Film Review: Barbie
warning: total spoilers
The thing is - and hear me out, here - I wasn’t expecting Barbie to be good. I know from popular reception that Greta Gerwig is an excellent writer slash director, although I’m yet to watch either Ladybird or her adaptation of Little Women, but many an excellent writer slash director has been humbled in the attempt to wring artistic merit from the wash of a well-known brand. Nor do I have any particular emotional connection to Barbie, the doll: I owned exactly one in childhood - Sunjewel Barbie, whose advertising jingle lo these many years later is still firmly imprinted on my cerebral cortex - and her I only coveted because she came with a swimsuit that changed colour depending on the temperature of the water it (and by extension, she) was dunked in. And perhaps more saliently still, I’m a trans man, only very newly transitioning - this review, in fact, will be how a non-zero number of people learn of this development - which can make me… twitchy, let’s say, about the invocation of some shared, high feminine girlhood. Ironically, it was my husband and our ten-year-old son who most wanted to see the movie, and so we went along to it as a family. My expectations were, to put it mildly, low.
And yet: the Barbie movie is good. More than that: it constitutes a rich text, one sufficiently multifaceted to reward a pluralistic analysis. That it can (and, indeed, should) be subjected to criticism along various axes doesn’t change this. It’s self-aware, playful, emotive and more thematically nuanced than a brand-name venture of this type has any right to be, and if you’re surprised to hear that said about Barbie, believe me: I am also surprised to be saying it.
The film opens with a paean to the merits of Barbie as the first doll for girls that was not a baby for play-acting motherhood, but an adult doll, intended as a vehicle for the imaginative expression of self. Narrated by Helen Mirren, this information is conveyed via a hilarious parody of the iconic monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with drably-clad girls and their baby dollies in place of apes and a giant, smiling Margot-Robbie-as-Barbie wearing her equally iconic black and white swimsuit in place of the monolith. This comedic blending of philosophical insight, pop cultural references and high camp perfectly sets the tone for what’s to come while also establishing what is (inarguably, fight me) the film’s central spec-fic element: the existence of Barbieland, an otherworld spawned by the collective imagination of little girls playing with Barbies.
The Barbies in Barbieland know that the real world exists, and that they are ultimately products of it; likewise, the good(ish) folks at Mattel (more of whom later) are also aware of Barbieland. As such, there’s no arc where anyone first learns of and then comes to terms with these two planes of existence: we’re simply allowed to experience them as a given. This is a smart choice, as it means the narrative never has to explain its own conceit in a way that both the audience and the characters are obliged to take seriously. Which isn’t to say no explanation is given at all; only that it’s neither meant to be subjected to in-world scrutiny nor constructed with any eye to being the sort of worldbuilding that an audience might invest in. The conceit is fundamentally unserious, but the emotional introspection it allows is very real - and the latter is ultimately what matters.
As Barbie goes through her daily routine - showering in a waterless shower, “eating” food that never touches her lips, floating down to the ground from the top floor of her dreamhouse because (of course) no little girl playing with Barbie ever bothers to make her walk down the stairs - we learn about Barbieland. Run by a President Barbie (Issa Rae) and populated by every type of Barbie (and Ken, and accessory doll) that’s ever been produced, including discontinued classics like Midge, Barbie’s pregnant friend, and Allan, Ken’s… friend (Michael Cera), Barbieland is presented as a feminine utopia. The Barbies are judges, astronauts, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, doctors, pilots - everything that Barbie has ever been. The Kens, by contrast, are simply Kens: accessory helpmeets, single- and simple-minded in their pursuit of the Barbies’ affections. Our main Ken (Ryan Gosling) is puppyishly devoted to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, his identity defined by unrequited infatuation: he wants more from both her and his role in life than he knows how to find in Barbieland, and while he seems content to follow Barbie’s lead, that frustration remains beneath the surface.
