Barbie
I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that's made. I want to do the imagining, I don't want to be the idea.
Helen Mirren opens Barbie with the line, "Since the beginning of time since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls." This, of course, was a parody of the opening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; nonetheless, she's right. It's hard to find a straight answer online about when the first doll was created, but one website claims dolls can be traced back to the Paleolithic Era. (charlottesydimby.fr)
However, we can easily trace back to the day the world of dolls changed forever. On March 9th, 1959, Ruth Handler debuted Barbie at the American International Toy Fair in New York City. As the first mass-produced doll with adult features in the US, Barbie became a phenomenon. While baby dolls helped young girls become nurturing, preparing them for motherhood as adults, Barbie was the first doll to inspire young girls to reach for their dreams. As the Barbie slogan says, "You can be anything."
Barbie is also the most scrutinized doll in history. Handler's intention may have been to inspire young girls, but soon, the world was questioning if Barbie was actually setting unrealistic beauty standards for women. The scrutiny continued 64 years later when Warner Brothers released Barbie, the most polarizing movie of the year. Barbie seemed to receive every critique under the sun from it wasn't empowering enough, it wasn't as light-hearted as some expected, or the portrayal of Ken as a "himbo" was offensive to men. Mind you, this is a movie about a plastic doll.
"This makes me emotional, and I'm expressing it. I have no difficulty holding both logic and feeling at the same time, and it does not diminish my powers; it expands them"-Lawyer Barbie, Barbie.
Despite the criticism, Barbie brought in $1.4 billion worldwide and is currently the 14th highest-grossing film of all time. Barbie, along with Oppenheimer, also brought massive crowds back to theaters in a fan-created double-feature viewing called Barbenheimer. For the first time in years, movies seemed to be packed all day long with fans ready to see the world-famous doll come to life on screen. I went to see Barbie twice in theaters and would rate it as my favorite movie of 2023, no matter how mad that might make some people. In honor of Women's History Month, I'm starting March with Barbie, an empowering film that is far more complex than anyone expected.
Barbie's Journey From Plastic To Human
Among themes of female empowerment and commentary on our society, there is a very real story about a doll realizing she wants more than the life she's always lived, and to me, this is the most powerful storyline in the film. Leading up to Barbie's release, every teaser or trailer was intentionally vague in terms of its plot. The only hint we had was one scene when Barbie drove past a movie theater decorated with The Wizard of Oz movie posters. This subtle hint let us know we were likely about to see Barbie leave the world she knew behind and enter the unknown. However, this time, it's reversed; Barbie is leaving the Oz-like fantasy world of Barbieland and going into the real world.
Barbie blurts out one of the film's most humorous lines during a disco dance party, shifting the theme of the film in a jarring way. "Do you guys ever think about dying?" She asks a confused group of Barbie dolls. Sure, we soon learn that Barbie is malfunctioning because Gloria has been sad while playing with her doll, but this moment is so much more. It's like Ariel in The Little Mermaid realizing she wants to go up to the shore. Barbie is realizing she wants more than to live the same day over and over again in pink wonderland.
"I'm not really sure where I belong anymore. I don't think I have an ending,"-Barbie, Barbie.
I remember hearing the same perspective from several people after seeing Barbie. They all said they would have stayed in Barbieland instead of choosing to become human and live in the real world, as Barbie does at the end of the film. As humans, the real world is our normal, and a world where everything is perfect and everyone is happy all the time seems like a dream reality. However, my favorite sequence in the film comes when Barbie is in the real world, observing human life in a way only someone who has never experienced it before could.
Barbie watches the trees blowing in the wind, a couple fighting, two men laughing together, and a man with his head in his hand, seemingly stressed out over something in his life. I've heard countless reiterations of the quote, "We can't have light without the darkness," meaning that in order to appreciate the good moments in life, we also have to experience the bad. Barbie finds herself observing both the good and bad moments of life, and she appreciates both of them because where she comes from, she's only ever experienced happiness.
