Barbie: Blockbusters Can't Do Satire
Sponsored content like Barbie are bad at being edgy and clever. You instead watch them just for the vibes.
A person, coddled in eternal bliss and comfort, is compelled to confront the harsh reality of mortality. The only solution to their existential despair: they must leave their dreamy homeland and seek answers in the real world. This premise describes two iconic characters, not unlike in their love of pastel clothing: the saffron-robed Buddha, and, our subject, the pink-loving Barbie.
The first third of the Barbie movie is a glimpse into a regular day in Barbieland. Every day is nothing short of amazing — one wakes up with optimism, the breakfasts are fulfilling, all Barbies adore each other but especially the stereotypical Barbie (our protagonist), and every night is a wholesome rager. This saccharine collage runs fairly long, and just as one begins to wonder “it must get tiring to be so pretty and popular”, Barbie’s problems are revealed to us: she has been contemplating death, her arched feet have gone flat (I did not know this was a thing), and she now has cellulite. In Barbieland, these horrors are cataclysmic.
Like Buddha, Barbie must leave her paradise for answers. She ventures to, of all places, Los Angeles. There, she learns that a mother has been projecting her anxieties onto her estranged daughter’s dolls, causing our Barbie to malfunction. In the meantime, Kens, who are usually powerless and needy, have discovered patriarchy, have taken over Barbieland with masculine fanaticisms, and have turned resident Barbies into docile playthings. Our protagonist Barbie now faces two tasks: to mend her cellulite problems by fixing the mother-daughter relationship (yes, bizarre), and to restore Barbieland by putting the Kens back to their station.
Amid the slapstick fervor besetting Barbie’s life, there are two scenes of unusual placidity that stand out. In one, at a bus stop in Los Angeles, Barbie sees, for the first time, and old woman. She stares at her for a few moments and says, “You’re so beautiful” and the woman returns, “I know it.” In another, as Barbie is running away from the cronies at Mattel Corporation (her manufacturer), she stumbles into the living room of an elderly woman (revealed, towards the end, to be Ruth Handler, the maker of Barbie), and Barbie stops running to drink a cup of tea. At this moment, someone in my theatre actually shouted, “Run Barbie Run!” Let’s not push her. Maybe all Barbie wants is to be old and drink some Earl Grey? How Zen!
Sure enough, at the end the movie, upon realizing that fixing Barbieland problems hasn’t cheered Barbie, she is asked by her makers: What does she really want? Then follows a bizarre scene with Barbie and Ruth Handler in a bright, white space — the same type of scene where Harry Potter gets sage advice from Dumbledore after Harry almost dies. This makeup is almost universally understood to be a prop to inject questionable plot-twisters, platitudes and dei et machina into flimsy plotlines. Here, Barbie, who has hitherto stood for timeless plastic cheeriness, tearfully reveals that she just wants to be a human. The semblance with Buddha is thus complete: they both really just want to experience and embrace suffering and pain, except that while Buddha would like you to give up all worldly possessions, the Barbie movie and its producers would love it if you could go buy some more Mattel toys.
Barbie is not a movie to watch for the plot. You cannot scrutinize the duality between Barbieland and the real world, or how one transverses between the two, or why, in a world where dolls and toys are routinely abused and mangled, the insecurity of an everyday mother should cause such an uproar. If the movie is a parable of gender equity, its message is perplexing. The build-up to the climax involves pitting brainwashed Kens against each other into a civil war, and kidnapping and preprogramming Barbies with a back-of-a-van pep talk— the dual version of the scene is a questionable proposition. That said, Margot Robbie makes an excellent Barbie, Ryan Gosling does wonders with his role, and the pastel visuals are a treat for the eyes. You might even laugh out loud at certain moments, if you let yourself loosen up a little.
When I asked my friends who had seen the movie wearing pink at the peak of Barbenheimer fever, I had gotten an unequivocal response: “It was amazing!” Clearly, like the pastel-colored evening assembly at a Rajneeshi commune, Barbie is a cultural experience that demands your total surrender. It is a movie you watch solely for the vibes, something a curmudgeon watching it three months after release perhaps wouldn’t appreciate.