Things quickly change, however, when, in the midst of a blow-out party, Barbie suddenly asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” There’s a record scratch: everything stops. Alarmed by her own question, Barbie manages to play it off and resume the party, but the next day, her life starts to move off-script: her shower is cold, her breakfast burned, and her previously high-heeled stance becomes abruptly flat-footed. Concerned and frightened, Barbie is urged by her fellow Barbies to go and seek advice from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) - so-called because her real-world counterpart has been played with too hard, leaving her drawn on, short-haired and permanently in the splits. It’s Weird Barbie who tells Barbie that whoever is playing with her in the real world is sad and upset, their thoughts bleeding through to influence Barbie herself. In order to fix things, she needs to go to the real world, talk to her doll’s owner, and help her to be happy.
It was at this point in the movie that I was reminded, suddenly and strikingly, of Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, a spec-fic novella where the titular heroine, a respected professor at a women’s college, goes on a quest to recover one of her students, who has eloped with a dreamer from the waking world. The core conceit here, which Johnson executes beautifully, is one of fantastic inversion: instead of a regular person undertaking a spiritual quest to enter a magical realm, we have a woman of dreams labouring to enter the mundane world. It’s this same inverted quest which Barbie undertakes, venturing out from the imaginative dreamscape of Barbieland to seek enlightenment and salvation in reality - except that she’s also accompanied by Ken, who stows away in the back seat of her convertible.
Prior to embarking, Barbie is cheered by the encouragement of the other Barbies: like her, they believe that, through their inspiration of young girls everywhere, Barbie must surely have transformed the real world by defeating patriarchy, making it a utopia for women equal to their own. Barbie is therefore shocked to arrive - on rollerblades, in Venice Beach, California - and discover the truth. But while Barbie is ogled, catcalled, condescended to and generally unsettled, Ken experiences a slow, unexpected awakening: in reality, men are valued. For the first time in his life, he feels seen, respected - even desired, the gay men who look him over on the boardwalk eliciting a very different response to the straight men who ogle Barbie. There’s a comedic sequence where the duo are arrested, twice - once because Barbie punches a man who gropes her, then again because they fail to pay for clothes - only to find themselves released both times, as clueless as before.
While Barbie takes a moment to meditate, attempting to connect with (and thus locate) whoever’s been playing with her, Ken wanders away and explores, attempting (but not necessarily succeeding) to learn more about the wonders of patriarchy. The contrast between their experiences of reality is stark. For the first time, Barbie sees a full spectrum of womanhood: babies, little girls, mothers, grandmothers - all absent from Barbieland. When an old woman sits down next to her, Barbie stares at the lines on her face and says, overcome with emotion, “You are so beautiful.” She absorbs the difference between the plastic, technicolour world of Barbieland and the varying textures of the real world. She, for the first time, cries. Ken, meanwhile, is watching men bonding - gym bros, finance bros, construction workers - and absorbing the shallowest possible understanding of patriarchy, which he interprets as a system where men and horses are in charge.
This shallowness, while funny, is also deeply significant at a thematic level. In his excitement at seeing, for the first time, people like him respected and valued (and also because he’s the ultimate himbo), Ken doesn’t bother to look deeper, and so fails to understand patriarchy on any level beyond the superficial. He’s attracted to the idea of powerful men in big fur coats supporting each other and riding horses; the fact that this elevation comes at the expense of women is an afterthought. When he and Barbie reunite, for instance, Ken’s first impulse is to blurt out excitedly, “Men rule the world!”, as if expecting Barbie to be happy for him; likewise, he also wonders why she never told him about patriarchy.
On one level, this works as commentary on how men can be attracted to the trappings of patriarchy without any awareness of its deeper implications; you could also, if you were being uncharitable, parse it as a warning about the inherent failings of men. I would argue, however, that Gerwig is building towards something far more nuanced - but in order to explain what this is, we first need to return to the plot.
Thanks to her meditation session, Barbie now knows where to find Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the unhappy tween who’s been playing with her: the local middle school. Elsewhere, the FBI has notified Mattel employee Aaron (Connor Swindells) that Barbie and Ken are loose in the real world - something that has evidently happened before with a Skipper doll. This leads to the CEO (Will Farrell) being informed. Surrounded by his all-male board, he declares a need to put Barbie back in the box; listening outside the door, however, is secretary Gloria (America Ferrera), who has been drawing designs for Consuming Fear of Death Barbie in her notepad, and who decides to take action of her own.
