Words by Bailey Alexander
Bound to be everyone’s favourite movie of the summer, Barbie sees Margot Robbie reinvigorate a brand, learn some hard truths, and wear some pretty cool outfits.
MILD SPOILERS AHEAD
Before jumping into Barbie, it would be a missed opportunity not to first give a shoutout to ‘Barbenheimer’, the cultural phenomenon and pairing of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Starting off as a meme before turning into a mammoth movement, the online marriage of these two blockbusters has gripped a generation, and brought people back to the cinema in droves.
There’s some debate over what order Barbie and Oppeneheimer should be watched in. Some argue Barbie first, as watching it after Oppeneheimer can be a taxing feat: watching a movie full of pink, plastic, and positivity after watching a fictional documentation of the most horrendous invention in human history isn’t widely advised.
With that in mind, I watched Barbie first. Why? Because I believed Barbie was going to be an escape from reality, an opportunity to go to Barbieland and forget all about my troubles, something that I knew a movie about J. Robert Oppeneheimer was never going to give me. Well, much to my surprise, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The marketing for Barbie has been nothing less than stupendous: there was the AirBnB’s listing of Barbie’s Dream House (free of charge), Barbican tube station’s rebranding as ‘Barbiecan’, and even the materialisation of a pink TARDIS on the Southbank.
Yet, once you watch the movie, something becomes apparent: these wide-ranging and at times unbelievable modes of advertising were a savvy ploy. Despite the marketing drive, nobody really knew what the movie was about. The trailers shied away from ruining too much about the movie’s plot (as trailers so rarely do these days). What we knew for certain was that Barbie would be a feminist triumph, but what we didn’t know was that the true heart of the film would be found in our own reality.
The film isn’t all dreamhouses and convertibles, with Barbie (Margot Robbie) finding herself on a journey to our reality, having been experiencing a slew of so-called ‘imperfections’ such as cellulite-gain and much dreaded yet very human ‘irrepressible thoughts of death’. As Barbie crosses over to our world to ‘fix’ what’s wrong with her – a newfound humanity – the movie switches its gaze from glitz and glamour to the hard realities that women face everyday.
What ensues is Barbie’s discovery that the ‘Barbie’ brand didn’t do all that much to liberate women as she had believed – perhaps even the opposite – and Ken’s (Ryan Gosling) discovery of the patriarchy, which he brings back to Barbieland, corrupting and altering it from a women-run safe haven into, well, something more reminiscent of our world: misogyny, bad clothes, Jeeps, and horses galore.
The movie’s handling of a woman’s experience is nothing short of spectacular, but who would expect anything less from the maestra Greta Gerwig? Little Women and Lady Bird served as testaments to her innate capacity for creating and analysing complex female characters. With Barbie, Gerwig takes a character with a long history of being considered, for lack of a better word, two-dimensional, and gives her a radical makeover. Barbie has always been considered perfect, and Gerwig endeavours to challenge the audience to second-guess this just as Barbie does herself.
Gerwig’s greatest asset in accomplishing this is the meta, which she utilises to create one of the most meta and memorable blockbusters in recent memory. The movie is fully aware of the triteness that Barbie represents to some. The doll for a long time has served as a standard that women are expected to fulfil: a male-approved vision. The movie doesn’t shy away from this, instead poking fun at it, celebrating a range of women, and following Margot Robbie’s Barbie as she comes to realise that perfection comes in many forms. Thus, Barbie explores what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal world, and does so splendidly with a standout scene starring America Ferrera bound to bring a tear to anyone’s eye.
Naturally, there’s been some pushback by mostly right-wing commentators on the film’s messaging. For instance, Piers Morgan labelled the movie “an assault on not just Ken, but men”, and Ben Shapiro derogatorily called it “one of the most woke movies” he’d ever seen. Unsurprisingly, men like them seem to have missed the point of the film. Why should we let them ruin the fun, though? The truth is uncomfortable, and so any men who find themselves hating Barbie are more than likely in need of a firm reality check.
Barbie is a celebration of life, what it means to be human, and what it means to be a woman in a world run by men. Greta Gerwig manages to breathe life into an age-old brand and redefine what it means to be a ‘Barbie’ in today’s world.
Barbie is in cinemas now.