Barbie: When Plastic Becomes Parastic
By Anna Trinh
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is undeniably the event of the summer. It was practically destined to be, assuming destiny is the meticulous prowess of the Mattel sales team. The first live-action Barbie movie was always going to get eyes on it, but Mattel made sure you couldn’t get your eyes off it through a marketing campaign that included almost a hundred different brand deals all around the world. Makeup, clothes, toothbrushes, hair straighteners and doughnuts all hit the shelves in a hot pink celebration of the world’s most iconic doll. Helmed by contemporary cinema darling Greta Gerwig, the film was almost guaranteed to evoke the magic of so many women’s childhoods. Unsurprisingly, the film delivered and was received positively by critics and general audiences alike.
Barbie is a delight from a technical perspective. With a director like Gerwig, it’s almost a given that the filmmaking would be of a high standard. The set design, particularly that of Barbieland, where most of the film takes place, is gorgeous. You are immediately immersed in the glossy pink surfaces of the dreamhouses. You are charmed by the costumes of the Barbies and the Kens. They look just like the plastic dolls and houses that constituted a large part of many childhoods. The soundtrack is full of mostly upbeat and uplifting pop music from some of the biggest artists at the moment and features “Barbie World”, a Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice collaboration that samples the beloved Aqua song, “Barbie Girl”. There’s a lot of nostalgia in the visual and aural aspects, and you can’t help but fully embrace the ride Gerwig takes you on.
The film is mainly centered around the Ken-led introduction of patriarchy to Barbieland after joining Barbie’s trip to the Real World as a stowaway. Before the trip, Barbieland was a matriarchy, and the Kens were just accessories who did not even have houses. When Ken returns from the Real World, however, he transforms Barbieland into his horse-themed Kendom and the Barbie dreamhouses become mojo dojo casa houses. The Barbies are brainwashed into being servants/long-term, long-distance, low-commitment, casual girlfriends. With the help of an ally made in the Real World, Barbie manages to deprogram the Barbies and with their help, take back control of Barbieland.
The film is equal parts fun and funny, full of self-aware quips about the doll and jabs at the corporate bosses at Mattel. There’s a scene where all the Barbies are in the midst of a dance party to celebrate every day being “the best day ever” when Margot Robbie’s Barbie, the main Barbie, called Stereotypical Barbie in the film, poses the question, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” This dampens the mood of the party for a bit until Barbie plays it off as a joke and the party resumes. The scene is very reflective of the experience of watching Barbie because the film has so many ideas that are wrapped in pretty pink packaging but refuses to explore them in any meaningful way, so you just have to carry on and ride the pink wave.
The Barbie movie, much like the doll it is based on, was always going to be subjected to a lot of scrutiny. There’s the feminist discourse that has followed the doll for its entire existence. The first scene of the film spoofs Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and in lieu of the iconic monolith disrupting primates, it is Barbie who towers over young girls playing with infant dolls. Barbie signified that girls could aspire to be more than just mothers. She is an independent, working woman who can join any career she wants and has a very admirable lifestyle. Who wouldn’t want to be like Barbie?
However, Barbie is also historically white, thin and physically flawless. What message does that send to young girls? Then there was the question of how the movie would exist in the context of the current film climate, where major studios are more than happy to release mediocre work based on existing IP because that’s the easiest way to get an audience. Would the film be yet another shameless cash grab from Mattel, or would there be some artistic integrity preserved?
It was a dauntless task for Gerwig to take on film with so many expectations riding on it. Even Diablo Cody, who was attached to an earlier version of the project, dropped out due to the complexity of the doll’s history and relationship with feminism. Robbie Brenner, executive producer of Mattel Films, has been very vocal that Barbie is “not a feminist movie,” and yet the film benefits a lot from the promise of progressive, feminist politics. Part of the film consists of Barbie trying to convince a disillusioned tween that she is not a fascist but a great role model.
The film runs on one basic principle: “Because Barbie can be anything; women can be anything.” The film wants you to know that aspiring to be like Barbie is indubitably good. It even goes as far as addressing the body image discourse surrounding the doll. Rhea Perlman’s Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, tells Barbie that nobody is supposed to look like Barbie except Barbie. In an interview, the president of Mattel acknowledges the fact that there has been a historical look attached to the doll that Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie embodies perfectly, but Barbie has since diversified. Margot Robbie is simply “the bridge” between the old and the new. But in the film, the newer, more diverse Barbies are barely considered. By the end, the film essentially tells you that all Barbies are equal, but some are more equal than others, and this sentiment is evident from the movie-inspired dolls Mattel decided to put on the shelves.
You can’t escape the feeling that the Barbie movie wants to sell you a lot of things under the guise of a sort of noncommittal progressiveness. The writing is, uncharacteristically for Gerwig, ham-fisted at times. Characters will conclude otherwise normal conversations with monologues about the trials and tribulations of womanhood under patriarchy, and you’re left feeling more than adequately preached to. Even the more subtle parts of the script seem to suffer from a lack of ideological cohesion between Mattel and Gerwig.
The evil corporate goons at Mattel want to trap Barbie in a box while she wants to “make meaning” in the real world. So they put hundreds of different Barbies in boxes and stuck those on the shelves. Every Barbie and Ken has a set-in-stone ending and role except Stereotypical Barbie, who leaves Barbieland for the real world at the end of the movie in quest for a life that has meaning beyond just being an ideal. So at least one of the Barbies is not just a vapid, conventionally attractive doll. A film that was in some ways meant to reaffirm the newer models of Barbie unintentionally condemns them to the jejunity that it presumably wanted to sever from the Barbie brand.
Ultimately, Barbie crumbles under the weight of its ideas, which is unsurprising for a film whose lead performance was achieved through “a lack of introspection”. Cohesive messaging isn’t a prerequisite for box office success, and Mattel is completely okay with that. It’s a crowd-pleasing experience and many movie-goers have indulged in all the pomp surrounding it. You get to wear your pink outfit, watch your favorite actors as iconic Barbies and Kens, and listen to your favorite artists on the soundtrack. It makes for a great day out, but don’t expect any thought-provoking conversations after. Any interesting ideas that are introduced are commodified and repackaged in shiny pink packaging, and you’re left feeling as though the movie would have benefited a lot more from completely omitting them rather than doing them a disservice. ♦