Attribution: Photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash
Pink is the New Black: Review of Barbie
By Geoff Carter
It used to be that movies were pretty much based on a straight narrative template. You know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, yada yada yada…
Then movie storylines started expanding and incorporating graphic novels, comic books, television series, and even video games as source material for movies until now it seems as if every other film features an abundance of superheroes, franchise extensions (ad nauseum), and even toy lines. Remember the G.I. Joe action series?
Barbie is the newest in this long parade of films based on concepts outside a typical—or any—narrative framework. It’s about a Barbie doll. And this film is way outside the box. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect as I walked into the sold-out theater (yes, sold out on a Wednesday night). After the incessant, hype, buzz, and marketing campaigns, I thought I might be walking into a two-hour advertisement, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Barbie is unexpected, hilarious, and touching. It’s not only a great movie, it breaks new ground.
The film opens in Barbieland, a perfect little pink plastic city brought to you by Mattel. We are introduced to this utopia by the eminently civilized narration of Helen Mirren. Barbie (Margot Robbie) wakes up into her perfect world, says hello to all the other Barbies (President Barbie (Issa Rae), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), and many, many more…), has a perfect little breakfast with items pasted into her little fridge and goes off in her pink car to the beach where she sees the underappreciated Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling), who is full of unrequited love. None of the Kens, including Tourist Ken (Simu Liu) , Basketball Ken (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Kenmaid—a Ken mermaid (John Cena), and Stereotypical Ken (Scott Evans) are not treated with the same esteem as any of the Barbies, who run the place. They are definitely second-class citizens in Barbieland, where nothing, from the pink see-through houses to the saturated pastel décor, ever changes.
During one of her ubiquitous girls’ nights, Barbie suddenly starts having strange thoughts of death and begins experiencing an odd ennui. She wakes up the next morning grumpy and finds her milk has gone bad, her breakfast is burned, and that everything is a little off. Then, horror of horrors, she loses that distinctive Barbie tiptoe arch, and her heels fall flat on the ground. Shocked and horrified, the other Barbies tell her she must see Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) for answers.
Weird Barbie—who is weird because she was played with too hard—informs our Barbie that there is a rift between Barbieland and the real world because the child who owns her is having a problem. Barbie, along with stowaway Ken, goes to the real world, using a variety of Barbie transportation, including rollerblades, to get to the real world. Needless to say, she and Ken are puzzled and baffled by real world culture. Men seem to run things. Encountering a group of construction workers, Barbie fruitlessly looks for the woman who is their boss. While Barbie is attempting to connect psychically with her child, Ken wonders off and is awed by the men who run this world. He becomes infatuated with the patriarchy, replete with sports, machismo, beer, and horses.
Meanwhile, the bigwigs at Mattel have become aware of the presence of a Barbie in the real world and set about capturing her—“putting her back in the box”—as it were. They find her, bring her to the Board, headed by a hilariously clueless CEO (Will Ferrell). Barbie escapes and is rescued by Gloria (America Ferrera) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Goldblatt), whose real-world disenchantment has created the rift. Together, they all return to Barbieland to find that Ken has installed his version—Kendom—of a patriarchy there and decide to fight back to reinstate Barbies to their rightful place in the pink world order.
Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach and directed by Ms. Gerwig (Frances Ha, Ladybird, and Little Women), Barbie is a delightful and surprising mash-up of fantasy, social criticism, comedy, satire, and pathos which works on a number of different levels. In an interview with (The Guardian) Ms. Gerwig said, “There was this sense of wanting to make something anarchic and wild and completely bananas.” And while there is a constant sense of the unexpected throughout the film (including a slapstick-type chase scene, a dance sequence by the Kens hilariously reminiscent of a West Side Story type rumble, satiric jabs at the male ego—who puts a little foosball table on a bigger foosball table?, and encounters with the ghost of Ruth Handler, the Barbie doll creator).
As disparate as this smorgasbord of material might seem, Ms. Gerwig and Baumbach weave it together seamlessly, using the vernacular of the Barbie experience as one of the common threads. As in the dream house, there is no water coming out of the shower, no juice in the glass, and no water—only mirrors—in the pool. In Barbieland, everyone loves Barbie because she exemplifies what any little girl can become, but this expectation comes to a screeching halt when Barbie meets Sasha in the real world. The girl rejects Barbie because she is a symbol of unattainable beauty and perfection that no girl can attain. Sasha tells Barbie she makes girls feel terrible about themselves.
This is a the beautifully rendered pivot point which simultaneously underlines Barbie’s ennui and introduces the feminist theme; however, a little later in the film, when Gloria and Sasha rescue Barbie from the Mattel board, Gloria reveals that is was her memories of herself and Sasha playing with the that precipitated Barbie’s crisis. In this relatively compact sequence of events, Barbie has gone from a paragon of perfection to a pariah to a relationship builder.
As Barbie, Margot Robbie is absolutely—no irony intended—perfect. As stereotypical Barbie, she is appropriately beautiful, stylish, cheerful, and happy. As conflicted Barbie, her encounters with bewilderment, frustration, and anguish (especially in the scene where she—in her best doll-like fashion—folds herself into a sitting position, flops over, and then lies flat face-down on the ground), she is completely believable. It is a brilliant scene. Robbie conveys Barbie’s complicated emerging awareness deftly and with dignity.
As Beach Ken, Gosling very nearly steals the show. His transformation of a feckless lovelorn nobody (men are second-class citizens in Barbieland) to a blustering, imperious—and hilariously clueless—chauvinist spouting half-baked theories of patriarchal righteousness that entrances the Barbies (“it’s like smallpox to the indigenous peoples. They have no immunity”) is perfectly calibrated. Ken’s machismo is loud but brittle, and his seduction by commercialism, including foosball tables stacked on each other and sunglasses over sunglasses is simultaneously hilarious and sad. Gosling has the perfect persona to carry off the vulnerability hidden under overbaked bravado. And after all, he is no stranger to playing with dolls. Remember Lars and the Real Girl?
Barbie is a lot of things. It is a delightful comedy, a brilliant satire, and a beautifully choreographed double take on repressive societal hierarchies. Barbieland is the exact reversal of the real world: women rule, men drool, and everything is perfect—for the Barbies. The real world is, of course, the opposite. Flipping between the two realities reveals these disparities and with the final denouement, gives the mounting ironies one final twist.
Finally, in Barbieland, there is also a ubiquitous lack of individual identity. All are Barbie or all are Ken, (except for social outliers like Alan, Skipper, Weird Barbie, and Midge). It is a weird sort of hierarchy in which personal identity is unnecessary. All desires and wants are satisfied. The world is intertwined into one Ur-identity. There is no internal life because there is no need for one. So, there is no doubt, fear, love, or pain.
That is at least until Barbie meets the creator, finds her feet, and discovers what being human can really mean.