i don't know what i thought of the barbie movie
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently striking, the films covered in this review would not exist.
So. My friends and I did the thing.
Oppenheimer, which we saw first, was exactly what I expected. And I expected that it would be good. A good movie about a shitty guy who did a really shitty thing at the behest of other shitty people. That’s the Oppenheimer guarantee.
And Barbie was…
Um.
Barbie was…
Good? Ehh. Bad? I don’t think so? It contains multitudes. More multitudes than I know what to do with. More multitudes than I feel qualified to draw definitive conclusions about. But I have to draw one! I had an Oppenheimer take ready to go like, ten minutes after the movie ended!
Let’s just look at these multitudes one at a time, I guess.
Spoilers ahead.
THE PLOT
Barbie is simultaneously a doll line in the human world, and a living species in the parallel realm of Barbieland. The Barbies of Barbieland know that they exist elsewhere as dolls created by Mattel for human children to play with, but Mattel has brainwashed them into believing that the dozens and dozens of career-oriented Barbie dolls convinced girls they have infinite potential, leading them to influential leadership positions in adulthood, where they were then able to eradicate gender inequality once and for all. Thus, all Barbies earnestly believe themselves heroic figures admired by all women.
The Kens of Barbieland are essentially second-class citizens who exist only as accessories to Barbies. Without Barbie, there is no Ken. Barbies are allowed in government, in courtrooms, in the medical field, in the Nobel Prize nominations list, in Dreamhouses. Kens… can be beach.
Our protagonist, Stereotypical Barbie, (Margot Robbie) is undergoing an existential crisis and thinking only of death. This manifests physically in flat feet (Barbies walk en pointe) and cellulite. The other Barbies tell her she has to go see Weird Barbie, (Kate McKinnon) a pariah who was played with too interestingly by a human girl and now has an asymmetrical haircut and (Crayola marker) tattoos and can do cartwheels. Weird Barbie tells Stereotypical Barbie that whatever human girl she belongs to in the real world is also having an existential crisis, and taking it out on the doll. The only way to fix things is by sending Stereotypical Barbie to the human world so she can tell this girl to snap out of it.
The Ken who is enamored with her (Ryan Gosling) stows away in the trunk of her convertible, and Stereotypical Barbie is like, “Ugh, FINE, you can come with me.”
The convoluted travel method between Barbieland and the real world eventually spits them out in Los Angeles. The realest world there is! Barbie gets objectified and sexually harassed, and Ken gets treated like a person. Barbie is shaken but undeterred from her mission; Ken wants to explore this wondrous place where people take him seriously. They split up.
Barbie intuits that a local middle schooler named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) is the girl whose emotional turmoil is having the ripple effect, so she strolls up to the cafeteria table where Sasha and her three friends (who may or may not be a Bratz homage) are sitting. Barbie’s all, “Hello, I am Barbie, you’re WELCOME for your equal rights!” and instead of screaming, “WHAT THE FUCK A DOLL CAME TO LIFE WHAT IS THIS LIFE-SIZE (2004) STARRING LINDSAY LOHAN AND TYRA BANKS??????” as I would’ve done, they just start shitting on her. They’re like, “Fuck you, fuck your unrealistic body proportions, fuck your cascading negative effect on preteen girls’ self-esteem, and FUCK your cowboy hat.”
Barbie runs away crying. She’s ready to go to the Mattel headquarters and beg them to help her. Meanwhile, Ken discovers… the patriarchy.
And he likes it.
Everybody at Mattel is a man (a comedy buffoon man, but you know, a man) except for Sasha’s mom America Ferrera, who is a receptionist. Whenever she has downtime, she draws the dark, existentialist Barbie concepts that have been plaguing Stereotypical Barbie. The character is named Gloria, but I don’t believe they actually say so in the movie, because I didn’t find this out until the credits. I will call her Gloria for the sake of brevity and clarity, but just know that I spent my entire watch referring to her as America Ferrera in my head, for lack of anything else.
