Barbie

Director: Greta Gerwig (USA, UK). Year of Release: 2023

A neolithic desert. As we watch some girls playing with their toys, an unseen narrator says “Since the beginning of time, there have always been dolls ” As a 50-foot smiling Barbie appears, the girls start to destroy their dolls as part of an hommage to 2001, A Space Odyssey. This is a problem which will turn up more than once in a film which is trying to appeal both to the teenie audience which turned up in pink hair, and to geeks who are not so much cine-literate as anal retentive.

Barbie is, as they say, just a Barbie girl in the Barbie world. Actually “Barbie”, as personified in the film by Margot Robbie, is just one of many girls with this name. Our heroine’s full name is Stereotypical Barbie, or – as she says – “I’m the Barbie everyone thinks of when you think of Barbie.” But she shares her name with a multi-ethnic group of rocket scientists, members of the Supreme Court and even the US president.

In Barbie world, as the narrator explains, “thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved.” And when it works, Barbie, the film, is a sharp satire on the massive gap between the claims of Barbie’s manufacturer Mattel, and the real world. At a high point, a teenage girl is brought on who screams at Barbie that she’s a Fascist who represents everything wrong with our culture and destroyed the planet with her glorification of rampant consumerism.

Barbie, being an airhead, does not know how to respond. But something is changing in her. Rather than conforming to her high heels, her feet are becoming flat. Cellulite starts to appear on her body. At a dance party, where everyone is mindlessly enjoying themselves, she blurts out “You guys ever think about dying?” It turns out that someone in “the real world” (well, Los Angeles) has been playing with their Barbie wrongly, and our heroine must go and rectify the situation.

On her travels, she is accompanied by Ken. Again “Ken” is a name used by a multitude of characters, but there is only one Ryan Gosling. Gosling’s Ken’s occupation is “beach” and for undisclosed reasons, he has a peculiar obsession with horses. In Barbie world, Ken is unsure of himself, always craving Barbie’s approval. Once they reach LA and he learns about the patriarchy, he wants a piece of the action, and returns to Barbie world to try and re-introduce male privilege.

There are a lot of daring and subversive ideas in Barbie, which deserves some acclaim for daring to go there. At the same time, it is a lot less radical than it thinks it is. In an interview, director Greta Gerwig described the film as “wild an anarchic”, but it faces a permanent dilemma of not knowing whether it should attack or celebrate the Barbie phenomenon. Even the trailer said: “If you love Barbie this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie this movie is for you.”

Yes the film sticks out its tongue at the Mattel corporation, and does land some punches, not just at Mattel but at “feminist capitalism” in general. Although Mattel in the film does seem to have one woman worker in a non-influential position, the CEO and all of his minions are white men in suits. If the Barbie toy really made any substantial social changes towards women’s liberation, no-one has noticed this in the board rooms.

At the same time, the film has obviously been approved by the neoliberal megacorporation. At one stage, Rhea Perlman is wheeled on as Ruth Handler, the female creator of Barbie. Ruth is portrayed as an unambiguously positive role model, as if the film’s earlier attacks on Barbie’s unfeasible body size contributing to generations of body shaming were just an incidental extra to an essentially feminist project. It is not an unambiguous success that women can be capitalists too.

This is before we come to the Ken problem. This is nothing to do with Ryan Gosling, who plays the part impeccably. Gosling is a great comedian, who – long before he became famous for being pretty – showed great range in comedies like Lars and the Real Girl and tragic dramas like Half Nelson and Blue Valentine. He is also a very intelligent actor, which is exactly what is needed to play someone as vacuous as Ken.

The film is in many ways about Ken’s struggles to come to adjust to a world in which his life has more reason than just hoping that Barbie will notice him. The scene in which he goes into a hospital and demands a job as a doctor because he’s just heard of the patriarchy is hilarious. But although it works well as an individual scene, a film which sets itself up to smash some myths about the patriarchy should maybe spend a little more attention on its female characters.

For a film which promotes women’s liberation, Barbie has a very low opinion of women’s ability to think for themselves. In the dragging third part, Ken enacts a counter-revolution by gaslighting all the Barbies into serving the Kens, because that’s all it takes, isn’t it? This does contain a good joke – where the Kens sing a maudlin song at the Barbies (in passing, the film’s music is almost universally terrible), but shows little hope in the agency and intelligence of the sisterhood.

Barbie is certainly based on an interesting premise, it has a number of great gags and Gosling is excellent. Margot Robbie may be even better, given the paucity of material she is given to work with. But it’s not at all clear what the film trying to say, other than “the patriarchy isn’t very nice”. Maybe it shouldn’t need to say any more, but as it has set itself up as making a Meaningful Statement, it’s just too vague what this statement is supposed to be.

The film starts really well, but by the end it runs out of steam. Despite it’s anti-consumerist ambitions it will almost inevitably be used to sell lots of products, and to an extent it courts this appropriation. There are some great scenes, but unfortunately, these scenes never add up to a coherent or entertaining whole. The people who are hating on Barbie because it acknowledges that women’s liberation would be a good thing are obviously wrong, but its no classic either.