*/****
starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Will Ferrell
written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
directed by Greta Gerwig
by Walter Chaw Margot Robbie is so good in good movies–and she’s also in Greta Gerwig’s smug, self-congratulatory, painfully obvious, subtext-free screed Barbie, playing Mattel’s signature doll-for-girls, which, despite occasional attempts at empowerment, are still primarily thought of as regressive artifacts of a reductionist patriarchy. Does this review immediately sound like a didactic thesis more appropriate for a freshman-level gender-studies course? One that condescends to presume neither prior knowledge nor scholarship but rather hopes to build consensus through the most basic of shared sociological experiences, catchphrases, and facile platitudes? Well, fight fire with fire, I guess. It’s tough to sit through populist groaners like Barbie because it’s right about the wrongs it’s angry about, but in the act of being right, it validates the criticisms of the worst people in the world–a strident preach to the choir that embitters the villains while actually showing those same incels, rapists, corporate stooges, and other clinically-twisted narcissists an uncomfortable amount of grace and mercy. I’m sympathetic, don’t get me wrong. But while I think it’s a long and rocky road to make something thorned and substantive out of a corporate icon under the supervision and financial control of said corporation, I’m of the mind that you might have been better off asking, say, Andrea Arnold to give it a go instead of Gerwig. Someone good, I mean. That is, if you were ever really serious about meaningful subversion as opposed to the stealth launch of your plastic-based cinematic universe using a name with a perplexing niche pedigree as the frictionless, candy-coated disguise for your rapacious intentions.
Everything is perfect in Barbieland, a world that is one part Elf‘s North Pole and one part satire of how all little girls play with their dolls in exactly the same way: eschewing stairwells and doorways, driving carefully according to the rules of the road, having tea and throwing parties while being obsessed with clothing. In this Eden, Stereotypical Barbie (Robbie) is starting to have existential thoughts about dying, making Beach Ken’s creepy desperation to gain her attention the least of her worries. Ken (Ryan Gosling) invites himself to sleep over one night, and she asks him why. He says, “I really don’t know.” The joke is that as neither of them possess genitalia, they possess no awareness of sexuality, either. That changes for Stereotypical Barbie, too, when her depression (and its attendant less-shapely calves, morning breath, and the appearance of cellulite on her thigh) inspires her to go to The Real World, where she is immediately keyed into the concept of objectification via the male gaze and the threat of assault. “I don’t have a vagina,” she tells a group of rowdy construction workers, which doesn’t land like a joke so much as it does a deeply misguided bordering on insensitive and ignorant gambit to escape sexual harassment. This isn’t the sort of thing you toss off flippantly. It’s not a joke and it’s not funny. It touches on questions of gender identification, on the idea that men are immune to sexual violence, even the presumption that such a declaration in this situation would in fact be a deterrent when in many cases it would be seen as a provocation. It’s dangerous. And it’s arrogant to believe no one could be hurt by “just a joke, you’re overreacting, relax.”
Stereotypical Barbie not having a vagina is fascinating, however, and I wish they would have shown her naked: hairless and nipple- and vagina-free. Ditto Ken, who jokes about his smooth genital mound without our ever getting to regard the Cronenbergian uncanniness of an entirely castrated Ryan Gosling. By itself, seeing these actors shorn of their privates would have been more of a statement on objectification and appearance than anything in the entire running time of this benighted garbage. The good–indeed, masterful–version of Barbie, in which a woman’s appearance is her greatest weapon as well as a giant, often deadly bullseye drawn across her, is Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, wherein a perfect-looking but anatomically unfinished woman first lures men into her grasp before coming to a kind of sexual awareness and immediately getting destroyed by men in gouts of physical and emotional violence and fire. The difference between that film’s unnamed being and Stereotypical Barbie is that the It in Under the Skin is created with thought and intelligence so that it’s not able to eat when it wants to, whereas Stereotypical Barbie learns how to have tea after first dumping a glass of mineral water on her face. No vagina, yet a working digestive tract? That’s going to get pretty uncomfortable pretty fast. Barbie and Ken apparently also have fingerprints when they get arrested in The Real World, another weird swing-and-a-miss that probably won’t bother anyone hoping against hope there’s nothing slipshod or careless about Barbie.
