On Barbie

A brief summary of the film, before we get into the whys and the hows and the Ryan Goslings. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, where - generally speaking - life in plastic is fantastic. Barbie, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, lives in a simulacrum of the real world, where every day is very similar to the one before - she and gazillions of other Barbies do things like go to the beach, have dance parties, win Nobel prizes for literature, while various Kens stand around and look pretty - until thoughts of mortality spur her to leave her own world and join the 'real' world (Los Angeles). One of the Kens (Ryan Gosling) joins her on this trip. Barbie discovers that her feelings of estrangement have been caused by a pair of real-world humans, a mother and daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt) who are growing apart; the mother cherishes her daughter's old Barbie dolls (and also works for Mattel (?)), while her daughter is now a moody little teenage cuss who wears black instead of pink, and thinks Barbie set feminism back by decades. [Sidenote: she's right!] Meanwhile, adorably grasping male Mattel execs (including Will Ferrell and Jamie Demetriou) are on the hunt for the escaped Barbie; also meanwhile, Ken has brought back to Barbieland the concept of patriarchy, and all of the previously emancipated Barbies have now been convinced to play second fidde to a bunch of fuckboy Kens. Barbie and the two humans return to Barbieland to make femalehood rule again, while Barbie begins to harbour thoughts of turning into a real human. 

OK that's it for the story (and it's a lot (some might say too much!)!)! I wrote a piece for the Guardian, before seeing the film, about Greta Gerwig selling out by making a film for Mattel, and while the film clearly is a sell-out job (Mattel is constantly mentioned; the narrative is twisted incredibly spuriously to make Barbies the model of a weirdly retrograde white feminism of empowerment) it's also interesting to see the flourishes that Gerwig brings to this commission, which align it with Little Women, Lady Bird and Frances Ha. I'm fascinated by Barbie's absurdly garbled feminist discourse, and how it exists within a big consumerist blockbuster. Who is the film for? What does it say?

Last week I was texting with my friend Nija, who is roughly my age, a mother of two, a woman of Indian-American heritage. She wrote: 

I am glad she [Gerwig] clearly put thought into it and it's not a completely dismissive piece of shit movie marketed to kids with contempt for kids at its heart. But fundamentally, it sucks that this is what her mind has been up to for the last 4 years or whatever. What other, frankly, better things could we have had? But then I've been really struggling with ... oh my god, am I seriously going to pay for and watch a film about Barbie that is basically the Matrix? Really? 

I had to make a big logical leap upon reading these messages, an effort of memory and dissociation, because for a long time now it has been clear that I would see this film, so would all my friends and acquaintances, and that it would be pretty good. But that didn't have to be the case - Mattel could have made a cash-in film aimed at children, along the lines of, say, the My Little Pony Movie, in which case I wouldn't have seen it, and most likely neither would you, and not a single one of us would be arguing about whether the plastic dolls from the olden days that can be air hostesses or quantum physicists and which have tits but no nipples or pussies, are feminist. 

So Gerwig and her partner Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the movie, know they have a right old job on their hands: a great deal of the intended audience feels queasy about these dolls and about capitalist consumerism in general, and much has to be done to fit the dolls into a tolerable worldview while also being a fun entertainment that sells the dolls. Let's start with Barbieland, where the film's charming first twenty minutes or so are set: this is a pink paradise full of thin, beautiful women (and one fat, beautiful woman), with no money, no class system (cheerful bin-ladies in pink remove the rubbish), no violence, no sex, no smell and no patriarchy. Hence the no violence and no sex thing. Women are at the forefront of everything - there's a woman president, and the women all hang out together happily. There is something like a childlike innocence to this world, and everything that happens has the giddy simplicity of child's play: the Barbies don't go down a staircase, but simply float from their houses into their cars. 

