The idea that femininity is a performance that alienates the subject from herself has gained even greater ground in the age of reality television, the infinite scroll and the self as a brand, with all the blurring between the ‘artificial’ and the ‘real’ that such endeavours entail. At the same time, our world is in ever-greater thrall to the seductions of the image, and the rewards of a successful femme performance – if reports of influencer earnings are to be trusted – are astronomically high. It’s nice, then, to have a chance to return to the original sinner, the doll that started it all. Barbie showed countless girls the way to earn, if not love, at least its cheaper corollary, attention, by being thin, blonde, beautiful, bad at maths.[1] As attitudes changed, she adopted increasingly different faces and careers – Barbie President, Barbie Lawyer, Barbie Astronaut – but she was still gorgeous, plastic, and ambiguously ageless (Mattel, the toy company that created her, historically froze Barbie’s age at 19.) Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a self-referential, contradiction-filled and sometimes confused exploration of the role played by Barbie in forming a certain ideal of womanhood, veering between apology, revisionism and restitution for the doll.
When her arched feet (set in an eternal tiptoe, all the better for wearing high heels with) suddenly crash flat to the floor, Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” journeys from Barbie Land into the Real World to remedy the cause – the ‘sad thoughts’ of her former owner. Once there, she is told by a teenager named Sasha that Barbies ‘have been making women feel bad about themselves since the they were invented.’ The accusations continue. Barbie is an icon for ‘sexualised capitalism,’ she has encouraged the growth of rampant consumerism, and she has laid waste to girls’ sense of self-worth. The experience reduces Barbie to tears. Back in Barbie Land, her home, it is universally accepted that Barbies brought feminism to the real world, that now sexism is over, girls can be anything they want, and nothing stands in any woman’s way. Filled with cute clothes, beach volleyball and parties with choreographed numbers, Barbie Land is a pastel-coloured dream where a diverse population of Barbies live in harmony. No walls shield the rooms of the dollhouses from public view because here there is no shame; meanwhile, Lawyer Barbies reign triumphant in courts, Reporter Barbies line the newsrooms, and President Barbies occupy a Barbiefied Oval Office. Meanwhile, Kens are aimless. They spend their days hoping to get a glance from a Barbie, or hanging out en masse on the beach.
Gerwig has spoken in interviews about the film’s ‘spirituality’, and it is Barbie Land’s Edenic quality that makes the simplicity of the parable mostly work. Barbie Land is Eden for women before the Fall (here when Stereotypical Barbie wanders into Real Life.) When Ryan Gosling’s Ken joins her there and discovers how great it is being a man IRL, he returns to Barbie Land and successfully introduces “the patriarchy” back home, filling the dollhouses with horse iconography and brainwashing the Barbies into serving the Kens brewskis while they wax lyrical about The Godfather. A spectacular war ensues, set to another sublimely choreographed number.
The story is told with an absurd humour and high-octane aesthetic that inject lightness and novelty into a narrative about gender and power that might otherwise seem leaden or obvious. Unfortunately for the viewer, the Real World also creeps in. Throughout the thoroughly postmodern Barbie, references are made to their overlords: one Barbie cynically says that Mattel, which co-produced the film, ‘makes the rules!’, Lawyer Barbie argues in court that corporations are not people, and a Mattel logo appears over a Barbie’s mouth and bleeps out her attempt to say ‘fuck’. When Stereotypical Barbie turns up to the Mattel headquarters in the film, she is confused to discover its all-male leadership team, which the CEO tries to justify by saying they had a female CEO in the ‘90s before declaring himself ‘the son of a mother.’ Scenes like these seemed depressing to me in the same way that brands chasing viral tweets (RIP) in the 2010s seemed depressing. There has been a lot of discussion of Mattel’s ambitions to harness its intellectual property to become the new Marvel; Alex Barasch reported in The New Yorker that, following Barbie, there are forty-five Mattel toy films in development, including a ‘A24-type’ millennial-angst Barney. One of the most insidious results of developments like these might not just be forcing the audience to sit through annoyingly self-aware jokes like those described above, but the fact that, aside from Barbie, other Mattel films will most likely be conceived alongside company executives from the very beginning.[2] A group truly assured of its own power not only permits protest, but also sets the parameters for acceptable opposition, politely humouring its dissenters safe in the knowledge that they, too, will inevitably be eclipsed by the machine.[3]
Though it might seem pointless to gripe about the encroachment of commercial interests into art – it is an argument, Gerwig’s agent told The New Yorker, that ‘we’ve already lost’ – it’s still worth thinking about what is at stake when a film veers directly into commercial territory. Beyond product placement and plots vetted by corporations, this movement concerns the very form of cinema itself and the particular gaze it encourages. The visual language of advertising – seen in Barbie Land’s lack of shade, texture, and depth, candy-coloured radiance, and the transformation of landscapes, clothing, food and people into items to be admired and acquired – pushes us to see the world through the lens of mimetic desire and jealousy; everything, under the ubiquitous, inescapable touch of commerce, becomes glamour, becomes publicity, becomes commodity.[4]
Barbie, however, wants you to know that it knows all the above too. The film uses self-awareness not only to drive the narrative – Stereotypical Barbie’s development of self-consciousness brings to mind humanity after the fall, as well as a child coming into adolescence – but also to glue together its contradictions, with the same self-awareness serving as a kind of pre-emptive defence for the project as a whole. In the end, what saves the Barbies from the dominion of the Kens is learning about the cognitive dissonance involved in being a woman in the real world. This is where the script falters most, as its precarious balance between artifice, playfulness, and seriousness is entirely thrown off balance. A long, earnest speech from Gloria, in which she describes how tiring it is to live in a world that asks you to be thin but not too thin, assertive but not overbearing, and never too old, is presented as stirring and revelatory and succeeds in waking up writer Barbie from her tradwife slumber, but feels like a clumsy deus ex machina. You sense in this somewhat laboured plot device the mirror-image of Gerwig’s own cognitive dissonance as she tries to make her point and create art within the corporate machine. ‘I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing,’ she told The New York Times. Yet the film feels more ambivalent about the thing, unsure of what exactly it wants to say about its corporate roots besides ‘they exist, we know.’ Or, as in a scene in which a gaggle of Mattel executives pointlessly crash into a climatic stand-off between Barbie and Ken, something along the lines of we don’t really know what to do with them either, While acknowledging the problem saves the Barbies from the Kens in Barbie Land, it is hardly an escape route in the Real World.
