Barbie*
(or, Women Talking, Dancing, and Confronting the Patriarchy)
(*spoilers ahead)
Friday night, the whole family went to see Barbie with some friends. Bea and Harriet and I had been eagerly anticipating the movie for months, watching every trailer many times over. Richard was excited to see it too (he has good taste), though listening to his guffaws at the opening I don’t think he’d seen the teaser trailer. Bea, who currently hates pink and anything stereotypically feminine, agreed to go once she saw that the movie was not just for people who love Barbie, but also for “anyone who’s ever hated Barbie.”
The theater (we went to Silverspot and sat in the comfy first row) was a scene—so many girls, women, and also a few men dressed up to commemorate the event. For some (like Harriet), that meant wearing pink. But we also saw goth Barbies, cowgirl Barbies, and graphic/black-and-white attired Barbies. True to the film’s tag line, everyone in the theater had some sort of relationship to Barbie, and the best part, for me, was experiencing a large group of people expressing, reliving, and considering that experience both individually and together.
When Bea was about two and a half, she traveled with me and Mamie to Paris. I don’t even think she had a Barbie by then (her constant companion then was a Corolle doll named Lady Baby), but Mamie and I loved taking her to the Barbie exhibit at the Louvre Decorative Arts Museum. We admired the many iterations of career Barbie on display (from présidente to vétérinaire pour poneys), her various domiciles, vehicles, pets, outfits, friends. As at the movie theater, we loved watching the patrons (mostly women and girls) reminisce, marvel, and laugh at the dolls.
Because that’s a big part of Barbie, and the relationship to Barbie, which the movie totally gets. Girls become self-aware at a young age, which is why stories about teenage girls are interesting and enjoyable to me in a way that stories about cisgender/heterosexual teenage boys are generally not. A reward of this self-awareness is an ability to inhabit conditions of absurdity with a sense of humor. As an uncomfortably flat-footed Barbie says, “if my feet were always shaped this way I’d never wear heels!”
In Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie and her pals (including an especially wonderful America Ferrera) experience worse than heels in the movie—they take on the whole patriarchy, first chased by all-male Mattel execs, then having to fix Ken’s attempted re-imagining of Barbie Land as Kendom. But the movie is hilarious, and so much fun from start to finish. The sets are wonderful, the various Barbies (especially Issa Rae’s President Barbie) are fantastic, and Ryan Gosling is pee-your-pants funny as Ken. But my favorite scenes happened when Margot Robbie, as Stereotypical Barbie, saw and reflected on the realistic moments of ordinary human life (inhabiting memories of America Ferrera, then observing people in a park, and finally through a vision transmitted by Rhea Perlman’s Ruth Handler). Barbie’s emotional response confirms the value of flawed, complex human reality and elevated the film to a place I wasn’t expecting.
Here are favorite things about Barbie from the rest of the family:
Harriet: “I liked when Ken went like this [makes a muscle] and sang at Barbie.”
Richard: “My favorite part was Allan.”
Bea: “I thought the end was very surprising and funny.”
This was the fifth movie I’ve seen in the theater this year. All the films I’ve seen (Tar, Women Talking, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, and now Barbie) have centered on the lives of women and girls. Three of the five (Women Talking, Are You There God, and Barbie) were directed by women. Barbie might actually be my favorite of these great films—at least, I had the most fun watching it.
Here are 50+ other films directed by women this year—I’d like to see Past Lives next. What about you? Will you see Barbie in the theater, or another film by a woman director?
Also, random thought: weird Barbie would make a great Halloween costume.
Hope you’re having a great weekend, and staying as cool as possible, Frog Troublers!
I loved the “I am Kenough” hoodie at the end 😂
You’ve put into words what I’ve been strugythis afternoon to convey. Barbie’s reflections on real life made me cry, and thankful for a dark theatre. America’s character memories of Sasha growing up, changing, all made me cry. Barbie not wanting things to change, wanting things to just be good again, I sympathized with and felt. The social commentary, the Kens screwing up Barbieland once they gained control- all brilliant and hysterical and also too close to home and reality. I thought I would think it was funny, I didn’t realize it would bring up so many emotions in me that I didn’t realize were dormant. We all three dressed up in pink- as much pink as we owned - I like knowing now we were part of a group mentality (a positive one ;)