The Mattel execs are in a meeting, which Barbie crashes. She wants to speak to the CEO, who is noted man Will Ferrell. She’s like, “Okay, let me speak to the COO,” and the COO is also a man. So is the CFO. Will Ferrell is super worried about the ramifications of a Barbie in the real world, so he tries to capture her in a plastic box, but she runs away.
Meanwhile, Ken returns to Barbieland to teach the other Kens about patriarchal shit like horses and beer. Gloria picks Sasha up from school, and Sasha’s like, “An actual fucking Barbie crashed my lunch table today,” and Gloria is like, “HUH????”
A chase scene ensues. Barbie finds herself in an office decorated to look like a suburban kitchen circa the 1950s, where a kindly old woman named Ruth (Rhea Perlman) shows her the way out.
Barbie runs out of the building just as Gloria and Sasha pull up. Gloria tells her to get in the car, and they flee to Barbieland. The Mattel execs follow them at a distance (due to incompetence rather than stealth). Gloria is super excited to see Barbieland, but Sasha continues being a hater.
HOWEVER, Barbieland has changed! In the span of like, an hour of real-world time, Ken has rallied the other Kens, brainwashed the Barbies into subservience, taken over the Dreamhouses, and scheduled an emergency session of Congress to enshrine Ken supremacy in the constitution.
Stereotypical Barbie of course hates that shit, so she and Gloria and Sasha go to see the only person who might be able to help them: Weird Barbie. The Kens have not bothered to brainwash her, (or maybe they tried and couldn’t?) but she’s not really sure what to do because this has never happened before. Stereotypical Barbie lies face-down on the ground and gives up, prompting Gloria to rant about how womanhood sucks so much that even a fucking Barbie can’t handle it, and I use the word rant because there’s nothing hopeful to be found here. This speech is not inspiring; it’s just a frustrated woman venting about the systemic misogyny she’s lived her entire life under. It’s cathartic, but it’s bleak.
And it’s also just what Barbie needs to hear, because the impossible standards for women make her realize nothing matters. She’ll never be good enough for a society biased in favor of men, so she can do whatever she wants.
The speech also snaps a conveniently nearby brainwashed Barbie out of her fugue state, and Barbies Stereotypical and Weird realize what they must do. They must capture the other Barbies, bring them to Gloria for deprogramming, and recruit them to the resistance.
Once the Barbies are all back to normal, they engineer a Ken civil war, allowing them to reclaim the Dreamhouses and Oval Office undetected. Now it’s time for Ryan Gosling Ken’s own breakdown about how demoralizing it is to exist as an accessory to the dominant class. The Barbies agree to give the Kens equal rights. Incrementally. Just like women’s rights in the real world!
The Mattel execs finally show up and are like, “Alright, situation handled, we guess.” By acknowledging the no-win nature of womanhood in a patriarchal society, Gloria has found peace. Sasha appreciates Barbie now. Happy endings abound! Except!
“What’s my ending?” asks Stereotypical Barbie. The crowd parts, revealing Ruth from Mattel. It turns out she’s the ghost of Barbie creator Ruth Handler, who named Barbie after her daughter. She and Barbie have a private chat in an interdimensional white void, and Ruth reminds Barbie that she has infinite potential. Barbie decides she wants to become human, and does. The end.
THE GOOD
Set design. Costume design. Usage of “Push” by Matchbox Twenty. Will Ferrell. The horrifying notion of a ghost keeping an office at the company she co-founded. Dua Lipa Mermaid Barbie.
THE BAD
Thematic inconsistency. Unexplored dynamics between most of the female characters. Superfluous narration (sorry, Helen Mirren). Product placement, although I suppose that comes with the territory. The dawning horror that you have become so old that one of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants girls is playing a mom now. When Barbie cries that she’s not pretty, and Narrator Helen Mirren breaks the fourth wall to point out that this is quite a dubious claim from a character played by Margot Robbie. Criminal under-utilization of Dua Lipa Mermaid Barbie.
