Barbie: Code Pink
Is this movie a white flag from the patriarchy or a red flag for feminism?
“Barbie is so in your face, so pleasurable to watch, so visually stimulating, so fun, that you can’t help but love it…What makes me so frustrated about it is that we as a public are so easily placated by that. A corporate product to me is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Barbie is wearing the clothes of artful cinema, putting on an edge lord voice, and hitting on all the necessary talking points so we have nothing left about it to criticize and everything left to buy.”
-Broey Deschanel, Feeling Cynical About Barbie
“Because it’s “A Mattel Production,” as the opening credits inform us, it wants to have its cake, eat it, mock it, smear it on the faces of the manufacturers, and sell a shitload of dolls— or, as a recent piece in the Times suggested, “drive near-infinite brand synergies,” the sort of phrase that makes me want to move to Bhutan and raise goats.”
-Anthony Lane, on Barbie
“People talk about feeling seen by a movie or TV show, recognizing yourself onscreen and feeling validated by seeing yourself on screen, and often, for those of you who are not awkward heterosexual white men with podcasts, that’s a necessary and long overdue and truly beautiful experience to see yourself and be seen in turn.”
-Rob Harvilla
This film never lets you forget that Barbie the doll and Barbie the movie are many things. There are as many types of Barbie present as there are pastel shades in its rainbow color palette. At its best, Barbie is a surprisingly heartfelt romp through the colorful breadth of a beloved toy line, much like the delightful surprise that was The Lego Movie. Sometimes, it’s a fish out of water tale peddling important life lessons like Toy Story. Yet unlike both of those films, Barbie is a hyper stylized, fantastical metafiction examining the patriarchy underneath a satirical microscope. The storytelling is unapologetically silly, playful, and fun. Director Greta Gerwig brings the same maximalism to color in Barbie that Christopher Nolan did with sound in Oppenheimer. Even as they are roasted on screen, the Mattel executives depicted in this film will surely be delighted to hear that it’s impossible to forget that this is a movie about having fun playing with toys.
For the three readers who haven’t seen this pink touchstone of summer 2023, I’ll briefly address the plot. After having a Truman Show style identity crisis, Barbie takes a Matrix style red pill in the form of a Birkenstock that launches her journey to the real world. There, Ken discovers the patriarchy and horses in a hilarious scene for the ages and Barbie discovers that women in the real world don’t have it as easy as her sisters in Barbie-land. Thanks to some help from America Ferrera, she sets out to make things right as Will Ferrell and his bumbling bunch of Mattel executives sort of just bumble about like as many fuzzy bees.
My favorite scene felt like a mix of Oceans 11 and “The Scouring of The Shire” from the book version of The Return of the King. Barbie has returned to Barbie-land to find that Ken has installed a tyrannical patriarchy that she and her friends must overthrow. The hilarious scenes that follow skewer and roast men like shawarma, centered around a pitch-perfect mansplaining montage for the ages. This section of movie manages to breezily comment on our current politics (Ken & friends want to change the constitution to codify their nascent patriarchy) while maintaining the maximum LOLs that you’ve become used to at this point in the run time.
Other highlights were Michael Cera as Ken’s overlooked friend Allan and Dame Helen Mirren as the narrator. Watching this movie you’re reminded of John Hammond’s refrain from Jurassic Park—the filmmakers clearly spared no expense.
This was most evident in the marketing. Their enormous promotional war chest helped commission a Barbie playlist on Spotify powered by pop heavy hitters like Dua Lipa, Lizzo, Nicki Minaj, and HAIM, plus crossovers with seemingly every brand under the sun. You can wear your Barbie crocs to Burger King, order a Barbie burger, and then stay at the Barbie dream house Air Bnb in Malibu while sampling Barbie’s endless array of skincare products.
At the emotional crescendo of the film, the creator of Barbie utters this surprisingly deep line: “Ideas live forever. Humans, not so much.” So what ideas does this film have for us? Thankfully, this is a movie that tells you its themes directly, often multiple times. In one such instance, America Ferrera has a moving monologue that helps Margot Robbie realize that Barbie can give voice to the cognitive dissonance of being a woman to rob it of power. This pithy speech tells you everything you need to know about this movie, namely that it was written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, funded by corporate executives, and definitely made for nostalgic adults, not children.
Yet a cynical viewer may interject: does this liberal artsy takedown of the patriarchy represent a step forward for women or a calculated investment by a toy company? Let’s not forget that Barbie the toy is a symbol of sexualized capitalism that was literally invented to teach young girls to associate womanhood with shopping. This scathing critique isn’t even mine, either; it’s dialogue from the film.
Barbie is a fun, light-hearted, and occasionally poignant way to spend two hours, however its ubiquity and popularity have also turned it into a pink Rorshach test for how you feel about Hollywood, capitalism, and the state of modern gender politics. For example, Ben Shapiro, like many on the far right, found Barbie to be woke anti-man propaganda. Interpreting a movie that playfully explores how patriarchy limits both women and men as an assault on men seems to be ludicrous to me and many others. While I believe that Shapiro is missing the point, to be fair, he has made an entire career out of missing the point thanks to his crippling addiction to hilariously bad faith arguments. That man has never met an example of other people experiencing joy and acceptance that he didn’t interpret as a sign of the imminent apocalypse. However, the most substantive criticism of Barbie I’ve heard hasn’t been from the far right, but the far left. There you’ll hear that this film is nothing more than the mass market commodification of feminism. As Youtuber verilybitche puts it in a stellar video essay:
“We take a movement with a more radical message, something which demands systemic change in our society, and we flatten it into an aesthetic, a style mass manufactured and placed on the shelves for purchase. It’s a plastic feminism. The movement becomes mainstream but it’s a neutered version of it, a powerless version. It’s not a movement. It’s a t-shirt.”