A moment later, Barbie tells an old woman sitting on the bench next to her that she is beautiful. It's a very simple scene, but it means so much more when you remember Barbie has never seen an old woman before because no one ages in Barbieland. In fact, movie execs didn't understand the scene and wanted director Greta Gerwig to cut it from the film because it didn't bring the story forward. Her response was, "If I cut that, I don't know why I'm making this film." She even called it "the heart of the movie." People in our society will pump their faces with botox before allowing themselves to age gracefully, but without societal beliefs around aging, Barbie sees the old woman as beautiful.
"Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever,"-Ruth Handler, Barbie.
For me, the most emotional scene in Barbie comes at the end when Barbie walks off with her creator, Ruth Handler, where she asks her to turn her into a human. This scene is packed with inspiring quotes, where Ruth reminds Barbie that there's a lot of pain in the real world, but Barbie decides she would rather live in a world where there is good and bad and where she can experience something new. Right before Barbie embarks on her new life as a human, there is a montage of women, which Gerwig confirmed is real footage from the women who worked on the film.
There are clips of women graduating, women laughing, and even one clip of a woman bowling and falling to the ground after getting a strike. The montage represents life and all the wonderful things we experience in the real world that we often take for granted. The most beautiful part of Barbie to me is her appreciation for the mundane and how she sees the world through the lens of curiosity, almost like a child.
I'm Just Ken
One of the most brilliant decisions in Barbie was to make Ken essentially useless. Many took offense to this, assuming Greta Gerwig's film was trying to push the narrative that men in society are useless, but I think these perspectives completely miss the point of the film. Growing up, I had countless Barbie dolls, but I really only had a few Kens. As the Barbie tagline goes, "She's everything, he's just Ken."
Throughout the movie, we watch as Ken tirelessly and unsuccessfully tries to win Barbie's affection, but nothing he does ever seems enough for her. This is because, from the moment Mattel launched Ken, he was only meant to be another accessory for Barbie, like her pink car or her plastic shoes. What Gerwig did with the dolls was humanize them, and Ken's story demonstrates what it would be like for someone to feel so insignificant in the world and how that might lead to some extreme actions.
Sure, Ken goes to the real world, recognizes that the men there actually hold most of the power, and then goes back to Barbieland with a male dominance mindset, ready to spread all the knowledge he learned so the Kens could take over Barbieland. However, I still don't see Ken as a villain, and I don't think he or the other Kens were supposed to be villains. In fact, in the end, once the Barbies take back Barbieland, Barbie has immense compassion for him, and she takes responsibility for how she may have made him feel unimportant, even if she never meant to.
At the start of Barbie, she tells Ken, "This is my dream house, it's Barbie's dreamhouse, it's not Ken's dreamhouse." Later, when Ken turns her home into Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa House, he flips this line on its head and uses it against her: "This is my Mojo Dojo Casa House, it's not Barbie's Mojo Dojo Casa House." As Gerwig explains in her director's commentary, "You actually realize how painful what she said to him was the first time."
"Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him."-Helen Mirren, Barbie.
Gerwig writes Ken's storyline with so much compassion, and what really comes through in the story is that even though Barbie has accomplished so much–she's been president, an astronaut, a scientist, and Barbieland even has an entire team of female construction workers–her compassion is one of her most empowering qualities. Meeting someone with compassion even when they've done something terrible is one of the many difficulties we face in life. I admire Barbie the most for realizing that excluding the Kens in the name of female empowerment was actually quite harmful, and the real solution is for everyone to coexist equally without anyone being left out. This is a message we could really learn to implement in the real world.
The Complex Message In Barbie
There are several fun musical numbers in Barbie, a lot of pink, and a lot of humor coming from talented comedic actors like Kate McKinnon and Will Ferrell. However, amidst the fun, there are many complex messages about our world and the impact it has on both men and women. We see Gloria's daughter Sasha berate Barbie in front of all her friends, accusing her of setting feminism back 50 years. We see Ken thrive in a world run by men, then take those ideas back to Barbieland and convert Barbies, who were once doctors and scientists, into maids and cheerleaders. And we see the once self-assured Barbie now questioning her own worth.
