A Barbie Review
With plenty of book references
Biggest “News” (in Books?): Barbie, a film directed by Greta Gerwig
A Technical Achievement (no spoilers)
On Sunday I finally got a chance to participate in what has been the biggest cultural phenomenon in recent memory. I am of course talking about the Barbie half of the Barbenheimer summer blockbuster event. In just two weeks these films have made over $1.1 billion at the worldwide box office.
We’ve book-clubbed a few books at Dear Head of Mine in the past months, and, when discussing contemporary literature, we always start with examining how it is technically executed (the line-level writing/structure/etc.) before diving into the story or broader ideas. With Barbie, we’ll to start at the same place. From a technical standpoint—and even with admittedly very little film knowledge—you can see why cinephiles everywhere are going crazy for Barbie.
Like its 100+ brand collaborations, the actual production of the film involves an insane volume of talent. It starts at the top with Greta Gerwig, the director of five-time Oscar-nominated Lady Bird and six-time Oscar-nominated Little Women (both nominated for Best Picture) and stars Best-Actress-nominated, superstar Margot Robbie, who also produced the film. But Barbie’s technical acumen continues on down the line. The film looks spectacular: fully tactile constructed sets (without leaning on CGI) and incredibly intricate costume designs recreate an immaculate fantasy world that would make Wes Anderson blush. The music is done by legendary producer Mark Ronson (of Amy Winehouse and “Uptown Funk” fame) with mega pop stars Dua Lipa, Lizzo and others creating original music for the movie. Not to mention a cast that is a laundry list of incredible cameos, comedians, and serious actors that would take too long to go over. Google any part of the making of the film and that person or department has received its own feature in a national publication (Costumes, Set Design, Music, etc., etc.)
Love it or hate it, what can’t be denied is that Barbie is very well made and executed from top to bottom. And when you pass that crucial test of quality, as with book so with film: Barbie deserves some critical thought and discussion (stop reading and go see it if you haven’t).
Literary or Genre? (Mild Spoilers)
What’s curious is how quick many erudite film critics were to crown the film (see: The New Yorker review), choosing to contend with Barbie’s intellectual themes of existentialism and/or feminism first and foremost. The main plot is that Barbie (Stereotypical Barbie, that is—the Barbie you think of when you think of Barbie, as the movie cleverly puts it—played by Margot Robbie) wakes up one day to realize the concept of mortality shattering her perfect Barbie dreamland (a world entirely run by and for the different versions of Barbie Mattel has created over the years). This leads to a journey into the real world, with Ken in tow, and then back to Barbieland. But when Barbie finally returns to Barbieland, she finds that Ken has come back first, taken over and dubbed it Kendom, having discovered the patriarchy and the power of men when he traveled to the real world. If this all sounds a bit ridiculous after I just said that Barbie is a critical darling with film reviewers, that’s because a movie about a toy is mostly that: ridiculous and…fun.
For all of the serious attention the film has received, and for all that the filmmakers and producers have done to legitimize it as a film of ideas, the actual film isn’t self-serious. Thankfully this movie about plastic dolls, is mostly a fantastical, silly, big-budget studio comedy. Barbie is riotously funny, especially in skewering the status quo of masculinity (more on this later), the old-world symbols of male power (Ken calls horses “man extenders”, which is undeniably hilarious), and includes a pitch-perfect needle drop of a catchy, popular song that is slyly one of the most under-the-radar sexist things ever written. With parody and amazing musical set pieces, Barbie, at times, feel like the best of a Mel Brooks movie updated for the 21st century.
In book parlance, Barbie fits into the genre side of the equation, just with an unnaturally high-standard of production, filmmaking, and care. Personally, I love nothing more than when a literary writer does something more pop and more genre, essentially the turn that Gerwig is making here. However, you can’t necessarily make the assumption that while an accomplished artist usually imbues a pop project with a higher level of craft and construction, they don’t automatically imbue the work with the same level of deeper meaning and probing of the human condition. If anything it is the comedic parts that communicate the ideas more than the dramatic ones.
Barbieland vs. Kendom vs. Gone Girl (Full Spoilers)
Viewers and critics hold Greta Gerwig—understandably, given her previous body of work—in high regard. There’s also a huge vested interest in wanting Gerwig to succeed, as one of the very few women considered an auteur and able to muster the budgets that go with that unofficial title. Gerwig’s reputation, in large part, feels why the more complicated and probing pieces of Barbie are being held up by critics and smart viewers as operating on a higher level. As a Barbie film in 2023, the main idea the movie contends with is Barbie as a portrayal of women’s empowerment and an idealization of womanhood. Reconciling how Barbie, created in the 1950s, fits into society now that the idea that women are equal to men (aka feminism) is more widely accepted and, in ways, is a little closer to reality (with plenty of notable exceptions) then it was 70 years ago.
One moment in the movie is a stand-in for all of the film’s ideas on the subject. As an editor, you would call it a sore spot, a passage that feels out of place in the full body of work. This is a monologue from America Ferrera’s character (a person from the real world who comes back to Barbieland to help Barbie), which was also excerpted in full by People. Here’s a good sampling of it:
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, 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….”