Unaware of all this, Barbie and Ken are now at the school: Ken makes for the library, withdrawing books on men, patriarchy and horses, while Barbie tracks down Sasha. Sasha, however, has no use for Barbie, and precedes to castigate her, blaming Barbie for promoting poor body image for girls, making them feel self-conscious and representing everything that’s wrong with the world, which judgement she caps by calling her a fascist. Heartbroken, Barbie goes to sit and reconsider what she knows, at which point the Mattel people arrive to collect her. As Sasha watches her taken away, her mother - who turns out to be the Mattel secretary, Gloria - shows up and is horrified by Barbie’s capture. Despite her daughter’s protests, Gloria promptly hauls Sasha into the car and starts following the Mattel convoy, while Ken, oblivious to all this, decides to return to Barbieland and share his new knowledge of patriarchy with the other Kens.
At Mattel headquarters, Barbie’s relief at being back where she belongs crumbles when she realises the company is run exclusively by men. When the CEO tries to put her “back in the box” - a literal life-size Barbie box - she baulks and runs, fleeing into the building’s labyrinthine interior. Opening a random door, she finds herself in a kitchen occupied by an older woman called Ruth (Rhea Perlman), who comforts and affirms her before telling her how to escape. When Barbie finally makes it outside, Gloria and Sasha are waiting for her; Barbie piles into their car, and they drive away with the CEO and board in hot pursuit. Which is when we learn that, in fact, the person who’s been playing with Barbie’s Barbie wasn’t Sasha at all, but Gloria, her adult woes and insecurities seeping through to Barbie as she tried to reconnect with her sense of self.
As Barbie and Gloria bond, Barbie decides that all three of them need to go to Barbieland: this, she feels, will stop the changes she’s been experiencing and set everything to rights. But when they arrive, Barbieland has been taken over by the now-patriarchal Kens, the other Barbies brainwashed into simpering bimbos who live to flatter, their prior careers forgotten. When Barbie confronts Ken about his actions, he tells her, “It doesn’t feel good, does it?” - meaning, being secondary, servile; an unimportant accessory to the dominant group. Distressed by all she’s experienced, Barbie lies down and gives up, but while Gloria and Sasha initially try to leave with the help of Allan, who is also trying to flee into the real world, they end up turning around and going back for Barbie.
Which is where we learn that, in addition to Allan, certain other inhabitants of Barbieland remain unaffected by the Kendom brainwashing: notably Weird Barbie, Growing Up Skipper and accessory friends such as Sugar’s Daddy Ken and Earring Magic Ken. Although the story never makes explicit why these specific characters retain their personalities, to me, it’s both obvious and key to the thematic heart of the movie. What the discontinued and weird dolls have in common is that they’re misfits, falling outside the socially normative gender binary represented by the mainstream Kens and Barbies. Most of them are also, I would argue, deliberately queercoded to emphasize this point: Earring Magic Ken, for instance, is more often referred to as Gay Ken or Cock-Ring Ken, while earlier in the movie, Weird Barbie, played by noted lesbian Kate McKinnon, uses a Birkinstock sandal juxtaposed with a high heel to represent a Matrix-style choice between knowledge and ignorance. Allan and Skipper, meanwhile, aren’t Barbies or Kens at all - they’re different, with Allan’s aversion to Kendom a reminder of the way in which patriarchy also excludes and disadvantages certain men.
In other words: those best able to resist the roles and behaviours enforced by a toxic gender binary are those who stand outside of it in the first place - or who, like Barbie, are forced to confront its existence.
Together, the discontinued dolls capture their former President Barbie, trying to break her out of her brainwashing. When their efforts fail, Barbie continues her ongoing existential crisis, which prompts Gloria to launch into a heartfelt speech detailing the various impossibilities expected of women in patriarchal societies. “You have to have money,” she says, “but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time.” The Barbies listen, enraptured, and when Gloria finally finishes, President Barbie suddenly snaps out of her brainwashing - because giving voice to the contradictions expected of women under patriarchy robs it of its power, thereby restoring their minds. Together with Gloria and Sasha, Barbie and the misfit dolls set about enacting a plan to free the brainwashed Barbies: while one of them distracts a Ken with impersonated helplessness, the others snatch the closest Barbie and bring her to Gloria, whose wisdom steadily sets them all free.
