“Barbie”: the NP Cut

11/24/2023

Barbie: Lots of Pink Stories, Not So Many Blue Ones

(Warning: Contains spoilers)

I got a sneaky feeling Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” movie would be a hit when I bought a ticket on opening weekend. An infrequent movie-goer, I am seldom attracted to mass pop culture, least of all when it’s fresh. This summer I saw four great movies: “The Last Picture Show”, “Five Easy Pieces”, “Goodfellas”, and “Terms of Endearment” – all for the first time. For me, it would have been more in character to watch “Barbie” from my couch in 2043.

Even though Barbie the doll doesn’t mean a lot in our own family, I was enthusiastic. My mother never had a Barbie, I got one hand-me-down, and my daughter briefly had a gently-used, naked Barbie. We didn’t care much, either way. My daughter did ask for twin newborn dolls on her fourth birthday, but even they weren’t too special: just two more doll-babies in a long line of doll-babies. The nicest ones, which we found in junk-shops, had beautiful porcelain heads, which, to my dismay and hers, her brother shattered on the stone sidewalk, just like the angry, disillusioned girls smashing their dolls in the movie.

No, it wasn’t because of my personal history with Barbie. It was the ads. The best float in this year’s Pride parade down 5th Avenue to Stonewall was the Barbie bus. It was just a pink bus, tailed by a phalanx of prancing men and women in pink mechanic jumpsuits. I want one. As the Hollywood reporters (and Mattel) have told us, Barbie’s name recognition – the intellectual property that is Barbie – is marketing gold. 

Having failed to rally a single friend to go, I put on a hot pink wrap dress (the only hot pink in my closet) and gladly made my small, early contribution to the more than billion-dollar ticket sales.

Yes, I was also interested in what Greta Gerwig had to say, and whether she could please Mattel in a ninety-minute promotional “story,” while also making me laugh or cry or think. Could she dance as well as Fred Astaire, and in high heels and backwards? 

Happily “Barbie” is a very good story for girls and women from aged nine to ninety. It’s fun, thought-provoking, and witty. The brilliant idea at its heart, with the collision of two Lands – Barbie Land and the Real World, is super-likable, and Barbie’s own journey is credible and well told.

Barbie is not real, of course, so Gerwig starts there, with welcome frankness; instead of writing a reality-adjacent script for a woman something like Barbie, Gerwig opens the movie on a sincere note, writing about a doll’s day in a doll’s world. 

That can’t last. Barbie learns that she’s not real, in the same way, as Mike says in “The Sun Also Rises,” a person goes bankrupt. “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

What does “real” mean? The first hints are confusing. Externally, her feet are disastrously flat and she has ugly cellulite. Internally, like Meryl Streep’s character in “Doubt”, she has some. In the early days, it’s hard to say which is worse for Barbie: her insecurity about external imperfections, or inner doubts about her skill and purpose.

Once in the Real World, Barbie’s discoveries and humiliations come quickly and pile high. But along with the unwelcome insults of mean-teen arrogance and patriarchy, Barbie also notices human experience, and this dimension of the real world pleases her. It’s lovely when she watches the people of LA being simply human. She sees difference, tears, quarrels, and beauty she never knew at home. Barbie feels, and she cries, and it’s exciting when she thinks. Plus, dear viewers, even though we’ve been told how clever Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach are, it’s easy to enjoy this part; it’s not all high-minded and pretentious. The jokes are good.

Barbie’s mission – to find the girl who has made her begin to malfunction in doll terms – is quickly completed. She finds the girl, now a cynical high schooler. Mattel, meanwhile, in a rare corporate cameo of self-deprecation, has a PR problem and wants Barbie to go back in her box. She declines. It’s not about the box. It’s not about the girl. It’s about the girl’s mother, who has had thoughts and ideas about Barbie, thoughts Mattel did not, would not, could not, have. Here, in the mother who thinks, is the electrifying human connection Barbie needs.

When she takes the mother and daughter to Barbie Land to show off the feminist utopia the Barbies enjoy, Barbie has a rude surprise, because Ken, who has also visited the Real World, has had very different experiences there. In the Real World, Ken has discovered men rule. They are not handsome sidekicks; they have power and skills. Excited, Ken rushes to Barbie Land to tell the Kens: We can live differently; we can be in charge! So they become full time dudes, and jerks besides. Now they are running Barbie Land, and the result is not high-speed trains or better medicine or solar power. Tragically, the Kens did not acquire the skills of men in the Real World: the Kens do not become teachers or cops, chefs or biologists. 

