Can Barbie Have It All?

There was a good chance Barbie would topple under the weight of its expectations. In the 60 years since she debuted, Barbie has been embraced and disparaged as a paragon of idealized femininity, as a prompt for imaginative play, and as a tool of the patriarchy, upholding oppressive beauty standards and stereotypes. The Barbie movie winks at the doll’s cultural centrality, as it opens with a shot-for-shot remake of the first scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which depicts the dawn of human enlightenment. As humans’ precursors discovered the power of tools, little girls encountered a doll that represented an adult woman.

 

In the months leading up to its release, Barbie was shrouded with a certain mystique—the feminine kind—with trailers obscuring more than they revealed. It became more than a summer blockbuster based on a famous toy, one-half of a cinematic meme, and the vehicle for an increasingly popular “Barbiecore” aesthetic. Director and co-writer Greta Gerwig has leaned into the idea of Barbie as a unifying cultural phenomenon, a girlhood experience so broadly shared that it could bring all kinds of women together. She told The New York Times that she wanted viewers to find in Barbie a sort of benediction, hoping to replicate the feeling she had attending Shabbat dinner with friends as a child. “I want them to get blessed,” Gerwig said, aware of her subject’s cultural baggage. Could Barbie capture the magic of childhood play, while also contending with the doll’s complicated role in American culture?

More or less. (This article contains mild spoilers, so stop reading here if you want to avoid learning more about the plot.) While hardly a sophisticated vehicle for a feminist treatise, Barbie is a bright, creative endeavor that neatly wraps up the struggles of womanhood in a clever package. The film is a pleasing mishmash of genres, with elements fantastical, political, mystical, and musical, but at its core it is a coming of age story, a bildungsroman in shades of pink.

Barbie would be worth seeing in theaters for the visuals alone. Barbie Land, home to the Barbies, Kens, and their various discontinued doll sidekicks, is a colorful pastiche of life in plastic, and it’s fantastic. Watching the opening sequence of Barbie Land, depicting Barbie’s morning routine, makes the viewer feel like a little girl playing in her own plastic dream house. But it’s the main character who gives the world texture: Margot Robbie is incandescent as Barbie, and not only because with her megawatt smile and flowing blonde hair, it is easy to believe that she is a doll come to life.

Robbie is “Stereotypical Barbie”—the Barbie you picture when you think of “Barbie.” Her charmed existence is upended one day when her tiptoed feet start flattening, she experiences a surge of irrepressible thoughts of death, and notices the development of cellulite (gasp!). At a dance party with bespoke choreography, Barbie interrupts the festivities by asking if her fellow dolls ever think about dying.

To combat her existential woes, Barbie must venture into our reality—the Real World—to find and reconnect with the actual person playing with her, whose anxiety is manifesting in Barbie. Accompanied by Ken (Ryan Gosling), and buoyed by the Indigo Girls’ classic “Closer to Fine,” Barbie must discover who she is in the Real World.

by Grace Segers, TNR | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures