing the psyche of the child who’s playing with her in the real world.
So Barbie takes an interdimensional jaunt to Venice Beach, Calif. There Ken, her stowaway companion, makes the stunning discovery that men rule this reality, including the corporation that makes Barbie. His patriarchal epiphany could change Barbie Land forever — unless Barbie and her new mom and daughter human friends (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt) do something about it.
Will you like it?
Barbie has been a hotbed of online chatter for months, and since its release, virtually every possible take has had its 15 minutes on social media. Barbie is woke, anti-male propaganda. Barbie revolutionizes women’s lives with its feminist insights. Barbie is “white feminism” for middle schoolers. Barbie is too political. Stop politicizing Barbie, everyone!
All this discourse is too exhausting for mere humans to process. For an expert assessment, I turned to Champlain College professor Tanya Lee Stone, author of the 2015 book The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll’s History and Her Impact on Us. Though she would have liked to see a little more of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) in the film, Stone’s overall impression is glowing: “Despite the fact that it’s a Mattel movie and Gerwig had to navigate corporate involvement, she managed to craft a plot jam-packed with issues of feminism, hyperfemininity, equality, and the patriarchy, all tied up in an ultra-pink package that was both hilarious and touching.”
Cosigned. For me, what makes Barbie work is the blithe surrealism of Barbie Land — an amusingly Hollywood-ized reflection of how children actually play. Everything pivots around Barbie’s fabulousness because she represents an ego ideal, a hopeful vision of her owner all grown up. Ken is a mere accessory because little girls aren’t yet interested in boys that way. When you literalize this gynocracy, however (not matriarchy, because Barbies don’t reproduce!), you get a topsy-turvy version of our own reality in which Ken laments that his life has no meaning when Barbie isn’t looking at him.
Gerwig and cowriter Noah Baumbach use this conceit to poke fun at all gender-based hierarchies. They don’t really tackle the question of why beauty is so foundational to Barbie’s self-image in the first place, or why Barbies who look like Robbie (called “Stereotypical Barbies” in the film) are still what we think of when we think “Barbie,” even though Mattel makes Barbies in a range of body types and ethnicities. The characters who represent the human fears and desires behind Barbie also get short shrift, their screen time gobbled up by other supporting players, such as Will Ferrell as the Mattel CEO, who feel like gags in search of a purpose.
But these are quibbles about a consistently engaging comedy driven by wacky production design, joyful musical numbers, and goofy and committed performances. Robbie outdoes Elle Woods in pink positivity, McKinnon’s deadpan is the perfect foil for her, and Gosling gives a surprising poignancy to Ken’s character arc from insecure helpmate to Kens’ rights activist and back.
While Barbie ventures into reality to restore the perfection she views as her birthright, Ken is only just learning that he, too, might have an ideal to strive toward. Their reactions to such revelations are comically human — and, like so many comedies, Barbie primarily promotes a bemused tolerance of human absurdity. Children use toys to order a chaotic world. But by the time we reach adulthood, we’re all some variety of Weird Barbie — and maybe that’s OK.
If you like this, try…
Toy Story 4 (2019; Disney+, rentable): Disney’s hit animated series paved the way for Barbie by proving that kids’ toys can represent all kinds of heavy shit, man. The third and fourth installments are particularly rich in existential dread.
The Lego Movie (2014; Max, rentable): Likewise, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s satire demonstrated that movies about brand-name toys approved by the parent companies can be more than two-hour nostalgia-soaked commercials (even if they’re also that).
Little Women (2019; Starz, rentable): Barbie is Gerwig’s second round of interpreting a beloved female-oriented intellectual property. Her version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel pairs a somewhat off-putting structure with powerhouse performances.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2023.
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