Now Barbie Land is just an ugly frat house, hilariously renamed Kendom, where the Barbies have forgotten they were once doctors and lawyers and carpenters. Not Barbie of course: part of her problem, unique to the Barbies, is that, like Ken, she has no skill. She is “Original Barbie” – just a grown-up doll, with long legs and breasts. That’s how poor her position is. But Kendom will be even worse for the professional Barbies, the women now reduced to beautiful objects, serving beer to louts.

If the Ken subplot, an indigestible lump of junk food and beer, were merely a subplot, it would not matter. But it mirrors Barbie’s own journey, her painful discovery that she's merely nice and pretty, and fatally undermines the moral arc of the movie. 

At first, the Barbies do the right thing. They begin to reclaim Barbie Land with grass-roots campaigning, by waking each Barbie up from her dream-like subjugation to the Kens. The Barbies become politically active. This is what our feminist forebears called “consciousness raising,” and it is The Bomb. In these moving scenes, girls, teens, women, and grandmothers in the theater were silent both times I saw the movie. It was moving to watch recent feminist history condensed into a few earnest, meaningful conversations among women about their worth.

Then the plot swerves badly, and loses sight of its own logic. We have seen men behaving badly before. It’s not funny. It’s one-dimensional and tiresome. Even as a spoof on a bloated action movie, the epic battle scene fails. About the ridiculous Cyd Charisse dream-dance, the less said the better.

The Barbies' next move is both inane and immoral. They manipulate the Kens with false admiration, dupe them into fighting, and (somehow) trick them into “forgetting” to vote. The constitution of Barbie Land is saved by disenfranchising half the voters. In 2023, did Gerwig and Baumbach think this was funny? The Barbies get their houses back. The Kens remain unhoused.

Sometimes we feel sympathy for Ken, but the writers do nothing with it, because by this point in this film, men are only a joke. Ken can’t get a job. The guy has no education, no skills, and thus no chances. He certainly can’t be a doctor; he can’t even “beach.” He exists only in relation to Barbie. Slowly becoming real, Barbie now has empathy, and shows Ken a little kindness. But all she’s got is an apology for excluding him from sleepovers. “Every night didn’t have to be girl’s night.” 

What Ken needs is a house and a job. When the once-again decorative and supplicant Kens ask President Barbie for a seat on the Supreme Court, she says “not yet.” But maybe they can start on a lower court. It’s funny; it’s also honest, about how political change works. 

Unfortunately, the Barbies have missed the point. In the Nina Planck “Barbie” edit, they would win the vote fair and square (by a tiny margin, with allies like Alan, a not-Ken), and give everyone in Barbie Land a role. Construction, IT work, hairdressing…Give them all a job! Plus a house, or an apartment-share, or a beach shack.

At the climax, Barbie’s new position is unclear. It falls to the now less-cynical teen, who has become curious, has become a storyteller, to ask about Barbie’s future. The plot gets lumpy again. The Nina Planck edit cuts the awful angel-heaven scenes between Barbie and Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel. It’s more interesting to watch Barbie figure it out for herself.

Barbie’s dilemma is clear. She has no talent, no skill. Her gift – physical beauty – is marred by lumps received in Real Life, by aging. “Stereotypical Barbie” is effectively a beloved mascot of Barbie Land, where every other Barbie has a role. Sadly, the writers don’t let Barbie notice that she shares this predicament with Ken.

No – instead the writers put Ken back in his box. Barbie Land is in worse shape than before Barbie traveled to the Real World to fix her flat feet and dark thoughts. Now that I am emotionally engaged in the political world of a fictional place, I hope that one of “the more leadership-oriented Barbies” will remember that men hold up half the sky.

The Velveteen Rabbit becomes real by being loved. Barbie becomes real by feeling. She discovers that she can use conscious feeling to create, to act in the world, instead of being merely a symbol. In the moving final scene, Barbie chooses to become real. She will leave Barbie Land! Back in LA, her doll story ends, and her human story begins, on redemptive, radiant note of self-care. The line is much too good to spoil for you. But it’s a mission all boys and girls can share.

Read Jill Lepore (or listen to her read) for real Barbie history plus fascinating reporting on copyright and patent law.