Barbie

Barbie!!!! Opening day!! This movie is such an experience, first all the promo was so exciting and fun, from the costumes for the press tour, to all the campaigns and collaborations- the AI dream houses in every country, the shoes, makeup, clothes, the viral songs- it just all felt so FUN. What a perfect summer movie.

I unfortunately didn’t have a fun pink outfit but I did wear pink glittery eyeshadow. My boyfriend and I decided to go today, we were deciding between this and Oppenheimer as a matinee while his kids are in summer camp and since Oppenheimer is 3 hours, this won! Sorry Cillian Murphy, another day.

It was playing every 30 minutes at this theatre nearby so we were trying to pick a time and looking at tickets and the theaters were all almost filled up! For every showtime! Which I’m so happy for them about. So we got some off-center tickets and were on our way!

EJ recognized the opening as a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I saw that movie once in high school and don’t remember almost anything about it so I didn’t catch it but it was very funny. It was all these little girls and Helen Mirren doing voice over narration saying since the beginning of time, girls have played with dolls, but they’ve always been BABY dolls. Then Margot Robbie appears, towering, in the original black and white bathing suit with the cat eye sunglasses and all the little girls start smashing their baby dolls into the ground.

Then we cut to a fun music opening showing Barbie waking up and saying hi to everyone and getting dressed and eating breakfast. This situates us fast in a near perfect replica world of Barbie toys!! Her clothes, food, feet, car, etc. it all looks nostalgic to vaguely familiar depending on how much you played with Barbies as a child. There’s no liquid in the cups and the food never gets smaller no matter how many bites she takes. She flies from the ceiling into her car, because as Helen Mirren explains, “You never make Barbies walk all the steps to get somewhere, you just, pick them up and put them where they’re going.”

Everyone is Barbie and we meet them, we also meet all the Kens, especially Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who is desperate for Barbie’s attention. We also meet Allan (Micheal Cera) who’s just there and very funny and I loved him.

We go through a day at the beach, and see all the Barbies as President, and on the Supreme Court, and in space, doing every job in the city, then having sleepovers every night. So fun. At night, Margot Robbie Barbie has a party at her house with a big choreographed dance which involves everyone in the city and they’re all dancing and singing under a big disco ball moon and at one point she asks, “Does anyone else ever think about dying?”

There’s a record scratch and everyone freezes and after a few beats she laughs it off, “I meant, I’m just dying to keep dancing!” and they all resume. But the next morning when she wakes up, everything’s off-her breath smells bad, her shower’s cold, she falls off the roof, and most upsetting, her feet are flat. After taking a spill at the beach when she removes her high heels to play volleyball, all the other Barbies tell her she needs to go see Weird Barbie, the only one who can help her.

Weird Barbie is Kate McKinnon, who became weird by being played with “too hard.” She has the classic tell-tale signs most girls would recognize, her hair is cut, she’s always in the splits, and her face is covered with marker. I loved the expansiveness of the Barbie universe, it wasn’t about being perfect it was about representing everyone and being weird, also some other things we will get into later.

Kate reveals that there is a thin membrane separating Barbie Land and the Real World, that has been breached and the little girl playing with Margot Robbie must be putting too much of her emotions into her, making her feel what she’s feeling. Sadness, fear of death, and a worry about cellulite.

Kate tells Barbie she has to go to the Real World and figure out what’s going on to restore the balance. Barbie doesn’t want to go and when offered the choice between staying and keeping everything the same, or venturing out and learning more about the world (represented by a pink high heel and a tan Birkenstock), she chooses to stay. Like three times. But Kate McKinnon tells her she was just pretending to give her a choice to maintain the illusion of control, but really she has to go.

Barbie gets in a pale pink convertible and begins a journey that spans every mode of transportation: car, rocket, sailboat, camper van, snowmobile, and rollerblades. But once just outside Barbie Land, she finds out that Ken has hidden in the back of the convertible and wants to come with her. She tells him he’ll just slow her down but after some pleading, gives in and agrees he can come.

Once in the Real World (Venice Beach), they are rollerblading in neon spandex and attracting a lot of attention. Barbie senses that her attention has an undertone of violence and Ken senses that his attention feels like admiration. They try to go to a construction site to get some good female energy and are dismayed to find only men. After all the men catcall her, Barbie announces that she can tell their messages have entendre, even double, and she lets them know she doesn’t have genitals. That shows them!

Barbie decides to sit on a bench to focus and try to figure out where the little girl playing with her is. Ken goes off on a walk. On this walk, (5 min or less) he discovers Patriarchy, and decides to bring it back to Barbie Land.

Barbie finds the girl she thinks is playing with her but when she tries to talk to her, Sasha, (the girl, Ariana Greenblatt) is angry at her and doesn’t like Barbies and calls her bad for women and a fascist. After sitting down and crying for the very first time (“She called me a fascist! But I don’t control the flow commerce!”) some men from Mattel come to take her away in unmarked black SUVS.