THE REST
Perfectly fine.
THE MATRIARCHY
Barbieland is a democracy modeled after that of the United States. Kind of. They have a president and a constitution and a Supreme Court, and then director/co-writer Greta Gerwig was like, “That’s enough. They get it.”
The United States is a patriarchy; therefore, Barbieland is the opposite. It has to be, or else the Barbies would have a really hard time believing Mattel’s lie about how they solved real-world misogyny.
Against all odds, there does not appear to be capitalism in Barbieland — a utopia built around a line of children’s toys that has made Mattel billions and billions of dollars in the 64 years since its inception. Some of the Barbies have jobs — they are doctors and lawyers and writers — but they don’t appear to make any money from them. Issa Rae President Barbie does not have a pension, as far as we know. Ken’s job is “beach”, the duties of which he helpfully exposits to a human lifeguard: he is not qualified to save anyone, only to exist on beaches.
Then you have Barbies defined not by their profession, but by their traits. Weird Barbie. Proust Barbie. Mermaid Barbie. Our protagonist, Stereotypical Barbie. With the exception of Weird Barbie, there is no shame in having a trait rather than a job, because there is no capitalism. The greatest sin one can commit as a Barbie is lacking an identity. Even bullshit identities, like that of Stereotypical Barbie, are better than nothing.
The Kens are, fundamentally, simps. It’s all they can be. They can have jobs and traits, like the Barbies, but they cannot escape simpdom, because the Barbies do not love them. The Barbies do not love them because they are simps. This fixed, intrinsic aspect of a Ken’s ikentity is what traps them in a cycle of oppression. And I see what Gerwig is doing here, because it mirrors how the (human) world is slanted toward men in almost every way, and that women are often defined in relation to, or in contrast to, men. It kind of reminds me of that short film where a straight teenager in a homonormative society takes her own life, because there was an epidemic of real-world gay teenagers doing the same. What kind of rubs me the wrong way about Barbie is the implication that a) women are only systemically oppressed because we don’t know what matriarchy is, b) given the opportunity, we would simply invert the current social order in our favor and brainwash men into submission. I mean, maybe we would. It’s a totally hypothetical scenario, and human nature is unpredictable. But I resent the presumption!
When the Kens instate patriarchy, the Barbies’ only weapon against it is Gloria’s monologue about how much the real-world patriarchy sucks. Which I’ll include in its entirety, so that you too may be inspired to fight for women’s rights!
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow, we're always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also, you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money, because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always looking out for people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much, or that you threaten other women, because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that, but also, always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also, everything is your fault. I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”
Okay, it’s not a bad speech. It’s not even a speech I disagree with. I can appreciate the novelty of lamentation counterintuitively providing hope. And as an obsessive-compulsive, I can recognize the inherently freeing nature of acknowledging the futility of attempting to change things outside your locus of control, and the catharsis of accepting painful truths rather than trying to deny them. Most importantly, I can understand that I am not supposed to be inspired by this speech, or even learn anything from it, because it is ultimately just a means of advancing the plot of the goddamn Barbie movie.
But… it happens to espouse one of my personal least favorite conceptions of womanhood. The one where it’s is just wall-to-wall bummers with zero chance of respite. The bummers not a product of systemic misogyny, but of women’s inability to defeat it. You can find temporary relief only by venting (generally to another woman) about the relentless horror of being alive. And then the other woman just goes, “Oh my god, I know!” and you both continue to experience the bummers. Rinse, repeat. You cannot rise above your less-than-ideal circumstances, because you cannot name the actual reason behind them. And also, because it’s really hard. The system is rigged, and the way things are going, we’re not un-rigging it any time soon. Why is the system rigged? It just is — who gives a shit?
