If you plan on seeing the Barbie movie, please be warned that I am about to gut it, exposing spoilers that will sway you in one of two very polarized directions, so do read at your own risk.
“Smash the patriarchy” seemed to be a common message among the women digging out pink articles of clothing from their closets to wear inside the pitch black cinema. Incidentally, I have to point out the sea of Barbie boxes displayed at various public places where pioneer patriarchy-smashers posed for Instagram photos, and how that very same Barbie box turned out to be a symbol of oppression in the film. While my own husband climbed into a Barbie box just last week at a Zara, I did enjoy the irony when perusing the inevitable #GirlPower Insta-flood.
Once in the cinema, elbows deep in popcorn, I didn’t know what to expect from the movie but, three minutes into the film, I had a sick feeling that this was going to be boring. I was not wrong.
I am going to break down my thoughts on the movie through a series of questions that I am certain no one - not Greta Gerwig (co-writer of the film), not Ruth Handler (the inventor of the Barbie doll) – will be able to answer/contest. Take a sip of air from a pink teacup and let’s go.
First of all, if we are to buy into the logistics of: Every Barbie feels good in Barbie World because the human girl playing with her is happy, but when the human girl feels crappy, the Barbie feels crappy and at times even has an existential crisis which completely throws her off her game and causes her to enter the Real World in search of said human girl…(okay lol)…then..
What happens when every girl that has played with every Barbie that now exists in Barbie World grows up into a woman?
And if that woman happens to be depressed, and if depression is as prevalent as it is now in the year 2023, shouldn’t nearly every Barbie in Barbie World be having an existential crisis that leads down the EXACT SAME PATH that our protagonist has gone on?
And yet, ‘Weird’ Barbie (what a euphemism!) tells her that the last time this sort of thing happened was like …ten..twenty years ago? How? How has no one else who has ever played with a Barbie ever gotten sad but for these two times? And are all the Barbies forever controlled by the emotions of the humans that have ever played with them? What kind of Vivarium is this???
Fine. Lets accept that it’s just..that way.
What exactly was going on with all the Kens? I mean, when the Barbies so effortlessly tricked them into fighting each other (despite the fact that they had forged such a rock-solid bond in their Patriarchy Pizza Party or whatever and were JUST ABOUT TO GO REWRITE THE CONSTITUTION) with pastel tennis rackets and toy horses and random crap that does not belong in Barbie World at all. Aesthetically, just what the hell was going on? How did they go from allying to create a new government and overthrowing all of the women (typical) to immediately fighting each other? Even with their hollow, toxic male heads..why was it so easy to trick them?
Why did the television sets go from neon pink to, like, real plasma screen TVs displaying videos of horses? I mean, fine, in the story they represented the patriarchy to Ken, but did New Evil Male Dominated Barbie World now mean regular household items also became real? Why? And why was that all so inconsistent?
Why did the Kens break out in a jazz dance a la Newsies meets Rent meets some kind of deviled-eggs-under-hot-sun hallucination…what was that all about? How did that keep with the Barbie theme at all?
Why did Ken break out in a random song while wearing a pimp coat? What did that have to do with anything?
Why did all the Kens look like dusty dudes? Why wasn’t there even one shiny looking one?
At one point, as part of their Patriarchy Ploy, the Kens turn the Simple but Self-Confident Barbies into subservient morons, to put it nicely. Luckily, Barbie devises a plan (see above for how well it worked) and thankfully brings the Barbies back to their confident selves. But..
If the Barbies have all returned to status quo, why have they suddenly become these ultra introspective beings? Why wouldn’t they have just gone back to their original selves? Where did this new ability for insight come from, and if it came from having America Ferrera’s character remind them of how bad life is for women, why did that imply that these Barbies needed to have their IQs raised in the first place?
In the Real World, things didn’t make much more sense either. The lead Human protagonists are a mother and daughter with a broken relationship caused presumably by the fact that the daughter is in high school now?? I guess?? Like, they never explain why the daughter won’t even let her mom gingerly brush a strand of hair off her face before she climbs out of her hybrid vehicle and stomps off to school. And then when Barbie finds the girl (by having a vision – don’t ask) and tries to approach her at school, a fellow student warns her not to approach this girl because she is Too Cool and No One Speaks To Her Directly…and we quickly do learn that the daughter is, in fact, a bully.
HMM.
So, the self-righteous daughter, who has the balls to tell off Barbie for ‘setting women back 50 years’, is actually a real-life asshole…but Barbie is the problematic element in this story because..??
Also, what self-proclaimed tween would have such a deep seeded hatred for a doll?
Also, why do we never go into the fact that the daughter is a bully? Shouldn’t she have an arc beyond that of “I hated Barbie and then later I liked Barbie and was slightly less disrespectful to my mom although I still snapped at her to GROW UP at the end which still makes me a Grade A Unpasteurized C*nt”..?
What is Will Ferrell’s character? Doll maker who is actually nice guy? Evil man who is stupid and then comes around? What is he?
If Barbie was running away from him and his clan of Men Idiots Men in the real world, why was that chase scene so stupid and unrealistic? I get CoMeDy but…what world are we in here?? Or is this like a mish-mash, Elf style? A mish-mash where the ghost of Ruth Handler is just glugging tea on the 17th floor and we’re all meant to accept that as Real World Facts??
Finally, why did Barbie choose to live in the real world? Why, after spending barely an afternoon in shitty LA, would that life appeal to her more than everything she has ever known, loved, and fought for? What did she learn that was so appealing to her now? Why would Barbie leave her life behind in exchange for a life of gynecology appointments?
Why did that last scene with Ruth Handler last a fucking eternity? Honestly, what was going on? Did someone forget to yell cut?
What was this all about? A fractured relationship between a mother and daughter? What it feels like to be a woman? The hardships women face? Oppression? Women’s rights? Just that men are the worst? Help, I am not sure! I tried to explain the plot to my mom, but could not make sense of it at all. It just wants to be so many things, but isn’t sure how to follow through on most of them.
The story as a whole is a steaming heap of confusing ideas, apart from the moment America Ferrera’s character delivers a poignant monologue describing how impossible it is to live with the standards put upon women. It seems the whole film was just quivering in its seat waiting for the chance to blurt it out. I won’t lie, it made me a little emotional, and reminded me of some of the harder parts about being a woman, but this was an idea probably better suited for an op ed piece in the New Yorker, leaving the rights to the Mattel image to a filmmaker who would’ve given Barbie, this colossal figure in our lives, a film deserving of its name. And that’s what sucks about this! You can’t just make..another Barbie movie. That was it, folks.
If you’re the kind of person who believes they have done their part to dismantle the patriarchy by handing over $15+tax to those FaMoUs HoLLyWoOd MaTrIaRcHs to see this film, you will, at best, not have an opinion on the storyline, and at worst, hate me, which is something that will certainly keep me up at night. However, if like me, you expect to be entertained by a film you have paid a criminal amount of money to see in the cinema, you might want to look into Oppenheimer instead, which, I’m told, somehow manages to touch on an even more toxic theme.
*Title adapted from one of my favourite pieces by Lindy West
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