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"Barbie" Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun As Hell - The New Yorker
"Barbie" Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun As Hell - The New Yorker
"Barbie" Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun As Hell - The New Yorker
By Richard Brody
July 21, 2023
Gerwig’s movie puts in bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Photograph
courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
t’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s
I name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I.
animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than
realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical
both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially,
fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life,
the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the
ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived
reality, as Wes Anderson recently did in “Asteroid City,” and as Greta Gerwig
has done spectacularly in her new film, “Barbie.” Unlike Anderson, who has
spent his entire career on the far side of the imagination, Gerwig’s previous
features as solo director, “Lady Bird” and “Little Women”—both ardently
crafted, both modestly literal—did little to foreshadow the overwhelming
outburst of inventive energy that makes “Barbie” such a thrilling experience.
Though “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s breakthrough feature, is a fictionalized story of
her own adolescence, her family life, and her home town, “Barbie”—yes, a
movie about a doll made under the aegis of its manufacturer, Mattel—is the far
more personal film. It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic
freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has
brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of
studio filmmaking.
The underlying subject of “Barbie” is how to play with Barbie dolls and why.
Playing with Barbies, after all, is the D.I.Y. version of adaptation, the
enactment in private of the kind of free and wild play that Gerwig (who wrote
the script with her romantic and creative partner, Noah Baumbach) enacts in
the movie. “Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of
making preëxisting subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative
infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property.
Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial
form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the
prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of
them. “Barbie,” in other words, is a film of the politics of culture and, by
extension, of the need for a creative rebellion to reëstrange the familiar for the
sake of social change.
The movie begins with one of the most ingenious parodies I’ve seen in a while,
an origin story of the Barbie doll based on the opening sequence of “2001: A
Space Odyssey.” A group of girls is stranded in a barren primordial landscape.
A voice-over narration (by Helen Mirren) explains that, since the beginning of
time, they had only baby dolls to play with, leaving them nothing to imagine
themselves as except mothers. Then came Barbie (Margot Robbie), who, with
her many varieties and guises, offered the girls (who now smash their baby dolls
to pieces) the chance to imagine themselves as astronauts, doctors, judges, even
President, and thus heralded a future of equality and opportunity. It’s in the
abyss between this promised utopia and the world as we know it, between the
merchandising of professional feminism and the endurance of patriarchal
realities, that the movie is set.
The driving conceit is that Barbie comes to life and enters the real world, but
Gerwig grounds that transformation ingeniously by giving Barbie a prior life of
her own as a doll. The Barbie played by Robbie, who’s called Stereotypical
Barbie, lives in Barbieland along with all the other Barbies who have been put
on the market, whether Astronaut Barbie or Doctor Barbie or President Barbie,
as well as Barbies of a wide range of ethnicities and body types, all named
Barbie, all residing in doll houses, all calling to one another every bright and
sunny morning, “Hi, Barbie!,” and offering identical side-to-side hand-wave
Stereotypical Barbie has a stereotypical suitor, the hunky blond Ken (Ryan
Gosling)—one of many in Barbieland—who courts her with a droll sexual
ignorance to match hers. There’s a strong gay subtext to the movie’s well-
coiffured and accessorized Kens; in one scene, Ken and another Ken (Simu
Liu) get into a dispute and threaten each other to “beach you off.” (A nerdy
friend of the Kens, called Allan, played by Michael Cera, is the only non-
himbo around.) The narrator makes the distinction—one that proves to be of
great narrative significance—that for Barbie every day is a good day, whereas
for Ken a day is good only when Barbie looks at him. Ken takes awkward pains
to get Barbie to look, but she’s content in her Barbie-centric world. In lieu of a
date, she invites him to a girls’-night bash at her house—the best party ever,
but then, they all are—complete with a whirlwind-spectacular dance sequence.
In the middle of the festivities, though, Barbie embarrassingly blurts out her
own sudden premonition of death.
The trait that enables Barbie to fight to take back Barbieland is the very
weirdness that she’d sought to cure. It’s the “hard” play of a human owner—the
use of Barbie as an avatar of a real person’s emotional crises—that gives
Stereotypical Barbie the perspective to see what’s wrong with Barbieland, the
wiles to take action to reclaim it for herself and the other Barbies, and the
open-mindedness to see that she herself is in need of personal change. The
uninhibited expression of Barbie’s human has taught Barbie, above all, the
concept of freedom; and it’s no spoiler to note that the concept, here, meshes
with an existentialist tradition that links such freedom to the inevitability of
death. (In a magnificent meta-touch, Barbie has an encounter with the creator
of Barbie, Ruth Handler, who, in real life, died in 2002; here, she’s played by
Rhea Perlman.)
Far from being a feature-length commercial for Barbie, Gerwig’s movie puts in
bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Instead of
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 5/9
8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker
projecting their own imperfections or thoughts onto the doll, girls have been
socialized to strive for an impossible doll-like perfection in their own lives.
Barbie can be anything in Barbieland—a doctor, a President, an astronaut—but
only because Barbieland is a frictionless Brigadoon. There’s no Fox News in
Barbieland, no political demagogy, no religion, no culture. Any girl who plays
with Barbie and imagines that she can do anything will discover, eventually,
that she’s been the victim of a noxious fantasy. Playing weird with Barbie
means ascribing the tangled terms of one’s own environment to Barbieland,
one’s own conflicts to Barbie. It means turning Barbie human—into a character
whom a child can use to give voice to an inner life, in the second person, when
her first person feels stifled or repressed.
the connection between playing in a child’s doll house and on the big screens of
the world. ♦
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Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He writes about movies in
his blog, The Front Row. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life
of Jean-Luc Godard.”
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