So, essentially, this monologue crosses my personal discouragement threshold and then doesn’t bother to posit a solution to any of the problems mentioned, because in the context of the film, the monologue is the solution. Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it, but in this scenario, it’s the only step. Womanhood sucks, and if you want it not to suck, you have to admit that it sucks. But then it still sucks, because you haven’t actually enacted any policy changes or anything. Why would you bother, if things are just destined to suck forever? And I just don’t think womanhood is the thing that sucks here. Patriarchy sucks, but the word doesn’t actually appear in the speech. Womanhood just sucks for SOME reason. What could that reason be? Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it. Identifying the source of the problem is step two.
Now, patriarchy is obviously the source of the problem in Barbieland, and in the film’s depiction of modern-day America, so maybe I’m not being fair. I don’t need Gerwig to spell it out for me. But I know this thing is going to get shared out of context, and misinterpreted, like so much feminist theory before it. That’s not the movie’s fault. But maybe if I express how much it bums me out, it will suddenly cease to do so. Moving on!
THE (LACK OF) GAY STUFF
Greta Gerwig had one hundred and fourteen minutes to include a joke about scissoring, the first and foremost “adult” concept anyone thinks of with regard to Barbie dolls, and SQUANDERED THEM.
Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie is ostracized from society. She is the least outwardly feminine Barbie, due to her wardrobe and haircut, and she’s played by Kate McKinnon, who I’d argue has dethroned Ellen Degeneres as Hollywood’s capital-L Lesbian. Because you know they’d kick out everyone else if they thought they could get away with only having one. Weird Barbie’s lesbianism is never confirmed in the film, though; it is sequestered in the shadowy confines of the Barbie Weirdhouse that is subtext.
Every time Barbie drives into and out of Barbieland she is listening to “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls, a folk rock duo comprised of two lesbians. The lyrics describe an existential crisis, and that is what Barbie’s having, but there are other existential crisis songs that weren’t famously written and performed by lesbians. “Dancing in the Dark”, for instance. Actually, that wouldn’t have made this any less gay.
All of the Kens are in love with at least one Barbie, but none of the Barbies are in love with any of the Kens. Nor with any of the other Barbies. The Barbies don’t even seem like particularly close friends. And if I had to pick my absolute least favorite aspect of the film, that’d be it. Obviously, I wouldn’t have minded some throwaway lesbian side characters — like, maybe Kristen Stewart and Janelle Monáe could’ve cameoed as, I don’t know, Socially Awkward Mechanic Barbie and Sexually Liberated Veterinarian Barbie, and they live in the same Dreamhouse and kiss for 0.2 seconds in the background of a particularly chaotic wide shot so that severely anti-gay countries can just trim the aspect ratio a little when they release it — but I wasn’t expecting them. I don’t think lesbianism is something that really occurs to Gerwig like, in general. But complex, non-romantic relationships between women — the theme of her two previous films — certainly do! And she couldn’t even put any of those in here! None of the Barbies are friends with each other. Barbie canonically has three sisters, but they are barely mentioned. Gloria and Sasha’s tumultuous relationship is repaired in like, a few hours, after just one trip to Barbieland. In a movie directed by the woman who wrote Lady Bird.
When Ken’s redemption arc has concluded, and he and Barbie are discussing how to create a more just society that meets the Kens’ biological need for attention and validation from Barbies, she concedes, “Not every night has to be girls’ night.” This might ring less hollow if she had any close female friends. Maybe womanhood would suck less if you had someone to do it with!
(Okay, I do think it’s genuinely interesting that all Barbies are on good terms with each other, but Kens are prone to petty infighting, mirroring the way that women are often stereotyped as catty bitches who live for drama, whereas men are chill and can just hang.)
But I digress. None of the Barbies are gay. Nor are any of the Kens.
Barbies and Kens can’t be gay, producer and star Margot Robbie explained helpfully, because they don’t actually have sexual orientations. Nice try, Neil Gaiman. Kens are in love with Barbies. Barbies are in love with no one, but they are never insinuated to be aromantic. So to an average moviegoer, that just means they’re straight, Margot.
“She’s a doll,” Robbie told Vogue in May. “She’s a plastic doll. She doesn’t have organs. If she doesn’t have organs, she doesn’t have reproductive organs. If she doesn’t have reproductive organs, would she even feel sexual desire? No, I don’t think she could.” Well, then. I think that’s as good a segue as any.