But a child's understanding of the world can't explain everything here. Barbieland is, cunningly, like a cross between child's play and an advert. Gerwig is clever in her depiction of one Barbie, known as "Weird Barbie" (Kate McKinnon) who has hair cut with kitchen scissors, mismatched clothes, pen on her face, and constantly does the splits. This signifies to us that we are in a child's universe, where the Barbies tend to do things imagined for them in child's play. But little girls tend to have one Barbie, or maybe two or three if they're lucky, and perhaps one or two sets; that means that Barbies are usually integrated into other games (as in Toy Story). In this film, the Barbies don't do what kids actually do with Barbies (undress them; throw them across the room) but what marketing boards would have you believe kids do with Barbies (make them act out their designated scenarios). That fudges the line between childlike fantasy and commerce, partly in order to present the Mattel worldview with clean lines and a sense of wonder, in order to sell the dolls; partly so as to present a more coherent political vision of this very broadly feminist utopia. 

Late in the film, when Ken tarnishes this Garden of Eden by bringing back the notion of patriarchy into this world, we are supposed to feel the violent force of that act. But the world of these women already had the hallmarks of patriarchy, before that desecration: they are thin; they are required to be beautiful (for whom?); they model straightness; they wear heavily gendered clothing. When one of the Barbies, under the cosh of the patriarchy, is later made to wear stereotypical male-fantasy clothes (a French maid outfit), she exclaims in horror: "I wouldn't choose that!" Indeed, quite possibly - but would she "choose" whatever pink ensemble for girls she had been wearing before that, instead? The implication is that women, without the influence of men, would naturally tend towards the gendered presentation of themselves that we see. This is bizarre. It's notable that the Barbies never argue over anything - the Kens get wound up with one another, but the Barbies are all happy girlfriends to each other. The interests of one woman never conflict with those of another, partly because there's no class system and race is flattened: the President (Issa Rae) is Black, but most other Barbies I can remember are white. Since nobody has sex - and nobody is a parent - what are the Kens for, at all? 

These questions are only muddled further when our protagonists adventure into the 'real' world, where Barbie - in the course of seemingly a few hours - immediately finds out about the oppression of women, which mostly takes the form of street harassment. In the same time-frame, Ken gets several books out from the library, learns about male power, and applies for several jobs (including doctor, lifeguard). It's interesting that Gerwig has chosen, for her main character, a Barbie with so little going on. While the other Barbies mostly have jobs, this one - Stereotypical Barbie - has none; and in the real world, only shows an interest in beauty, and suffering. Female identity is mostly viewed, in a way that feels redolent of 90s feminism à la Bridget Jones, as a state of cosmetic social victimhood. This is affirmed by the mother she meets, Gloria, who is given a monologue about how hard it is to be a woman - you have to be thin, but not too thin, confident but not too confident, etc. The thing is, America Ferrera, in this role, is conventionally beautiful in exactly the same way as the Barbies; the car she drives is remarkably new and clean; her hair neat; her clothes perfectly ironed and Barbie-coded. There comes a moment in the film where the main Barbie protests that she doesn't feel pretty, and the narrator (Helen Mirren) drawls: "Note to the filmmakers: this would be more convincing if the role wasn't played by Margot Robbie." It's funny, but could be said just as easily after one of Ferrera's monologues. In this 'real world', Mattel execs are rendered as toy-like figures; the grumpy black-wearing daughter is also beautiful, and duly gets Ally-Sheedy-in-the-Breakfast-Club-ed by the end of the movie. 

In the 'real world', a few moments of violence stand out - especially when Barbie is harassed in the street by builders - but it's notable that the film has no interest in class. Barbie is a white, blonde, beautiful woman who has a house of her own; presumably the builders aren't in the same bracket. Their harassment is patriarchal, certainly, but it's significantly complicated by class. Likewise, race is flattened here: Gloria is a Latina woman who works as a receptionist at Mattel, but she's able to afford a new, expensive car and have a big, perfectly tidy house in L.A.; her daughter, we suppose, played with predominantly white dolls while growing up. 