While this monologue has been celebrated (see the People link above) and there is some validity to spreading a common message in a pop form for mass consumption, if we’re being critical, this speech and Barbie’s larger commentary on feminism is not particularly sophisticated or new. This speech, in many ways, feels like it was written 15 years ago and, by that virtue, nearly every line felt familiar. It does not contain original thought, which is the measure to which we hold talented artists like Greta Gerwig.
From the start at Dear Head of Mine, I’ve said that books are never the center of culture but they often underpin it. This is true of the Barbie speech above. There was some point around the early 2010s—particularly in the backlash/aftermath to Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013, you-can-do-it-all manifesto Lean In—where the double standards and unrealistic expectations placed on women began to be exposed and articulated like they never had been before. The first book that comes to mind is Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud (2017), which in its title alone almost adequately summarizes the speech above. But then came all kinds of related books—on the pay gap, the healthcare gap, the parenting gap, etc. The point is that the Barbie speech glosses over all of these without adding anything new and specific to the proceedings. So, while it is easy to say that Barbie is a good movie and nails the satire and parody (it’s also possible to “say things” through this mode, although comedy is routinely less respected in this regard), it’s a much thornier as to whether Barbie succeeds when it gets explicitly “literary” and tries to directly speak about the human condition or society.
On one of my favorite movie podcasts, The Big Picture, I heard that the Barbie speech is being compared to the famous “Cool Girl” speech in Gone Girl (which was first a novel by Gillian Flynn and then a movie adapted by Flynn and directed by David Fincher). In a twist of irony, Gone Girl is a genre novel that came out in 2012, around the time these new articulations of sexist double standards emerged, and unlike Barbie it is a genre work that the author elevates to a place of originality and incisiveness that makes it one of the stealth literary triumphs of the last decade. It’s a twisty thriller, but it also has a hell of a lot to say about gender roles. The real Cool Girl speech, the one from the book, is quite long (pages 222-225), but I’ve strung together some key parts for comparison to the Barbie speech:
“I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl…Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do what they want…
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the widow dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain…
It's tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try…He teased things out of me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hallowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool Girl—I couldn’t have been Cool Girl with anyone else…”
What stands in stark contrast about this monologue next to the Barbie speech is its specificity. The Cool Girl monologue comes from the character and locates with precision a slice of the impossible and fantastical roles women are expected and encouraged to play. It still feels cutting and timeless eleven years later. In contrast, America Ferrera’s speech is all generalities hitting the big issues (weight, pay, leadership, motherhood), recycling ideas that may be applicable to the Barbies she’s speaking to, who are hearing this all for the first time, but that have no direct specificity to Ferrea’s character. To nitpick by way of example, her character isn’t a boss in the film (“You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.”) and even though she is a mother she only has one kid (“You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids”, emphasis mine). By trying to speak to everyone and using 2nd-person point of view, the speech ends up feeling hollow.
Final Thoughts (Even More Spoilers)
In contrast to its handling of feminism, Barbie has a much easier and more successful time taking men to task and pointing out how much of a man’s world we still live in. At one point a Barbie asks a Ken to start the Godfather from the beginning and talk the whole way through explaining it to her. This is the kind of joke that is precise in a way that the humor on the Barbie side of the gender equation is not (in fairness, there is a pretty good “White Savior Barbie” line directed at Margot Robbie near the end).
There has been much made of the Mattel, corporate tie-in nature of the film, here at Dear Head of Mine included. But in a twist, since seeing the movie, it is not on the matters of capitalism or corporations that this partnership has seemed to cause Barbie to pull its punches. Barbie pokes ample fun at the corporation and its previous misdeeds (e.g. canceling Pregnant Barbie and making a Sugar Daddy Ken), but never goes so far as to interrogate the powerful role Mattel and corporations like it have played in reinforcing gender roles for girls and women. It disassembles the absurdity of the patriarchy but ultimately not Barbie’s role in it. This is in part why the Cool Girl speech remains so potent—it doesn’t just drag the men in power, but acknowledges the full scope of a patriarchal society in which women are participants as well.
Oftentimes with novels, I am a firm believer that the strongest messages arise from the subtext and not the big monologue (Cool Girl speech withstanding). This is where the old adage show don’t tell comes from. With Barbie the most interesting commentary on gender arose not from the stump speech or the final monologue and sappy montage at the end of the movie, but from the overall setup of the story. Setting up the fantasy of Barbieland as a utopia run entirely by women where men are inconsequential (“he’s just Ken”) in contrast to our real world was a stroke of genius. Sometimes by seeing two ideas at their extreme, you gain more perspective on what the reality actually is. Barbieland and Kendom are both toxic fever dreams. At the end of the film, Barbieland discovers itself to be more of a dystopia than the Barbies initially thought and comes around to progress on gender equality, a little at a time. By seeing our own world from the naïve eyes of plastic people, we might realize that we could use a little more progress, too.