THE TRANS STUFF
Barbieland and its inhabitants do not conceptualize gender the same way that humans do. There are not women and men, there are only Barbies and Kens. Oh, and Allan! And Skipper! And Midge!
Actually, Skipper is just Barbie’s sister, so we won’t worry about her. Functionally, she is a Barbie. It’s like if your name was Woman and you had a sister named Jessica.
Midge’s gender is… pregnant? Narrator Helen Mirren told me not to think about this too hard, but I am. Out of spite. Midge is ostensibly trapped in a nightmarish existence of never-ending pregnancy. There are no children in Barbieland. None of the Barbies are pregnant, nor do I assume they can become so. They don’t have reproductive organs, remember? No way Midge is having this thing. What would it even be? Another Midge?
And then there is the crown jewel of nonbinary representation in big-budget Hollywood blockbusters… MICHAEL CERA. Okay, not literally Michael Cera himself, but his character, Allan, the only fully-realized doll character who is neither a Barbie nor a Ken. He’s “Ken’s friend.” He wears a garish, rainbow-striped shirt, and his job is not beach. If I had to guess, I’d say his job is like, assistant manager of a miniature golf course. A miniature golf course that doesn’t even really need an assistant manager, but he’s here.
Now, what’s interesting to me about Allan is that he eagerly joins the anti-Ken resistance, aligning himself with his former oppressors against his current oppressors. And by interesting, I mean I’d be pretty fucking peeved if I were nonbinary and this movie implied that if suddenly facing matriarchy, I’d eagerly fight alongside men to restore patriarchy.
Anyway, to my human sensibilities, Barbie reads as a cis woman because like, she’s supposed to. Barbies were modeled after cis women, and I can all but promise you nobody at Mattel in 1959 thought any harder about it than that. She was assigned Barbie at birth, if you will, and that seems to work for her. But then she becomes human. Specifically, a human woman. What else would she be? It’s like, not all women are Barbies, but all Barbies are women. I think.
Trans actress Hari Nef plays Doctor Barbie, but there’s no indication that Doctor Barbie is trans by Barbieland standards. She was also assigned Barbie at birth, presumably. There are no apparent Barbies who identify as Kens, or as Allans, or as something else altogether, (or vice versa) because given the rigidity of gender roles in Barbieland, if they wanted to do this story justice, I think it’d have to be its own movie.
Soon after arriving in the real world, Barbie announces that she and Ken are not in possession of a vagina or a penis respectively. There is context for this that I’ve already forgotten. The real reason she has to say it is because it’s a setup for the last line of the movie, when Barbie (now human) tells a receptionist she’s here to see her GYNECOLOGIST! Let’s go, girls!
I don’t want to be one of those fucking creeps massively overthinking any and everything to do with these sentient dolls’ genitalia, (or lack thereof) but the two most logical reads of the situation are that either Barbie has spontaneously manifested a vagina after becoming a real human woman, (horrifying) or that her first onscreen course of action as a real human woman is to get a vaginoplasty.
At least the second option gives her some autonomy, I guess. Otherwise, did she want a vagina? Did she disclose this to Ruth Handler’s ghost? If so, was the response she got, “Yes, I will magically give you one right now,” or “Yes, find a gynecologist, make an appointment, and ask them for a vaginoplasty”? A vaginoplasty will not give her an entire reproductive tract, so according to Margot Robbie’s obtuse, overly literal take on Barbie the character’s sexual orientation, she still can’t be gay. Or whatever. Does a spontaneous magic vagina from a ghost come with ovaries?
THE MESSAGE
The thing is, I don’t really care about the nuances of Barbie’s vagina acquisition. Neither does the movie. What it did take great care to do is gently push both of my absolute least favorite ideas about womanhood: that it is synonymous with vagina ownership, and that it fucking sucks. Hell, if you’re doing them both at once, you’re also basically implying that having a vagina sucks! If true, this is discouraging news for everyone who wasn’t assigned male at birth (except trans women). Thanks for that one, Greta!