Small wonder that various conservative men are losing their minds over Barbie: the climax of the film is literally a shared feminist awakening that expressly rebukes a laundry-list of misogynist double standards.
With the Barbies rescued, the next step of the plan is to turn the Kens against each other; this prompts the Kens to break into warring factions and fight, thereby forgetting their plan to vote on rewriting the Barbieland constitution in their favour - which, this being a metaphysical otherland, would’ve had the effect of enshrining their power. The Barbies win, the Ken fight ends in a dance number, and with Barbieland restored, Ken and Barbie finally sit down to talk. Ken is remorseful, but conflicted; he admits to having lost interest in patriarchy once he found out it wasn’t really about horses, but still wants Barbie more than she wants him. He doesn’t like being an accessory to Barbie; he wants his own identity beyond that.
Just as Barbie’s dream-quest to reality was a trope inversion, so too is Barbieland an inversion of reality. In terms of Barbie lore, Ken is like Eve to Barbie’s Adam: a secondary creature made to be a partner and helpmeet instead of an equal. As such, the point of Ken’s unhappiness is neither a commentary on the inherent fallibility of men nor a trite, anti-feminist assertion that women need to be nicer to guys to stop them misbehaving. Rather, it’s an inversion of sexist norms designed to point out that making one gender inherently lesser than and/or subservient to the other is fundamentally bad. Just as countless women throughout history were raised to define themselves by the men in their lives, so too has Ken been raised to define himself by Barbie. He embraced the shallow trappings of patriarchy without understanding their implications because they represented a previously unfelt chance at autonomy, but ultimately, he was left unfulfilled.
Here, then, is the thesis of the movie: that the solution to establishing both personal and collective happiness after breaking free from a bad system isn’t to mirror the same toxic binary to which you were previously subjected, only tilted anew in your favour, but to work towards shared equality. Barbieland has overcorrected for the real world’s misogyny, resulting in the unhappiness of the Kens. In return, the Kens overcorrect the other way, but as this is done without any self-reflection, they remain unhappy, still hanging their metaphorical hats on the need for Barbie’s attention. Ken needs to understand and appreciate himself as an individual rather than leaning on toxic systems to prop up his insecurities, and will now be given the chance to do so, as Barbieland moves to allow its Kens exactly the same proportion of participation that women have in the real world. The one is an inversion of the other.
At this point, the Mattel executives, who’ve followed Gloria et al all the way to Barbieland, show up to endorse the Barbies’ return to power. Gloria suggests a normal, everyday Barbie be sold, a regular woman who’s doing her best and just wants to feel good about herself; the CEO initially gainsays the suggestion, but changes his mind when one of his board predicts that it’ll make money. With Gloria’s arc resolved, it’s Barbie’s turn to ask what her ending is. The CEO suggests that she get together with Ken, but Sasha shouts him down. Barbie, for her part, doesn’t think she can go back to the way she was before, and nor does she want to.
Suddenly, Ruth - the old lady Barbie met at Mattel - emerges from the crowd to speak, revealing herself to be the ghost of Ruth Handler, the original creator of Barbie. She walks together with Barbie into a blank white space, where Barbie expresses her desire to be human - the thing that creates, and not the thing that’s created - along with her fear that Ruth, as her creator, will be angry at her for changing. Instead, Ruth tells her, “We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.” Understanding Barbie’s desire to be human, she says that she can’t let Barbie make the choice in ignorance, and so Barbie - and by extension, the audience - experiences a montage of human existence, showing womanhood in all its forms. With the blessing of her creator, Barbie makes her choice, and the film ends with her in the real world, excitedly making her first appointment with her gynecologist - a callback to an earlier line, spoken when she and Ken first enter the real world, about how neither of them has genitals.