While its cultural potency was lost on me, its commercial one was not. Many critics have pointed out that the film is merely a two-hour long commercial for Barbie dolls, an incarnation of sponsored content, and a woeful harbinger for more to surely follow. If people hadn’t heard of Mattel, the movie has successfully made it a household name. We not only get introduced to a line-up of Mattel toys, but we also even get a sympathetic portrayal of Barbie’s founder, Ruth Handler — her tax-evading past notwithstanding (“Baby, I am Mattel! Until the IRS got to me but that’s a different movie.” Wink wink). The movie underlying hypocrisy is that it serves as a loyal Mattel mouthpiece while pretending to be a satire of capitalistic opportunism.
The movie portrays the Barbie doll as Handler’s noble creation, intended to give a liberating voice for children worldwide, but somehow degraded to an objectified capitalistic tool by the greedy fools at the Mattel Corporation (the movie Mattel is led by Will Ferrell). “I named you Barbie after my daughter Barbara,” says the movie-version of Ruth Handler, with the show of maternal affection one extends to a daughter and not to an object mass-produced to fill a lucrative market gap. The original Barbie was a knock-off of the promiscuous German Lilli Bild, which was sold in Europe as an ironic adult gag gift. Handler and Mattel redesigned the doll, with numerous focus-groups of parents as well as young girls, for the American market, to maintain just the right balance between the yearnings of an American girl and the respectability of the American middle class. Barbie would have a house, but she would be unburdened by domestic chores. Once, Ruth Handler turned down an offer to market a Barbie-themed vacuum because Barbie, of course, wouldn’t do rough housework. Moreover, the invention of the Ken doll, which the movie paints as parasitic beings latching onto Barbie for emotional security, was necessitated by the very middle-class mores Barbie was supposed to market: What nice suburban girl wouldn’t, eventually, need a nice boyfriend? The entire Barbie ecosystem was meticulously crafted for the singular purpose of consumption. There are no villains or heroes in this story, no matter how hard the movie tries to make it seem so. As Mattel’s response to its market performance since the movie’s release shows, it will happily pay lip-service to any en vogue cultural sentiment and will tolerate Will Ferrell’s theatrical lampoons, as long as the bottom line remains profitable.
If the Barbie movie simultaneously appears to be heavy-handed, frivolous, and sputtering in its message, it is because it really is an incoherent mess. The dialogue sways between too clever and outright lazy: “Oh honey, that’s life. It’s all change” or “A: By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power. B: Hell, yes, White Savior Barbie.” The movie is self-aware, even annoyingly so. At one point, a distraught Barbie says, “I am not pretty anymore” and a directorial voice rears its head to comment: “Note to the filmmakers. Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point” We get it. Margot Robbie is very pretty, the casting director must be very proud, but the artistic freedom that comes with this kind of self-awareness amounts to nothing. Many have criticized it for being man-hating crusade. Rubbish! The film itself has no clue what it is doing. It is almost as if the movie story board only had three bullet points: 1) Margot Robbie as Barbie, 2) Dash of Feminist Empowerment and 3) Don’t get too hung up on point 2. The lesson here is that you cannot be edgy and clever when you are also a very thinly veiled commercial.
Criticizing this movie puts one in a difficult position. Set yourself up against the mass opinion (“A riotous, candy-colored feminist fable”: The Guardian) and you risk being sympathetic to the incel camp. Balk at the Barbenheimer fever and you get tagged naïve to the modern economics of cross-product marketing and counterprogramming. Look, I understand. A film has every right to disappoint a straggler. It absolutely does; I am clearly not its prime target demographic. But it also feels that such an objection is fair on a movie that spent half a year in absurd, off-the-top marketing. In Los Angeles you couldn’t drive two blocks without seeing a gaggle of people in pink at a pop-up Barbie pop-house. Have seen most of Greta Gerwig’s works since Frances Ha, I rightfully expect a refreshing change from the vapidity of a modern blockbusters. I just feel a little let down, a little insulted given that this movie equivalent of a cotton candy was marketed like the second coming of Christ.