Is this a fair interpretation? Does Mattel funding a film featuring an on-the-nose monologue about the unrealistic pressures of being a woman help women or help Mattel? Are the two even mutually exclusive?
If this feels too abstract or unfair, let’s consider some hypothetical scenarios. Hasbro announces a movie based on the Monopoly board game that’s hilariously self-aware, has a diverse cast giving woke performances, and has a message about climate change, directed by indie darling Taika Waititi. Would this count as progress or would it just be co-opting environmental progress to sell more board games? Would a NERF movie starring The Rock that breaks the fourth wall and has anti-gun violence sentiments do anything concrete to dismantle the military industrial complex? Would a Hungry Hungry Hippos movie with quippy dialog, technicolor jungle scenes, and wildlife conservation themes directed by Wes Anderson help cool down our planet? Okay, I’m done now, I think.
These theoretical films are sadly not far-fetched because Mattel has literally shown us their hand already. They aren’t shy about their plan to “raid their entire toy box” in an effort to copy Marvel’s playbook and unveil a multi-billion dollar cinematic universe of their own. A JJ Abrams Hot Wheels, Daniel Kaluuya Barney, Lil Yachty Uno, and Vin Diesel Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots are all coming soon to a theater near you.
The Barbie of today, this film will not let you forget, comes in new colors, outfits and meta-feminist varieties. This may indeed be progress in the tidy pastel landscape of Barbie-land, but in the real world, Hollywood is more corporate, exploitative, and growth obsessed than ever. They’re currently deadlocked in a labor dispute where their playbook is quite literally to not budge until the striking writers can’t pay their rent. A charming pink movie can’t and won’t change any of this.
However, I think both poles of the Barbie discourse miss the bigger picture, which is that capitalism has flattened our social lives to the point that the only barometer we have for social progress is what we can view and what we can buy. Viewership and purchasing habits are, of course, the analytical lifeblood that animate our corporate boardroom overlords, but we shouldn’t mistake them for our only means of interacting with the world or each other. When did we all adopt Hollywood’s KPIs as our own? Why is it so hard to simply enjoy a colorful movie these days?
Perhaps instead of tearing down fun pink films, our energies would be best spent discussing if it’s helpful or counterproductive to expect Hollywood and toy companies to actually address much less solve social issues via their products when time and time again they’ve proven to be the caboose end of progress, depicting something on screen only after social movements, nonprofits, and activists have raged and argued and fought about it for decades. The spectacular arrival of Barbie means that self-aware discourse about the cognitive dissonance inherent in being a modern woman has gone mainstream. This is good but it’s also what those in business circles call a lag metric; it’s only measurable long after work has been done and thus not a good indicator of if your current efforts are working.
As a movie, I found Barbie to be very smart, fun, and well-crafted. While I’m not sure this is Gerwig’s best film, it’s undeniably her most successful one. This is the highest grossing film directed by a woman of all time and she and the entire cast and crew deserve tremendous praise for that accomplishment. This is all solid evidence that this is the best a Mattel funded Barbie movie could have possibly have been. Just as Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther offered us an inspiring Afro-futurist look at Black excellence untouched by colonialism, so does Gerwig’s Barbie shine a disco ball onto a world without patriarchy. It’s not perfect, but it makes the most of the subject matter and brings progressive feminist themes to life in a fun and accessible way. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling both elevate the characters of Barbie and Ken from doll-like simplicity to complex, insightful, and hilarious humanity, deeply enriching the film and its themes. Barbie does a stylish and effective job of entertaining us while reminding us about what matters and the work yet to be done.
The crux of the Barbie phenomenon and subsequent debate for me has been the recognition that making ideas accessible by making them entertaining and consumable by definition limits their revolutionary power. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we all have to reckon with it somehow. The duality that this movie makes you think about is that onscreen representation and thought provoking dialogue is very satisfying but somewhat superficial, whether we’re talking about gender inequity, racial justice, labor issues, or anything else. Viewing Barbie, two times in my case, no more advances feminism than laughing at Last Week Tonight stops gerrymandering. It’s a colorful starting point at best. Food for thought is important, but not the same as actual food.
Many want to rush to a Goldilocks style judgment of this movie, eager to define and dismiss it as either too woke or not woke enough, but I think this misses Gerwig’s true accomplishment here. Barbie proves that even corporate IP films can be successful and subversive, stylish and substantive, silly and serious if they’re made with care. While some people have gotten hung up in the dualities and contradictions here, I found them to be an open ended invitation to all viewers. This can be nothing more than a fun two hours for you or it can be a motivational speech for your own journey to tear down the patriarchy or replace toxic masculinity with the feeling of being Kenough. The power of play, Gerwig reminds us, is what it allows you to imagine.
If you expect Barbie to be more than just a fun movie, I think that optimistic and cynical viewers alike should both remember what this work actually looks like. Mattel solving its well-documented abusive labor conditions in China or Warner Brothers reforming its vampiric relationship to screenwriters and actors stateside will never happen on screen. As captivating as the third act battle royale always is, and it’s glorious in this film, let’s all remember that the off-screen fights are where real progress happens.
A doll can’t actually do very much. Neither can a film about a doll. But we can.
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