Sex is not mentioned, but Gerwig knows about it of course (the film's very last sentence is a joke to that effect): we know that the street harassment Barbie receives is due to a sexual impulse, not just the fruit of a nebulous patriarchal desire to dominate women. But sex can't be brought back into Barbieland, which allows Gerwig to put forward the insane notion that the dolls aren't really sexual. This, despite an introduction where little girls throw away their baby dolls in favour of a woman doll. The Barbie revolution came about because little girls stopped playing mother - or stopped only playing at being a mother - and played at, er, sexually available childless femalehood. Barbie is a sex object - she was sold to girls, but the stereotype (blonde hair, blue eyes, friendly, maybe dumb) is a man-friendly one. The dolls represent a stereotypical straight man's stereotypical dream fuck. This is a woman who can never get pregnant because she doesn't have a vulva or womb. Barbie, the film, touches on motherhood through the prism of Gloria and Sasha, the mother and daughter who bond over - for crying out loud - Barbie dolls, but otherwise questions of sex, parenthood, ageing and death are held at bay. Barbie is supposedly tormented by thoughts of dying, but these are not developed; in the film's most cloying scene, Barbie meets a very old woman (whose obvious significance is that of being close to death) and tells her that she's beautiful. But why would she think this woman beautiful, when she has no concept of ageing, and is repelled by body 'imperfections' such as cellulite? Barbie, coming from her world, would consider this woman an alien, a freak. 

Barbie - the film - has its cake and eats it, by presenting (both in Barbieland and the real world) a feminism that is easily digested, and which feels incredibly old school in its lack of intersectionality: a very thin model of feminism (female friendship; finding oneself; female success) that doesn't conflict too clangingly with the Barbie brand is leveraged in order to give Barbie and Mattel a pass. 

Fascinatingly, despite this incredible tonal clash, this murky soi-disant feminist soup of garbled dictums and girlboss can-do, Barbie fits quite handsomely in Gerwig's oeuvre: this Barbie, who seems completely lost in her world, is eerily reminiscent of Frances from Frances Ha - a privileged, intelligent, beautiful woman whose world is broadly alright, but who feels disturbingly lacking in some way. That woman who is still in the state of becoming crops up again and again across Gerwig's filmography, right down to Greenberg, her first film with Baumbach. These are women - Jo in Little Women is another one - who are strong in many regards, and who want to be and do, but who are often also confused and uncertain. In Barbie, the main character states that she doesn't want to be the created thing, she wants to be the creator, but we stop short of imagining what she might do with her life; she hasn't ever said anything of interest or showed any proclivities for anything, so her very yearning is supposed to carry us along. 

I was reminded of Gerwig's Little Women in the way Gerwig takes a familiar character or story and plays around with it - by far the best quality of this film, which is occasionally delightful, is that sense of playfulness, which finds expression in some smart gags, beautifully devised dance sequences, and loopy flights of imagination - in order to re-present it for modern eyes. But in Little Women, Gerwig's chopping-up of a familiar story ended up undermining the narrative at its heart. Gerwig retools the story of Little Women so that Jo's romance with Professor Bhaer (Louis Garrel) takes centre stage, rather than her romance with the lovely Laurie - which is instead presented in flashback. She also makes Bhaer incredibly handsome and quite charming, which makes a mockery of the book's idea that Jo is being pragmatic in her settling down with the Professor; that he is physically unattractive means that she is able to look past appearances. The needless complication of that edit, replacing the linear narrative with a sequence of skips forwards and backwards, ends up harming what is a quite realistic story of womanhood making difficult compromises, instead favouring a resolution where Jo gets her perfect man. 

So it goes with Barbie, where everybody is beautiful and gets along, and where for every problem (e.g. societal dominance of men) there is finally a pretty easy opt-out (the Barbies simply change the constitution!). No compromises have to be made in this film - where, for instance, Barbie isn't in love with Ken, so doesn't have to make any effort to share her space or taint her own independence. A much more simple story could have been told: it's to Gerwig's credit that she thought big, but in the end all of these layers of invention and meaning are used in service of a thoroughly hedged message, which all too easily becomes swallowed up in a feelgood pink miasma.