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For the most part, Barbie has held fast to its reputation as an old school work of art in the (im)pure studio system sense of the word. Hand-painted sets, huge backlots and no expense spared for costuming all add up to a movie the likes of which modern audiences haven’t seen in who knows how long…when you don’t count Marvel and DC movies. The big budget allotted to Greta Gerwig’s film is always a rarity for a “women’s movie,” and one that doesn’t “technically” require a lot of special effects. Something Gerwig also offers in spades with subtler moments like Barbie’s convertible overturning, causing her to land with a thud that leaves behind animated pink smoke clouds.
Amid the usual backlash that always tends to arrive when something has been oversaturated, the accusation that Barbie is just more capitalist propaganda designed to bolster Mattel’s sales has perhaps only added to the idea that the movie is nothing but “fluff.” Or, that most odious term, “escapist fun.” The cliche that so many critics and “amateurs” (read: anyone with a website) like to use when describing a film that is comedic and fantastical. Therefore, automatically “frothy.” Barbie has proven no exception to the rule, despite its overtly pleading message for the demise of patriarchy. One that many men and women alike are uncomfortable processing unless they can laugh it off (ha ha ha!) and bill it as comedy rather than something that cuts way too close to the quick of reality.
But Gerwig knows perhaps better than most that the truth is often far more painful than people can deal with “straight up”—it needs to be mitigated with a comedic tincture. And Barbie is sure to offer that in spades (something Mattel is likely happy about to help dilute the “mature thematic elements”). Between reminding audiences of how she drinks from a cup with nothing in it to how incongruous it is to walk around on tiptoes, the “subtle touches” are what contribute to Barbie’s hilarity.
Less funny, alas, is Ken (Ryan Gosling) horning in on Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) journey to the Real World (so Barbie can repair the rip in the portal between it and Barbie Land, therefore stop the cellulite she’s now got from spreading further). Not only is that in and of itself a signal of Ken’s (a.k.a. “men’s”) total lack of consideration for what Barbie wants (which is to go it alone), but the general assumption that men make about how their own wants and “needs” should usurp those of women. When Barbie realizes Ken has stowed away in her fly pink convertible (after he interrupts her solo singalong sesh to Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine”), she’s not, as he would expect, pleased to see him, so much as irritated by the inconvenience of his presence. “You’ll just slow me down,” she tells him. But he keeps needling and pressuring. And so, of course, wanting to be “nice” (as all women who twist themselves in knots to be “liked” do), she lets him stay along for the ride.
This tiny act of “kindness” on her part turns out to unleash the main “Act Two problem” of Barbie: Ken unearthing that patriarchy governs the Real World. A Pandora’s box (or Ken’s box) that, once opened, can only unleash all the same patriarchy-driven ills of the Real World onto Barbie Land. A consequence that Barbie hardly anticipated when she first set out to correct the breach in realms. One, as Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) tells her, that’s caused by the sadness of the little girl who’s playing with her. Only, as it transpires, the girl playing with her isn’t so little. She’s a grown woman and a mom, not to mention an assistant (who dabbles as an illustrator of Barbie concepts) of some kind to the CEO at Mattel (though, in the credits, she’s billed as “employee at Mattel”—for everyone below the executive level is just “employee,” right? No need to get more specific than that). Her name? Gloria (America Ferrera). Her venomous tween daughter? Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). It’s the latter who cuts Barbie down to size, so to speak, by calling her a fascist who represents everything that’s wrong with the world, and how women are viewed in it.
Causing her to cry for the second time since being in the Real World, Barbie can’t believe that “her kind” is seen like this by the women she thought she had brought peace, harmony and equal rights to. Subsequently approached at her lowest moment by handlers (not Ruth or Barbara) from Mattel, she goes with them in their black SUV to meet the CEO (Will Ferrell), who has big plans to put her back in her box (yes, it’s very symbolic of what men do to women in general as well). Barbie, still too trusting and naive after exiting the Garden of Eden, as it were (indeed, Gerwig has turned the Adam and Eve story on its ear by calling out how Ken is sprung from Barbie’s proverbial rib), goes along for the ride. All while Ken watches from afar, now with the diabolical knowledge of patriarchy that he plans to take back to the other Kens in Barbie Land so that it will become the “Kendom.”
As viewers watch Barbie become unsettled by the subjugation and constantly-looming sense of anxiety she endures as a woman (caught somewhere between being a “real girl” and a Barbie doll, for a dash of Pinocchio influence), it’s almost impossible not to squirm in one’s seat over how familiar it all is. Ergo, not exactly making for much in the way of “escapism”—though one can see how it would be necessary to “Trojan horse” Barbie through that “visual cotton candy” lens. Bountiful in the use of bright colors and The Wizard of Oz-esque sets. For anyone can be distracted from deeper meaning by aesthetic beauty. Which is so often how Barbie has been overlooked as a “being” with more substance than her appearance. “Authentically artificial,” as Gerwig would say (though of her sets, not Barbie).
What’s more, Barbie explores, through Gloria, how women are expected to “put aside childish things” like playing with Barbies once they reach Sasha’s age. Already thrust toward the cold, hard adulthood that will stamp out their former comfortableness with exploring who they are through play, and through projections of different selves onto Barbie, or other toys they might engage with. As Ferrera put it, “Growing up is about leaving behind childish things, particularly for women. And not so much men [who] get to have their man caves and play their video games forever. And women, it’s like, ‘Toys away, do the chores, grow up.’ That was really what touched me about Gloria as a character. This woman somehow made it to adulthood holding onto the value of play, and the value of aspiration and imagination is, in a way, counterculture. [Women] can be a lot of things at once…we can be joyful and playful and imaginative and childlike and be a grown woman, professional, taken seriously.” At least, in the world that Barbie sets up.
Unfortunately, in the Real World outside of Barbie’s Real World, it’s as Proust (a fitting luminary to quote considering the “Proust Barbie” reference in the movie) said: “There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.” A fact that Gloria seems to understand only too well. And something that Barbie, as she decides to navigate her way through the bizarre innerworkings of the patriarchal Real World, will also come to apprehend once she becomes a “permanent resident.”
So to call Barbie “escapist fun” diminishes what it actually does. And that is put a glaring spotlight on how women in the Real World are still subjected to the same form of treatment found in the era of classic films from which Gerwig culled much of her inspiration for the sumptuous visuals that have branded Barbie with this misleading assignation.
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Genna Rivieccio
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