I’m being unfair again. When I said “gently push”, I should’ve said “not dispute.” This movie doesn’t dispute anything, really. It’s not self-reflective. All it does is present some depressing ideas with which every woman in the world was already familiar, put them in a Barbie context, and conclude that they are still sad. But at least you got to see them in an escapist pastel setting.
I don’t think the movie has to send a message. I don’t think it wants to send a message any more complex than GIRL POWER and BUY TOYS. I certainly don’t think it wants to imply that womanhood is a prison from which we cannot escape, and vaginas are a non-negotiable component. But maybe no one noticed that might have been in danger of happening.
Jesus fucking Christ. Every time I think of a half-baked concept to be a huge bitch about, it reveals at least two more. Like a hydra. We’re gonna have to go back to the basics. And I mean the basics.
THE BASICS
Barbie is a movie. I saw it in theaters. It’s a real go-to-the-thea’er film movie. The source material is toy company Mattel’s line of Barbie dolls. The film was directed by Greta Gerwig, and co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling star as Barbie and Ken. The film’s existence was made possible by the labor of writers and actors in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. It grossed $155 million dollars during its opening weekend. It currently has an 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Wikipedia describes it as a “fantasy comedy film.” It is an hour and 54 minutes long. The premise, as presented by every trailer I saw, is that Barbies and Kens (and affiliates) live together in a magical realm called Barbieland, but following an existential crisis, Barbie has to travel to the human world to fix things. Ken follows her. Hijinks ensue.
EVERYTHING
I’ve asked a lot of people I know what they thought of Barbie, and the most common response is, “I wish it had included [X.]” Even I’m like this — remember like, nine hundred paragraphs ago, when I was all, “Why aren’t the Barbies friends with each other?” The movie is less than two hours long, and it had to adhere to a basic three-act structure. If it had exceeded that runtime, or further complicated its plot, I do not think it would’ve been as well-received.
Still, “Barbie is everything,” claimed the film’s viral promotional material, “He’s just Ken.” And so Barbie had to be everything. Perhaps it was doomed all along.
THE CONTRAST WITH OPPENHEIMER
Barbie is everything. He’s just Oppie.
Of course, this is a totally unfair and nonsensical metric by which to grade Barbie, but since I and so many others watched them together, I’d be remiss not to at least mention the two films’ opposing expectations.
As a biopic, Oppenheimer had a very specific niche to fill. All that writer and director Christopher Nolan had to do was tell the guy’s life story — with embellishments only where strictly necessary — and figure out exactly how strongly to criticize the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without totally alienating the lucrative demographic that is the United States military fandom. And I don’t mean to imply that this movie would’ve been easy to write, even with Nolan’s decades of experience in the field. The limits of adapting an extant story, though, can be freeing. Nolan’s primary obligation was to do the source material justice, and by extension convince audiences and critics that a movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer is worthwhile when it would be so much easier to just read the guy’s Wikipedia page.
Barbie is an adaptation too, but there was no preexisting story. All Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach had at their disposal were some dolls whose personality traits essentially boil down to “ambitious and kind” and “devoted and kind”, and the woman who created them and was later charged with fraud and falsifying documents and forced to resign from the company she co-founded. It kind of reminds me of Tina Fey basing Mean Girls on a nonfiction book about the social hierarchy of high school cliques. There were no story and characters, only scenarios and archetypes.
So from these toys and their origins, Gerwig and Baumbach had to write a movie that appeals (as the trailer claims) to people who love and hate Barbie alike. Maybe that’s my problem? I’m Barbie-neutral. What about people who had a few Barbies as kids, and they were fine, but they weren’t your favorite or anything? Love and hate are not diametric opposites — the antithesis of both is indifference.
