The Front Row

“Barbie” Is Brilliant,
Beautiful, and Fun as Hell

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-
brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell

Greta Gerwig’s giddily stylized vision of a doll coming to life makes a serious case for
the art of adapting even the most sanitized I.P.

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
It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished
the genre’s 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.

“Barbie” contains a potent paradox that is fundamental to its

effervescent delights. A single frame of the film packs such
profuse and exquisite detail—of costume and settings, gestures
and diction—that it’s impossible to enumerate the plethora of
inventions and decisions that bring it to life. With its frenetic pace
and its grand-scale, wide-ranging inspirations, it plays like a live-
action cartoon, and captures the anything-is-possible spirit of
classic Looney Tunes better than any other film I’ve seen. Yet its
whimsical plot is constructed with a dramatic logic that manages
to transform phantasmagorical leaps into persuasive
consequences, with the result that the details of the story seem
utterly inseparable from, and continuous with, the riotously
ornamental visual realms that it sets into motion.

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 greetings. Stereotypical
Barbie drinks imaginary milk poured from a carton to a cup, eats
a plastic waffle that pops from a toaster as a perfectly shaped
dollop of butter lands atop it, and—because, as the narrator
explains, Barbies can be carried and placed anywhere—glides
from her balcony through the air to behind the wheel of her pink
fifties-style Corvette convertible.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Foreign Uncle: Secret Love Revealed

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.

Something troubling is disturbing the pristine perfection of

Barbie’s permalife in Barbieland, and she consults the closest
thing to a troubled outcast in her midst, Weird Barbie (Kate
McKinnon), to find out what’s going on. Weird Barbie has a punk
haircut, a malformed body, and something like face tattoos—the
result, it is said, of a human who played with her “too hard.” To
get to the source of her disturbance, Barbie will have to make
passage to the human world and find her own owner, whose play
has perhaps left an emotional mark just as Weird Barbie’s has left
a physical one. Travelling between Barbieland and the human
world involves transit via, among other Mattel-certified vehicles,
Barbie’s convertible, a space rocket, a tandem bicycle, and a
Volkswagen camper van. Ken stows away on Barbie’s journey,
and the duo eventually lands on the beach in—where else?—Los
Angeles, another land of artifices, where Barbie quickly has her
illusions burst.

In L.A., Barbie encounters such human-world phenomena as

catcalling, old age, anxiety, and the social dynamics of real-life
girls, most notably a young high-school intellectual named Sasha
(Ariana Greenblatt), who calls Barbie a “bimbo,” a menace to
feminism, even a “Fascist.” Barbie finds her way into Mattel
headquarters, where the C.E.O. (Will Ferrell) wants to trap and
twist-tie her in a display box. Instead, Barbie escapes, but, while
she’s on the run, Ken—who’s read up in the school library about
patriarchy—heads to Barbieland and exports the notion there.
When Barbie returns home, she finds it transformed into a
manosphere, full of Kens slaking grudges against Barbies and
Barbies content with subservience to Kens, and she has to plot to
restore it to its ostensible original form as a feminist paradise.
Spoiler alert: the Ken-centric patriarchy that Barbie finds at home
is both appalling and hilarious, with lots of horses (“man
extenders,” Ken calls them) and ardent guitar playing “at” Barbie,
especially of the Matchbox Twenty song “Push,” which the Kens
have adopted as a male anthem.

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 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.

“Ordinary”: pay attention to the arrival, in “Barbie,” of that word,

which reverberates like a tuning fork through the entire story,
conveying longing for the day when a woman’s life doesn’t
demand heroic struggle against societal limitations and
contradictory demands. (The movie features a fervent monologue
on the subject, built of familiar talking points that are energized
by the fast and furious indignation of the speaker, Sasha’s mother,
a Mattel employee played by America Ferrera.) The idea inflects
Gerwig’s aesthetic, too, in a way that’s made clear, again, in the
contrast between her filmmaking and that of Wes Anderson, the
current cinema’s preëminent stylist. Anderson’s films borrow
copiously from pop culture without making films of pop culture;
his rigorous visual compositions set the action at a contemplative
distance that keeps one eye on history and the other on the future.
Gerwig, by contrast, is out to conquer the moment, and her visual
compositions reflect this immediacy. Her images (with
cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto) offer, in effect, a mighty
sense of style without a corresponding sense of form: they teem
and overflow, because they’re meant not to be limited to the
screen but to burst out and fill the theatre and take their place in
the world at large. She doesn’t borrow pop culture ironically; she
embraces it passionately and directly, in order to transform it, and
thereby to transform viewers’ relationship to it and to render that
relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic. Her art of
reinterpreting society’s looming, shiny cultural objects, in the
interest of progress, dramatizes the connection between playing in
a child’s doll house and on the big screens of the world. ♦

Follow up: video

Barbie’ makes history with $1 billion at

the box office
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/06/business/barbie-box-office-history/index.html

Vocabulary:

 emulate
 Arch of your feet
 Birkenstocks
 Quintessential
 Pursue sth
 Deride sb

Discussion:

1) When did the first Barbie come out ?

2) Why did women stand in their tiptoes in the 1950s ?

3) Why did Barbie keep wearing high heels ?

4) When did Barbie’s feet change ?

5) What are birkenstocks linked to ?

Lucre’s class

August 16th
RUNWAY

Usted a Todos 12:15

the rear-view mirror

admonish: warn

Usted a Todos 12:25

sparkling water

spark; there's a spark in your eyes (brillo)

spark (verb): sth sparks a fire (provoke)

iniciar, provocar; encendar

an issue can spark debate (trigger)

a security breach: failure

breach of contract

there's a glitch in that computers/ devices

Usted 12:33

screen (verb): evaluate in detail

Teachers will be carefully screened for this position at school.