Helen Mirren provides an arch anglophone voiceover that only makes sense if her tone and accent alone constitute a gag about the picture’s faux-profundity (“Maybe we should call you ‘self-effacing’ Barbie!” squeaks Barbie creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman)). At one point, when Stereotypical Barbie is being consoled about her appearance despite not having any makeup on or her hair done, the Narrator chimes in with a note to the director that you shouldn’t cast Margot Robbie if you’re making this point. This should cause the audience to stop and reflect who in the actual fuck thought that any of this was a good idea. The larger plot has to do with each of the Barbies in Barbieland having a Real World plastic counterpart that essentially functions as a voodoo doll for their Barbieland manifestations. That’s why there’s Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), marker on her face and always doing the splits: because her plastic juju has been played with roughly. I want to say this, too, that although great pains are taken to show Barbieland as a utopia where a diversity of skin colour and body types is accepted, Stereotypical Barbie one day sees her high-heel-elevated feet “flattened” to touch the ground, causing her entire friend group to screech and gag. The choice between real and fantasy is presented not as a blue and red pill but as high heels vs. Birkenstocks. What is the message here about what women wear in relation to their level of intelligence and ability to deal with the world as it is? Legally Blonde made the case eloquently for how judging a person’s capability based on their exterior is a “you” problem. Barbie tries to do the same but hasn’t the first notion of how to go about it, making how Stereotypical Barbie dresses in the Real World a running joke at her expense, not ours.
Just as the concurrent Oppenheimer is a movie about the creator of a bomb made with the gravity and subtlety of the bomb, Barbie is a movie about Barbie made with the political awareness, consistency, and intelligence of the doll. Perhaps realizing it’s in deep water without a swimming lesson, Barbie resorts to a three-minute speech on the plight of women in the United States. Uninterrupted. Three minutes. That’s three full script pages of monologuing nothing insightful, just cataloging the same old tired saws: “You have to be the boss, but you can’t be mean… You have to be thin but not too thin.” A minute into it, I started wondering if you could set it to the tune of Howard Jones’s syrupy anthem of oily self-pity, “No One is to Blame.” This is delivered by Stereotypical Barbie’s “owner,” Gloria (America Ferrera), a lachrymose designer at Mattel responsible for Barbie’s sudden introspection. When she’s done, Barbie says, “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power.” Then she gasps and exclaims, “Wow, I just said all that!” in surprise and as a pressure valve for a now-terrified audience witnessing a trainwreck in real time, because beautiful women even surprise themselves when they blandly summarize general observations made without much insight or resonance. The argument will be made that the legions of young women flocking to see Barbie as an act of camp appreciation will benefit where all the oldheads sick of the social-media simplification of activism will not, and, okay, I hope that’s true. I hope that along the way, they pick up on the message that Ken is a horrific incel with violent tendencies who intimates several times throughout the film that he would like to either coerce or force himself on this woman who has no interest in him. He is a pit of self-interest and manufactured drama, and if Barbieland has a watchlist, he’s on it. Funny how this film’s main detractors wish there was more Ken. The good version of Barbie would end with prison bars closing on him.
Barbie lifts its ending from “Puff the Magic Dragon” on the one hand and Pinocchio/A.I. on the other, as Barbie wishes to be a “real live” girl in a cloud-draped, pseudo-mystical grey limbo: “I wanna be 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.” I waited for the Narrator to interject again about the wisdom of asking an actress, cast as a mass-produced fetish object and presented as the subject of lascivious glances and sometimes-threatening sexual advances, to say this, even one with Robbie’s gifts. The picture also lifts the “pretending to be soulful douchebag with a guitar” bit from Roger Avery’s The Rules of Attraction, (substituting a syrupy heartfelt ballad from that film’s ’90s emo college rock supergroup Counting Crows for Matchbox Twenty), and inexplicably tosses in some Care Bears exploding-hearts special effects for the Kens and some puffs of animated pink clouds when Barbie’s Dream Car gets in an accident. (My guess is they tried it without them and it looked even stupider.) This is a project that would have benefited from a sharper satirical voice, a smarter, science-fiction-minded bent, and a read-through with a few members of diverse groups to better understand the real issues it flails at in its awkward, destructive way. If only it had the courage and faith in its audience to shake shit up instead of trying so desperately to be liked. I would be easier on Barbie were it merely a piffle, but because it wants to play in the sandbox of social relevance, it has to do more than bomb topics like sexual assault, body dysmorphia, Trans identity, and depression from a great height and shove it off as a laugh. It’s morally irresponsible. You’re better off tracking down a bootleg of Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which the singer’s downfall as she struggled with an eating disorder and the social pressures on a woman in the spotlight is told exclusively through the use of Barbie dolls. Mattel’s had that one hidden away in copyright limbo for decades now. Funny, that.
