Barbie: Pretty in Pink, Didactic in Plastic

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) is what the ads led you to believe. Barbieland is stunning in both accuracy (or so I’m told) and aesthetic quality. Margot Robbie (as Stereotypical Barbie) moves as if made of plastic, gliding down a pristine slide from her dream house, straight out of a yassified The Ladies Man (1961). There is no liquid. Ken’s job is “beach,” and he does it well. In an age of rampant CGI, the sets are a pristine reminder, ironically enough, of real-world beauty.

In Barbieland, all is perfect, all is simple. There is no change, no fear. Women run everything from government to construction sites. The Kens, by contrast, seek only the gaze of the Barbies. Like a dog when you get home, the Kens beg to be looked at, seen, talked to. Stereotypical Barbie, however, begins having thoughts of death. Her feet, naturally arched to fit heels, press firmly on the plastic earth. Something is very, very wrong. She and Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) set out to the real world to put them right. Little does she realize that leaving Barbieland means more complexity, more humanity, not less.

Up to this point, the film is funny and promises a wry, ironic look at the idealizing consumerism and gender relations Barbie represents. The opening, an homage to the tool-discovery scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), has a giant Barbie pristinely walk up to the sepia-washed beach where little girls have only motherly toys with which to play. She is their liberator and their idol, to be worshipped, a new trap for their imaginations. Barbie’s theme song, which we hear when she wakes up and gets ready every day, tears at the seams, with lyrics about death and hopelessness peppering the otherwise saccharine tune.

The women-run world of Barbieland is idealistic to the point of being unsettling. When Journalist Barbie (Rita Aryu) asks President Barbie (Issa Rae) why she’s so successful, she smiles and says, “no comment,” because, of course, all Barbies are perfect and there can be no “why” to their excellence. We see the same with the various Barbie Nobel Laureates (one wonders how the Nobel came to exist in a world where men only seek the attention of women, but it’s funny nonetheless). Barbieland, we begin to see, may be imperfect in its plastic perfection.

It’s when the real world intervenes that things get messy, and, unfortunately, less exciting. There are still many wonderful scenes, bits of comedy and the like (I was especially taken by Stereotypical Ken discovering patriarchy by seeing mounted cops and images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan). Gerwig and Baumbach’s decision to have Ken, armed with the knowledge of male-dominance in the real world, lead a kind of right-wing Cultural Revolution in Barbieland, both makes narrative sense and provides a reasonable commentary on the dissatisfaction and violence produced by commodification (of bodies, of goods more broadly). The dude-bro world they create (filled with horses and the sexual ambiguities of homosocial rule) is hilarious. Still, these moments become fewer and fewer as Barbie rushes on.

From the beginning, there are hints of where the movie is headed. As early as Barbie and Ken’s arrival in the real world, there’s a scene in which Barbie endures cartoonish catcalling from a group of New York-sounding construction workers on break (in Venice Beach!). Barbie announces to them that she has no vagina. How or why does Barbie know what that is? This is not clear. But a whole lot of milquetoast didacticism follows, culminating in a speech at the end from Gloria (America Ferrera), the grown woman playing with Stereotypical Barbie whose emotions cause the changes in Barbieland, in which she essentially reads a motivational Twitter post and removes whatever strands of non-surface-level meaning had survived to that point.

Barbie becomes the superficiality it claims to deride, proposing that we allow people (and especially women) to be messy and complicated. Not a bad message taken on its own, it’s so well-trod as to be beyond reproach and so broad as to mean anything from “it’s okay to be sad” to “don’t bother trying to be great.” When it aims at existential themes (as we see in the final sequence, one so saccharine and cliché any vestiges of irony are finally, mercifully murdered), it does little better, leaving us with “being human is complicated.” In the age of AI, that may yet have some saliency. Unfortunately, the complication suggested is utterly destroyed by its turn to didactic addresses to the audience, gestures at this all-pervasive fear that viewers might be too stupid to “get it.” Gerwig makes, I’m afraid, the pink-tinged version of the comic book movies this film makes fun of. The surface rules.

The last laugh, however, is really at my expense. Barbie is a masterwork by the standards of most contemporary Hollywood cinema. Its aim, to appeal to both regular, perhaps nostalgic women and half-irony poisoned liberal millennials, is a triumphant success if the demographics in the theater last night or the woman next to me who spent the entire movie pointing out which items she owned or remembered are any indication. Gerwig’s film is fun, well-made, and a welcome change. But it’s nowhere near as complicated or critical as people seem to think. It says much that, despite these flaws, it’s still the best we’ve got. These are messy times indeed.