What Barbie Isn't

Gareth Higgins on BARBIE

First things first: Barbie is just marvelous - a comedy as serious as Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, an adventure story as psychologically resonant as The Wizard of Oz, a totally unrealistic comedy with something totally realistic to say about the real world as delightful as Some Like it Hot (and with equally tremendous performances), and a satire about prejudice that reminded me of Blazing Saddles. Director and co-writer Greta Gerwig has made a hilarious and wise movie about stereotypes and discrimination, in which collective liberation is preferred to one group defeating another. The fact that it has become a cultural phenomenon is to be welcomed.

We join our protagonist (deserving of the label - Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” not only drives the story, but advocates the lessons she learns along the way; and Robbie’s performance is an alchemy of warmth and edge in exactly the right proportions) in Barbieland, where everything is perfect: no rain, everybody smiling, heels never touching the ground. Barbieland, an island that owes a lot to the Metropolis in the vastly underrated Babe: Pig in the City, is one of those idylls that would suffocate most of us. But we’re not Barbie (or Ken) - and that’s part of the point. Psychologically healthy human beings would wither in a place like Barbieland: if there’s nothing to learn or work at or receive, then there’s nothing to experience. Gerwig-Baumbach’s Barbieland is less smothering than your average cinematic utopia, though, due to the presence of a panoply of multiracial Barbies and Kens of diverse shape, ability, and enthusiasms, as well as Michael Cera’s adorably lost best friend Alan and Kate McKinnon’s bedraggled Yoda-like Weird Barbie.

You can’t really taste joy unless you know its lack, but it takes a few trips round the spiral of experience to learn that; so when Barbie starts having thoughts of death, it’s a necessary rupture to the living hell she didn’t previously know she was in. Barbie’s questions drive her from Eden, joined by Ken (Ryan Gosling, as committed as ever), seeking answers from God, in the form of the CEO of the toy company that manufactures her. But it turns out God wants to put her back in the box - she’s about to have zip cuffs placed on her wrists before she fully cottons that Mattel may not, in fact, know what’s best for her. It also turns out that this God isn’t really God - he just thinks he runs things; the true Creator has a much less self-interested comprehension of what we’re here for and of the responsibility of parents and mentors toward those who depend on them.

Like I said, this is a serious film. 

(And Rhea Perlman does something deliciously enormous with a small role in two scenes; she made me cry and laugh at the same time.)

But here’s what Barbie isn’t: Barbie does not hate men, Barbie does not advocate women overthrowing men, Barbie does not blame men for all the problems in the world. To read the movie that way is to misunderstand one of its chief provocations - which is that to take life seriously enough we have to figure out what not to take too seriously, or seriously at all. Barbie is a serious film that happens to be a delight to watch; but if you’re taking Barbie too seriously, you’re probably taking yourself too seriously.

Barbie takes some of the serious consequences of gender essentialism and inequitable gendered power dynamics and makes them visible by pointing out the comedy in extremes. No one really believes that life should or can be like the pink plastic Eden in which Barbie and her sisters live alongside Ken and his bros. There are complex and nuanced ways of expressing gender, just as there are many people committed to becoming more conscious of how they manifest power in the world, so that they can learn to share it better (or give it up entirely). But as many great satires are about afflicting those who abuse power, and the genius (and joy, and effectiveness) of Barbie is that it doesn’t condemn or dehumanize anybody. 

It has room for everyone - it even allows some characters to acknowledge their errors and be welcomed into whatever’s next. The vision of the new Barbieland is simple: everyone’s welcome, everyone can figure out as individuals and in community who they really are and how to be; and the only rule of access is to do no harm. Collective liberation, as they say; but they don’t need to say it explicitly here, because the writing is subtle when it needs to be, and when it’s not (such as when there’s a long speech about the challenges of being a woman in patriarchy), it’s because a character is verbalizing their current lived experience, not merely telegraphing to the audience what the writers think we need to know. It’s so satisfying to see a film in which ridiculous things happen for reasons that actually make sense (such as why Stereotypical Barbie starts questioning her existence in the first place); and one in which conflict that is so often framed as a zero-sum game is resolved not by flipping the tables or re-inscribing us versus them, but by holding out the possibility that when inequitable myths are holistically challenged, everybody wins. 

Barbie’s boyfriend recognizes that there’s something rotten in Kenmark too, but not only his behavior, but the soul-burdens placed on men (or that we place on ourselves) when we believe the myth that only we can lead. I’d love to see a whole movie about guys figuring out a psychologically integrated vision of masculinity in a post-Gerwig-Barbie world.

Maybe Barbie could have been harsher or bleaker; and maybe Will Ferrell isn’t the right person to cast as Mattel’s CEO - I think it needed an actor with at least a touch of menace about him. This may seem like an obvious point, but Ferrell tends to be cast as a comedian in comedies, which I think underserves his talent. Ferrell is actually far better as a gently comedic anchor in a much less funny film - another underrated gem, Stranger than Fiction.

But this movie is more than enough for now - to see theaters full with people of all ages and genders going to see Barbie, a film that points to the necessity of calling forth embodied womanhood, embodied personhood, and the full humanity of the gender spectrum at the same time as they’re also full with people of all ages going to see Oppenheimer, a film about the necessity of grappling with the myth of redemptive violence is a sign of the ways in which artists really do sometimes help cultures grow up.

Unlike the stories often told in elected politics, headline news and fundamentalist religion or activism alike, Barbie doesn’t hate anyone. It actually offers an intelligent way to think about life, identifying that “we make up things like patriarchy and Barbie to help us” deal with its complexities and pain. If the things we make up - the stories we tell - don’t help us enough, we can always imagine better ones than patriarchy, or the story Barbie used to live. Barbie doesn’t promise panacea (I chuckled at the narrator’s assertion that in leaving Barbieland for Los Angeles, Barbie is trading one perfectly plastic place for another imperfectly plastic one), but instead takes its own anthem to heart. Resting in the nurturing vision of Indigo Girls poets Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, Barbie the character and Barbie the movie lead us not to paradise, but closer to fine.

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Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS

I’ve been thinking about how one man’s desire to cling to power can abuse millions of people. Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s Kakhoka Dam has rendered some of the most fertile soil in Europe useless, polluting it with sewage, industrial pollutants and anthrax from animal graves. As Ukraine was a major supplier of grain to Africa and the Middle East, this will mean starvation for many. And the Red Cross, which had spent years locating and clearing landmines in the area, has announced that the flooding means that they no longer know where the deadly mines are. “All we know is that they are somewhere downstream.” (From The Guardian, 10 June 2023). 

I’ve been thinking about how in ancient times warfare it was every bit as brutal as it is now. In the 7th century BC Scythian warriors fought with arrows dipped in poison. Ingredients such as snake venom and dung meant that those wounded faced gangrene and death. An early instance of chemical warfare emerged in 189 BC, when the defenders of Ambracia, a city in northwestern Greece (present-day Arta), realizing that burning chicken feathers releases sulfur dioxide, invented a machine to fill tunnels in their city with smoke that would kill the Roman soldiers attempting to invade.

I happened to be in New Zealand on Anzac Day in 2014, the 99th anniversary of the disastrous landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli, a peninsula on the Aegean Sea. In 2014, on another peninsula not far from Gallipoli, a new war was raging as the Russian army invaded Crimea. In the city of Dunedin I encountered an elderly man in full uniform, complete with medals, smoking a cigarette outside a veterans club. When I wished him well, he sighed and said. “It looks like we haven’t learned a thing in a hundred years.” Make that several thousand.