I’m not indifferent to this movie, as I’m sure I’ve made abundantly clear. But I don’t love it or hate it, either. Arguably, I’m indifferent to Oppenheimer, even though I enjoyed it. I am not compelled to analyze the themes and make it over ten people’s email inbox’s problem.
If Barbie and Oppenheimer were targeted at children, they would get pigeonholed as a “girl movie” and a “boy movie” respectively. McDonald’s Happy Meals would come with either a miniature Barbie that looks like Margot Robbie or a plastic atomic bomb. Notice how one of those sounds ridiculous and ghoulish and the other sounds like something they’ve literally done before.
Maybe that’s the problem. Oppenheimer is a movie by, for, and about adults. Barbie is a movie by adults, for a PG-13 audience, about a children’s toy. And not a discontinued toy that only adults would be nostalgic for — an extant toy that made Mattel $1.49 billion dollars last year. Barbie is not a movie for people who love and hate Barbie alike; it is a movie for teens and up who love and hate Barbie alike. The source material’s actual target audience has been left in the lurch. It’s not inappropriate for children, (though I’m not really sure whether anything is or isn’t appropriate for children, because they aren’t a monolith) but it’s pretty high-concept. If I had to guess, I’d say eight is the minimum age at which the average kid would appreciate it. And I don’t mean to imply that Gerwig had to make a movie for young children, but they’re who Barbie is for! The film explicitly tells us that Ruth Handler created Barbie for her daughter, who used to play with paper dolls and pretend they were adults with jobs instead of babies, like all the non-paper dolls on the market. Barbie is a doll for children that some adults also like, either because they were once children themselves, or because they just do. Barbie is a movie for adults that I’m sure some children will also like (if they see it).
Another film I think belongs in this conversation is Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, a movie that left me wishing it had been around when I was in eighth grade. A movie that was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for profanity and references to blowjobs; therefore, actual eighth graders couldn’t see it in theaters without an adult present. As a former eighth grader myself, that was total bullshit. The MPAA wasn’t technically unfair — the film exceeded the established limit of mature content to achieve a PG-13 rating — but nothing in there would’ve been new to me if it had come out in 2009. Burnham made a movie about being in eighth grade that is accurate and honest, and though he did not adhere to the guidelines of what supposedly is and isn’t appropriate for eighth graders to see onscreen, the target audience could not have been clearer. It was for them. It was also for once and future eighth graders, but at the end of the day, it was for real, actual eighth graders.
Again, Gerwig was not obligated to make a children’s movie. This is not a criticism, just a suspected root of why I don’t think Barbie works. It could’ve been a movie for children, and adults still would’ve turned out in droves, because adults love things that are for children. They love Disney, and they love My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and they love Frappuccinos, and they love SOUR by Olivia Rodrigo. And even if they didn’t, they still wouldn’t have been able to resist the siren call of Barbenheimer, because the only thing adults love more than children’s media is committing to the bit.
A CROOKED LINE
I saw Barbie on Sunday. I started writing this article on Monday. It is now Friday. I was hoping that the writing process would help me uncover my specific, concise opinion of the film. But as you can see, that didn’t happen.
It’s entirely possible I’m not trying hard enough. I have not sought out an older, wiser, reclusive lesbian who can give me a single Birkenstock and a quest. I haven’t gone to the doctor, or the mountains. I haven’t looked to the children, or drunk from the fountains. The way that I feel about Barbie is complicated. And the way that I feel about that is distressed, confused, anxious, frustrated. The movie is not that deep! It’s just like, “Here’s some themes,” and you’re like, “Wait, whoa, what?” And then you are driven to madness trying to make sense of them in order to critically analyze them. You still don’t understand why you are so compelled to critically analyze them, but you critically analyzed the boy movie, so it’s only fair!
How is the Barbie movie? Is the Barbie movie good? Is the Barbie movie bad? I don’t fucking know. There’s more than just one answer to these questions, so does it really make sense to ask only one person? I am not the world’s leading authority on the quality of Barbie (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig, nor do I want to be. There is no reason I should feel obligated to pretend otherwise.
And the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.