"Everybody hates women. Women hate women, and men hate women. It's the one thing we can all agree on."-Sasha, Barbie.
Gerwig shared that Barbie was partly inspired by the book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher, which explores how girls' self-esteem tends to crumble once they reach adolescence. Barbie's journey from Barbieland into the real world resembles what it's like for girls to grow up in a world that isn't always very kind to them. For example, Barbie's self-esteem takes a huge hit when Sasha insults her and when she's sexually harassed upon entering the real world. She comes to an all too familiar conclusion toward the end of the film; "I'm not pretty anymore. I'm not smart enough to be interesting. I'm not good enough for anything." This leads to a monologue from Gloria that has found itself at the center of several social media debates.
Gloria's Controversial Monologue
Gloria goes on a rant, starting with, "It is literally impossible to be a woman," she then vents to Barbie about all the expectations put on women in the world. Some loved the speech, others hated it and called it cliché. What matters most to me is that when I saw the film, I heard a woman in front of me say, "Amen," meaning no matter what anyone on Twitter thinks, that monologue touched someone and made them feel seen.
What I later learned while watching Greta Gerwig's director's commentary was that while filming that scene, all the women on set started crying, and later, the director noticed the men were getting emotional, too. She realized that while a lot of what Gloria said was specific to women, it's actually a universal feeling that we all feel like we can't do anything right no matter how hard we try.
Barbie's Perfect Ending
When Barbieland is first introduced, a world where women run everything, they all have big pink houses, and everyone rides around in a 50s pastel-colored Corvette that drives itself felt like a dream world to me and so many other women who were watching the movie in the theater. However, Gerwig's film revealed that a world where one group of people runs everything, and another is entirely excluded doesn't benefit anyone.
Even when the Barbies were in charge, they not only excluded the Kens, but Weird Barbie, Allan, and all the dolls that had been discontinued by Mattel. Allan is an interesting character because, just like the real-life doll, he's simply Ken's friend and has no other identity. In the film, he doesn't fit into the Kendom when the Kens take over, but he doesn't quite fit into Barbieland either.
Barbie's female-dominated society actually wasn't quite as empowering as it seemed. I think Greta Gerwig sums up the ending better than I ever could, "I wanted Barbieland to be at its most beautiful when it was a mix of what Ken likes, what Barbie likes, and what the motley crew of outcast Barbies also like and that they were all part of it now."
"We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they've come,"-Ruth Handler, Barbie.
I've watched Barbie several times now, and each time it gets funnier, and I realize it was never as serious as everyone online made it seem. A lot of its messages were lost in translation, mostly because some people just like to cause problems and will find any reason to pick apart a piece of art that a lot of people put their heart and soul into. However, one positive thing that I realize every time I watch Barbie is at its core, it's a story about a mother and a daughter. Not only because of Gloria and her relationship with Sasha but because Barbie's origins lie in a mother, Ruth Handler, creating Barbie for her daughter, Barbara Handler, and I do believe Great Gerwig did that story justice.
You nailed it describing the scene where she’s observing the park witnessing both light and darkness. And like you said Greta was inspired by the story that talks about little girls losing their self esteem in adolescence (I didn’t know that fun fact) I felt in my core how Barbieland was a place where Barbie could live a faux life. By the end Barbie chooses the Birkenstock on her own terms. She willingly chooses an experience of life that is real and raw with it's high highs and low lows. She decides to embrace the aspects of herself that were too human (bad breath, flat feet, crying, cellulite) by choosing to go all the way. She wants to be human because she wants to spend more time fully absorbed in life whether that's in sadness and grief or pure joy and elation. She chooses an experience of life that is in awe of it and in full participation with it. So good!!
Great job Gina I enjoy looking forward to your articles every week.👍