Barbie (Warner Bros., Mattel Films, Heyday Films, LuckyChap Entertainment, NB/GG Pictures, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles wanted us to do something special on the last day of his vacation (Monday, September 18) before he returns to work today, and we ended up going to the AMC 20 movie theatres in Mission Valley to see the film Barbie. I must say when I first heard that Warner Bros. and the usual plethora of production companies were doing a movie based on the iconic fashion doll, my initial reaction was you’d have to hold a gun to my head and threaten to kill me and/or Charles to get me to see it. Then word started to dribble out that Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig from a script she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach (a director himself), was actually good, a first-rate political satire lampooning male chauvinism and arousing the ire of social critics on the American Right like Ben Shapiro (who called it “angry feminist claptrap that alienates men from women”) and Jack Posobiec (who said it was a “man-hating Woke propaganda fest”). It also got banned in Viet Nam, not for its feminist politics or satire but because the line illustrating the journey “Stereotypical Barbie” (Margot Robbie) and her main-squeeze Ken (Ryan Gosling) – there are multiple characters named both Barbie and Ken but those are the leads – had nine dashes, and the Viet Namese government censors decided the filmmakers were endorsing the controversial “nine-dash line” drawn on maps by the Chinese government to illustrate their claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea and much of the island territory within it, including areas also claimed by Viet Nam and the Philippines. (The Philippine government allowed the movie to be shown, but had the line blurred.)

Charles decided he wanted us to see Barbie, and he wanted us to see it in a theatre instead of at home on DVD, though the showing we went to (at 4:50 p.m.) was virtually empty and thus we didn’t get much of the sense of collective joy at what’s, among other things, a very funny movie. Barbie opens in the magical republic of “Barbieland,” in which all the leadership roles in both government and the private sector are held by women, all (or almost all) named Barbie, including a Black woman Barbie President (Issa Rae) and an all-Barbie Supreme Court. There’s also a Dr. Barbie (real-life Transwoman Hari Def), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), Judge Barbie (Ana Cruz Kayne), Journalist Barbie (Ritu Arya), Diplomat Barbie (Nicola Coughlan) and various Mermaid Barbies (all played by the current pop singer Dua Lipa). Physicist Barbie has just won the Nobel Prize. There’s also a Midge (Emerald Fennell), a short-lived alternate model created by Mattel to give Barbie a best-bud girlfriend. Unfortunately, Stereotypical Barbie loses the ability to walk in high heels and falls over, and also starts developing cellulite. She seeks out Weird Barbie (a marvelous performance by Kate McKinnon), who apparently came into existence when a Barbie owner marked up her version of the doll with oil-based markers. Weird Barbie tells Stereotypical Barbie that the only way she can regain her perfect body and posture is to travel to the Real World (or at least Los Angeles, California) and find the marked-up Barbie that generated her current difficulties. Ken (at least the Ken played by Ryan Gosling in a decidedly hunky incarnation – did he “bulk up” for this role the way Chris Hemsworth did to play Thor?) stows away with Barbie in her pink Chevrolet Corvette convertible, and the two end up in L.A.

Barbie meets Gloria (America Ferrera), a disaffected Mattel employee who spends her time drawing Barbies with mental issues, and her “tween” daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who can’t stand Barbie and put away her copies of the doll at age four. The Mattel Toy Company, whose CEO is played by Will Ferrell and which astounds Barbie because all the top executives are white men, sends out a goon squad in two black SUV’s to capture the renegade Barbie and Ken and put Barbie back in her box, where she will be imprisoned. Barbie meets an old Jewish woman who turns out to be the ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), who created Barbie in 1959 and named her after her daughter Barbara. Ruth lives in a secret room inside the Mattel headquarters done up like a 1950’s kitchen and dispenses welcome old-crone advice to Barbie. While all this is going on and Barbie is singing the praises of her feminist paradise to Gloria and Sasha, who let her know that in their world men still run virtually everything, Ken goes to a high-school library, discovers a batch of books about patriarchy, decides he likes the idea of men running everything and determines to subjugate the women of Barbieland and turn it into Kendom. Patriarchy runs rampant through Barbieland, turning Barbie’s Dream House into a male-dominated hellhole in which the formerly independent and self-actualizing Barbies compete with each other for the dubious honor of fetching the menfolk beer. President Barbie and Physicist Barbie forget their previous knowledge and become just more slaves to the now-dominant men. Barbie (the one played by Margot Robbie) compares the invasion of patriarchy to the Native Americans’ encounter with smallpox – both smallpox and patriarchy are viruses to which the victims’ immune systems had never been exposed to before and therefore had no resistance – and she devises a plan to deprogram each now-submissive Barbie one by one. This has to work in two days, because the Kens have scheduled a referendum on changing the Barbieland constitution to enshrine male dominance. The Barbies get the Kens to fight against each other over jealousy, and so the Kens (including a quite hunky Asian one played by Simu Liu) miss the referendum, the Barbies outvote them and peace, order and feminism return to Barbieland.

Barbie is a quite remarkable movie, a throwback to the heady days of the 1970’s when we on the political and social Left naïvely thought we could trick the capitalists into undermining their own control by bankrolling subversive cultural statements in the guise of “popular entertainment.” Aside from its overall feminist message, it’s also a fascinating story in its frank acknowledgment of capitalism and its fundamental amorality: the willingness of capitalists to do anything to make money, no matter what the social or moral cost. Barbie is also an interesting exercise in metafictional reality; the Gerwig-Baumbach script acknowledges that Barbie is a fictional creation and the various realities – Barbieland, the “Real World” of Gloria and Sasha, the Mattel executives with their own corporate agendas – jostle against each other and sometimes clash in ways that reminded Charles (and me, too) of Elan Mastai’s novel All Our Wrong Todays (2017), in which the world we actually live in turns out to be a “butterfly effect” corruption of a far better, nicer and more humane one (though Mastai also throws in a third alternate universe that’s even nastier than the one we know, sort of like Conan, the Barbarian). It also reminded Charles of a film I’ve never seen: Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), in which (according to the film’s imdb.com page) “an angel tires of his purely ethereal life of merely overseeing the human activity of Berlin's residents, and longs for the tangible joys of physical existence when he falls in love with a mortal.” (Charles said it’s available for rental on Amazon Prime, but of course I ordered a DVD of it instead so we can watch it together on our big-screen TV, which is too old to “stream” programs from Prime.) Barbie ends up as good a movie as everyone (at least everyone not on the American Right) said it was, two hours of sheer joy, and even its prologue – in which narrator Helen Mirren says that before Barbie all dolls were babies, and an enormous Barbie strides onto the scene in a parody of the “Dawn of Man” sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which uses not only Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra but two of Györgi Ligeti’s pieces from the 2001 soundtrack, “Requiem” and “Atmosphères”) that ends with little girls smashing their baby dolls and the furniture and accessories that went with them à la the ape-men smashing bones in Kubrick’s film – sets the tone of pointed, satirical lunacy from the get-go.