As well as being funny, this is a fascinating note on which to end the film. While Barbie’s excited anticipation of her new vagina could easily read as tying gender to biology, in Gerwig’s film, the overt acknowledgement of the fact that Ken and Barbie have no genitals instead serves to highlight the opposite: that Barbie’s femininity was never dependent on what’s between her legs. (Indeed, it’s salient here to point out that, much to the anger of conservative critics, one of the many Barbies is played by a trans actress, Hari Nef.) Barbie becoming human, I would therefore argue, is its own form of transition; after all, expressing your femininity by getting the vagina you weren’t born with speaks more strongly to a transfeminine experience than a cisgendered one. (Though please note that trans people are not a monolith; in this respect, I’m speaking only for myself.)
If I had to categorize Barbie by genre, I’d call it a work of comic spec-fic with philosophical underpinnings, which puts it in the same ballpark as works like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, just with a high femme camp aesthetic. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it - and, beyond that enjoyment, respected the skill and care with which it was made. That being said, however, I’d be remiss not to include any criticism. At one point, Gloria draws a comparison between the ease with which Barbieland succumbs to the Kendom patriarchy and Native Americans dying of smallpox, because neither group has any immunity to what’s being transmitted. There are myriad other comparisons that could’ve been made to serve the same narrative point that didn’t involve a flippant reference to genocide, and the film would’ve been better had they used one. I also felt that Sasha’s character is underserved by the narrative: she’s initially depicted as angry, but beyond venting at Barbie, she never gets the chance to really articulate herself or her feelings, which weakens both her apparent reconciliation with Gloria and her eventual acceptance of Barbieland.
On a larger scale, however, even when I was enjoying the film, I could never quite shake my awareness of the Mattel Corporation’s role in things. A film made by a corporation to celebrate that corporation’s flagship product is never going to seriously criticize either corporation or product, but that’s not the same as no criticism existing to be made. When Sasha says that Barbie has made girls feel bad about themselves, there’s no mention of the Barbie released with a set of scales set to 100lb and a diet book advising her not to eat, or the Teen Talk Barbie whose possible catchphrases included “Math class is tough!” Yes, Mattel allows itself to be lampooned in the guise of Will Ferrell’s comic CEO and his all-male board, but of all the plot points in the movie, theirs is the most thematically unexamined. The joke is that the CEO is sexist and bumbling but ultimately willing to support both Barbie and Gloria, and while, as mentioned, I’d hardly expect Mattel to bankroll a story in which they’re the villain, you can nonetheless feel their presence as the the hand that feeds: they consent to be playfully tugged upon, but not bitten.
But at the same time, the film is a comedy, not a hard-hitting documentary, and if we’re discussing the shadowy hand of powerful interests - both corporate and otherwise - that dictate the portrayal of certain things within the American film industry, it’s hard to feel angrier about Mattel promoting a beloved doll than at, say, the military-entertainment complex, which has a hefty say in how Marvel movies are structured. Complaining that Barbie, the movie, isn’t sufficiently critical of Barbie, the product, therefore, is a bit like walking into a McDonald’s and complaining that it sells Big Macs. The corporation sells what it sells; that doesn’t stop our awareness of it from feeling disconcerting, but whatever else can be said of the film, Greta Gerwig has managed to take a famous, beloved-yet-widely-critiqued property aimed at children, and make a thematically complete, funny, emotionally affecting and fantastically camp movie that appeals to adults.
Originally, my family and I had planned to see Barbie a day earlier, but when we went to book tickets the day of, there were no good seats left in any of the evening sessions. We booked for the next day instead - a Wednesday, midweek, in a university town where the majority of the student body is not currently on campus - and our session was a full house. It was the most people I’ve seen in a single movie theatre since before the pandemic, and while there were plenty of women dressed up in pink to celebrate, they were far from the only audience. Barbie isn’t what I’d expected, and I suspect that’s true for a lot of other people, which is part of what makes it so delightful. It’s a high camp classic with heart, a great script and an ending that sticks the landing, and the fact that it’s making absolute clowns like Ben Shapiro lose their minds is the icing on the cake. Take note, Hollywood: an AI program could never.