And so like its protagonist, who discovers that the world is unknowable and terrifying and finds herself to be flawed and impotent and disgusting, Barbie throws its failings at us and asks for redemption. The kicker is that even Stereotypical Barbie, in all her aspirational perfection, cannot remain Stereotypical Barbie. Entering the real world, she begins to experience a whole range of ugly emotions, narrated in Gerwig-esque mumblecore humour. There’s self-consciousness (‘but the thing I am conscious of is myself’); anxiety (‘fear with no specific object’), and the impotency, frustration and despair that come with living under sexism. There is no going back to Barbie Land and its certainties. All Barbie can do now is to be human, with all of the vulnerabilities and failings and insecurities and cellulite and arch-supporting ergonomic shoes that being human entails. Barbie, the film, thus tries to invert the original sin of Barbie, the toy. While the doll made us so painfully aware of our imperfections, Gerwig’s film seeks to hold us in all our stupid, magnificent flaws and deliver us from ourselves; to tell us that being lost and confused and desirous of spending one’s days lying down prone and overwhelmed on the floor, is the point of being alive. There is something magical in how this message aligns and plays with the public mood, especially if one considers Barbie as a work of conceptual art (including its relentless marketing campaign; glamorous press tour; savvy and seemingly inescapable press coverage; landmark pilgrimage that saw people round the world queue up in pink, etcetera.) Facing declining box office earnings, the industry has sought different ways to get people back in cinemas. Against the rise of online shopping, brick-and-mortar stores have sought to rebrand themselves as in-person “experiences’”; a similar thing seems to be happening in the film industry, whose marketing increasingly teases the importance of witnessing something momentous up close. The weekend of Barbie and Oppenheimer’s releases served to reintroduce the idea of filmgoing as a mass cultural event, a rare chance to experience large-scale group feeling at a time when people are increasingly leaving church and the monoculture behind. And so, against this backdrop, Barbie performs a great trick: it takes in crowds aching for fantasy and switches the script, telling them that reality and their flawed, beautiful selves is all they have to love. (This is also an inversion of traditional literary narratives about women that position girlhood as a time full of adventure and promise and adulthood one of limitations and disappointments. In Barbie, the arrival of self-consciousness rings in a richer future, rather than forecloses it.)
Careening from satire to advertisement to sincerity, from retro musical to 2000s television advertising slot to SNL sketch, the film pastes together spectacle after spectacle, taking you along for the ride. But there are moments of stillness, too. Gerwig has spoken of one particular scene as forming the ‘heart’ of her film: the moment when Barbie sits down at a park bench in the Real World, and sees an old woman, possibly for the first time in her life. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she tells her (‘I know it!’). But what happens a few seconds before seems quietly important. For most of the film, the camera moves between slick, quick close-ups and long shots: it is always clear who is in focus and what you should be looking at. But before seeing the woman and as Barbie quietly takes in the world around her for the first time, the camera begins to drift across different scenes, and its focus grows unclear. There are couples and families chatting in the park; people lying down in repose. They are partly obscured by greenery, their conversations a mystery to the viewer. Barbie the film shows us that being fixed in frame, magnificently regarded and apparently desired and known, is no guarantor of humanity. In a world where constant self-representation has become almost an imperative – our childhood dolls perhaps paving the way – there is something satisfying about being partly out of view, free to keep your secrets.
Rebecca Liu is a writer and editor based in London.
[1] Barbie was notably the first major doll in the United States that represented an adult woman; previously, babies had played with babies.
[2]Barasch reports: “Whereas Gerwig and Baumbach had secured creative autonomy in developing the “Barbie” script, Mattel Films executives are typically present when a movie’s plot is conceived.”
[3] The encroachment of corporations into film and television has also made consuming media a sort of unsatisfying postmodern detective game, in which the viewer hunts around for signs of subversive artistic intent and then ponders what particular accommodations and compromises were made, or what red lines were drawn and what got cut (a feeling that I also experience when watching The Boys’s satire of capitalism on Amazon Prime, or at moments in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther series that mention the CIA’s colonialist experiments with regime change. One theory is that the statements were tempered by the inclusion of a good CIA white guy.) In Barbie, Sasha’s invective against the doll was nearly cut, and saved only after a six-hour-long conversation between a Mattel executive.
[4]This isn’t particularly new: John Berger previously wrote about 19th century oil painting as an artistic medium that affirmed the upper class’s proprietorial approach to the world. Many of these paintings framed luxury goods, earthenware, clothes, landscapes, animals as objects that ought to be acquired, thus confirming the presumed upper-class viewer and/or owner’s social status. However, while Berger observed the very “lifelike” quality of objects as presented in those oil paintings, a two-dimensional hyperreality rules the day. The chance to engage in conspicuous consumption has broadened over the years (one sort of democratisation, albeit maybe not the most important one.) And Berger continues, saying: “certain exceptional artists in exceptional circumstances broke free of the norms of the tradition and produced work that was diametrically opposed to its values”, which “contest[ed] the norms of the art that had formed him” – perhaps this is a challenge that now also falls on filmmakers.