Barbie • 2023
Adventure / Comedy
PG-13 • 1h 54m
I usually tend to really like the movie I am currently working on. And so, a month ago, I was sure this year’s best movie was going to be Killers of the Flower Moon. And, when I get to Oppenheimer I will, most likely, think it deserved Best Picture. So with the knowledge of my tendency to favor the most recent, I am a little reluctant to declare that Barbie is this year’s stand-out movie, but I’m going to say it anyway. Barbie is a fabulous movie and, while I’m sure everyone but me has already seen it, I’d say see it again. It is exhilaratingly entertaining and packed with layers of messaging.
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It generated substantial controversy. A New York Times article was titled “Barbie Movie Gives Left and Right Another Battlefront, in Pink.” (Flegenheimer; Tracy: 7/24/23) and another one was “Barbie Reviews Are In Slickly Subversive or Inescapably Corporate” (Jacobs: 7/19/23). So if a movie gets flack from both sides, what could be wrong with it? The right, apparently, objects to the simplified notions of “patriarchy” and how it demeans the masculine role. The left seems to have remnants of objections to the “stereotypical” version of Barbie as a mechanism of body shaming, but also to the movie’s enshrinement of a toy doll, and how that glorifies consumer capitalism. (I think that it is exactly this political controversy that kept Barbie from more nominations and wins at the Oscars!)
Realistically, I don’t get much of the argument from those on the right, although I suspect that is one of the reasons it didn’t fare so well among general audiences. How many Trumpers felt the film as a direct attack on their egos and, especially, their manhood? I mean if you can’t win at Beach, then what is life for? The criticism of the patriarchy is precisely correct and its effect is perhaps most evident in Gloria’s speech if not in Barbie’s total bewilderment as her world is turned completely upside down when she walks Venice beach. How Ken feels in Barbieland is exactly how a lot of women feel in the real world!
Criticisms from the left have a bit more going for them, but still mostly miss the boat. I had similar complaints about the glorification of corporate culture in one of the Lego movies that made the Oscar list a few years back. But Barbie is radically different because of the satire it makes of the underlying sex role division. The themes in this movie are arrayed in multiple layers with inversions of texture and form that keep the mind as dazzled as the senses. When Barbie’s feet go flat, it is a collapse of so much plasticity that real modern culture seems to demand women. We DO demand that they reshape their feet just so their calves can look more rounded. We effectively ask that women mold themselves in the image that makes them most attractive, regardless of how nonsensical, or artificial, that makes them feel.
There might be an argument to be made that the Barbie doll only amplifies the repression of women because of its ridiculously “perfect” image of a woman’s body that only Margot Robbie attains. I suppose I get that, especially since I have – since about age 13 – lusted after pretty much that image, although for me for a long time back then it was Elle McPherson, not Barbie). But the movie suggests, and apparently with some justification, that the Barbie doll may very well have been a key player and even instigator of the feminist movement. As the scene at the very beginning suggests, dolls before Barbie were baby dolls which only reinforced the idea that a woman’s purpose in the world was procreation, nurturing of babies, and keeping house. But the Barbie doll was a fully developed woman, with breasts. o the imagination of girls could now extend to a much bigger world. They could now play with ideas of being an adult woman and, as the doll evolved, with ideas of being an astronaut, a doctor, a president, and a physicist. I never saw all that happen, but I am told that they had that effect. If a girl can imagine that she is a construction worker, she’s much more likely to become one!
Pamela Paul, in her New York Times essay “Barbie is Bad. There, I Said It” suggests “despite its overstuffed playroom aesthetic and musical glaze, the movie was boring. There were no recognizable human characters… no actual stakes, no plot to follow in any real or pretend world that remotely made sense…only winking ha-has at a single joke improbably stretched into a feature-length movie.” I guess I sort of feel sorry for Ms. Paul. She seems to be so jaded that she can’t see the levity in the feminist parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the beginning of the movie sending up the origins of man with a new version of the origin of women. Or the fluid way the obviously fake dream houses take on the realism of their world the way our McMansions falsely reflect ours. Or the way a song featuring posturing men becomes an absurd battle dance with fake swords, showing the absurdity of “manly” wars. Or even how the importance of riding a horse (think Reagan westerns) is reduced to holding, with two hands, a non-existent stick! The human characters were exaggerated parodies intended only to be recognized for their extreme extension of existing traits. And the plot is, in my take, nothing less than the battle of the sexes and how it has changed, especially in the last few decades. Ms. Paul gets it wrong!
Barbie works on so many levels and with so much parody and intelligence that sometimes people seeking simpler and clearer messages won’t get it. This is a terrific movie that stimulates the mind and the senses. If you haven’t seen it, do so now! If you have, see it again, and maybe a third time. (I have, and it gets even better!) (5*)
