That's right, I saw Barbie.
What was I thinking? What did I expect? What could have been possible?
There’s no denying it’s my fault – I was invited to a press screening last Monday and I thought: Well, may as well go. It’s free and I’ll get a sense of the clearly impending cultural moment. I’ll have my own opinion to measure against the hot takes. And yes, I thought, it might be fun. It was made by indie queen Greta Gerwig after all.
In some ways, Barbie is a good film. Well-constructed, funny lines, an all-star cast from Will Ferrell to Helen Mirren to Ncuti Gatwa to Dua Lipa. It’s camp and chirpy and irreverent. Margot Robbie is brilliant as a naive, beautiful Barbie who cannot resist these crooked little thoughts of death. Yes, in some ways, the film is a good film – a jazz-handed spectacle thanks to a $145 million budget (for comparison, Gerwig’s very good 2017 film Lady Bird had a budget of $10 million). A part of me was along for the ride willingly, another part unwillingly.
After the screening – which I won’t summarise here as presumably you will either know or won’t care to know – I left the cinema, and felt a heat rising up through me. A kind of fury that was still young and still unsure of itself. This Substack is my way of working it out.
There is no way of evading the fact that Barbie – named after the hyper-sexualised and insecurity-breeding plastic doll for children, the one with the famously impossible waist, pert breasts and dangerously thin legs that if it were a real woman would be physically unable to stand up, the Instagram-sheened and Incel-approved idea of what it is to be a sexy, perfect woman, the doll that in studies has proved to affect the body image of 6 to 8-year-olds, that Barbie yes – subscribes to what it claims to send up.
It’s just a film, and hardly the first or last film to set impossible standards for women – that’s Hollywood, baby. But it’s the irritating hypocrisy: using irony, feminism and anti-capitalist argument in order to capitalise. Barbie is the perfect advert for Barbie and it will sell them (don’t worry, Mattel, Barbie’s creator, has a whole range of Barbie The Movie dolls, as well as lunchboxes, suitcases and heels branded for your Barbie urges) while it carries on selling the same old dream that women should aspire to look one particular way.
I feel myself descending into white feminism 101, let me just reverse my pink convertible back out . . . Watch Barbie without sound and you have everything the Barbie doll sells. The words may turn it into a knowing film, but it doesn’t enact anything different to that silent-film advert, nor does it truly subvert or resist the expectation. In framing it all in knowingness of The System is also to go one step further: Barbie is not just an advert for Barbie but an enduring one because it encourages complacency. It allows us to sit on our different-shaped arses and do nothing, so pleased are we to watch something that recognises how we might feel. It makes it seem okay to support Barbie because the consumer is doing it ironically, doing it with the veil pulled away from their eyes. Maybe Barbie can even represent something else! Maybe some feel empowered, others inspired.
By the way, if we take the story-arcs of Barbie and Ken in the film, Ken gets unqualified freedom. He learns about the patriarchy, he gets over-excited about it, gets knocked off his perch, then is told he can be anything he wants to be, that he is not defined by Barbie but can choose. He walks away a free man. Barbie gets…well, she gets to be in the real world. She discovers that her existence hasn’t enabled the happiness of women. By the end, she is still sugary-sweet, she still comforts whining Ken for the awkwardness of not liking him back, she is still full of the joys of life, her bright teeth sparkling, hair perfectly blowdried. She is still girlishly oblivious to her own sexuality. But instead of wearing heels, she is willingly wearing Birkenstocks® (the sandal does alright for adverts in this film too). She is still a cutie-pie, forever girlish at heart and vulnerable while not quite knowing it. She is still ready to be rescued by a man and taught about the world; she is still, in her head, in a dream world where life is sweet and a gynecological appointment is the most thrilling way to start the day.
There is no threat in the real world for Barbie, apart from some timid, contained catcalls on her first visit. As Ken introduces his confused understanding of the patriarchy to the other Kens, I wondered as I watched . . . oh, this could be dark. For Barbie does not know sexual violence, Barbie does not know of consent or rape or how she could be used or misread or patronised. What if she learned all of this in the real world, or in Ken’s new patriarchified Barbie World? Or what if she only saw a confused hint – meeting a woman who has never been able to escape from what her 8-year-old self learned many years ago? There were so many alternatives I wondered about that could be foreboding, powerful, visceral – but which would never make it into a Mattel-approved film. (A sidenote: there is a Barbie in a wheelchair featured in Barbie but there is no mention of her origin story – the original doll didn’t fit into the lift of Barbie’s Dream House. They realised when a 17-year-old with cerebral palsy wrote to tell them so.)
What is let into the film is what is safe to be let into the film. Even when Barbie is shown a taste of what the real world is to be sure she wants to commit to this life, what follows is a sun-saturated nostalgic slideshow where love and sweetness triumph. This was another time during the film where I felt the absence of a brutal third act: of making Barbie witness life’s darkness, its full variation. That was the only way it seemed to me that the film might undo its honey advertorial. To descend into a kind of Sarah Kane influenced hellscape. (This is also perhaps why I have never written a film script.) But even with life’s darkness, all you need is the name Barbie for the advert to start. And that advert began far before the first cinema-goer reached their seat, thanks to a $100 million budget for marketing.
What of those who are empowered by it? Who enjoyed the celebration of a specific kind of femininity? Who relished the wry asides about patriarchy and body image? I am not telling you where to get your kicks. I got some myself. And what of another counter, that I hear as I write – that I am not annoyed about the film, not really. I am only disappointed not to look like Margot Robbie, I am mad about living in a world where I have to worry simultaneously about my safety and my appearance, that really what winds me up are all the things the film takes aim at, rather than the film itself. Maybe it is all of that, maybe it is none of that. But there is no escaping — whatever it gives you, however much you laugh and cheer along — that Barbie is the most ingenious advert Barbie could have wished for.
I saw this on Saturday and completely agree! The part that really got me was this -
"As Ken introduces his confused understanding of the patriarchy to the other Kens, I wondered as I watched . . . oh, this could be dark. For Barbie does not know sexual violence, Barbie does not know of consent or rape or how she could be used or misread or patronised. What if she learned all of this in the real world, or in Ken’s new patriarchified Barbie World?"
In the part where [spoiler?!] Ken is playing his guitar and Barbie wanders off, a part of me thought he was going to lose it and that there would be some sort of physical or verbal consequence for her making him feel rejected. That's what would happen in real life. But real life isn't Mattel approved.