Ken sees her getting taken away but he thinks she’ll be fine since it’s Mattel, and he goes back to Barbie Land to pedal his newfound discovery. Inside the Mattel headquarters, Barbie is taken to the top floor where there’s a conference table of men in suits, headed by Will Ferrell. They want to put her back in a box and she gets in and the twisty ties have almost closed around her wrists when she jumps out. She asks to meet the CEO since she’s all the way here. “I’d love to meet her.” When Will Ferrell says he’s the CEO, she asks about the CFO (a man), the COO (a man) and all the way down she realizes they’re all men. She runs away and they chase her which is a really fun scene.

She finds her way to a room where Rhea Perlman is sitting drinking tea in what looks to be a cozy apartment in the middle of this sky rise . She introduces herself as Ruth and offers Barbie some tea and they talk for a little. Ruth comforts Barbie and instructs her how to escape. Barbie runs and out front is America Ferrara, who works for Will Ferrell and is Sasha’s mom. She jumps in the car and they decide the answer is for THEM to go to Barbie’s world so they can see how good it is and that they’re wrong about Barbie. (Sasha).

The women make the journey back but once there, Barbie starts to notice things have changed. The President (Issa Rae) is on the beach handing beers to Kens playing volleyball and the Supreme Court are cheering them on. The Mount Rushmore of Barbie Land which was previously all women is now horses. Barbie’s Dreamhouse has become Ken’s MojoDojo Casa House. When she asks what’s going on, Ken tells Barbie he brought patriarchy back to Barbie Land, because he was tired of the Kens being overlooked.

All the other Barbies seem to be brainwashed and don’t care that they’re doctors or Nobel prize winners, all they want to do is take care of and defer to the Kens. Barbie gets depressed and feel defeated, she tells America and Sasha to go back to the Real World and she’ll just wait for one of the leadership Barbies to fix it. They are on their way out (with discontent Allan in tow) when America realizes they need to help her. That playing with Barbie let her be her true self, and being with Barbie has let her daughter see and support that side of her. They turn around!

Meanwhile, the entire boardroom of men led by Will Ferrell have realized what’s happening and they followed the women back to Barbie Land, all on skates, then a tandem bicycle for ten, etc. The Kens have banded together and are going to vote in a new government that establishes patriarchy in Barbie Land.

At Weird Barbie’s house, America Ferrara has a breakthrough and monologues about all the contradictory things expected of women under patriarchy and how exhausting, defeating and impossible it all is. Upon hearing this, a Pulitzer Prize winning Barbie who had been brainwashed wakes up and remembers who she is.

They realize the cure for the Barbies is to hear patriarchy accurately described and that breaks the spell of patriarchy. One by one they get the Barbies away from the Kens to de-program them. This is funny because the way they distract the Kens lampoons common mansplain-y tactics, like saying they’ve never seen the Godfather, or pretending not to know how to use Photoshop, or letting them play guitar. The culmination of this is a guitar circle on the beach where all the newly deprogrammed Barbies each pretend to like other Kens, feeding the jealousy and animosity between them.

The Kens decide to go to war (the day of the vote) and have a musical battle on the beach with tennis rackets and volleyballs (no weapons in Barbie Land). This turns into a Grease-inspired musical and the Kens reach an understanding. This leads them to remember today was the day of the vote but it’s too late.

Ryan Gosling Ken is distraught once he realizes it’s all over and runs crying out of the room. Barbie follows to console him. He shares that being a leader was hard and he didn’t really like it, and once he realized patriarchy wasn’t mostly about horses he didn’t care about it that much. She apologizes saying she took him for granted and he says he appreciates that. He says he doesn’t know who he is without her and she says that’s what he needs to work on, finding himself, and that all the things he thought defined him, might not be who he really is.

A light goes off and he says, “Ken is me!” crying and laughing. He proclaims this to all the other Kens who have their own epiphanies that Ken is them too. By this time the Mattel board is there and America pitches them her idea for Normal Barbie that is a little long-winded and doesn’t make total sense (“She’s a doctor or not a doctor, she just has a nice top and days where she feels mostly good”) and Will Ferrell rejects it as terrible but when his CFO tells him it will make money, he says yes.

Everyone has an ending except for Barbie, and Ruth reappears and reintroduces herself as the inventor of Barbie. She shares that Barbie was never supposed to have an ending, she’s named after her daughter Barbara, and that she, Ruth, has committed tax fraud. Margot and Ruth go on a walk and seem to enter another dimension where Margot says she wants to be human, be the one making the ideas, not the thing being made. They hold hands and Barbie seems to feel all what being a woman and alive is and she sheds a single tear and says simply, “Yes.”

Barbie asks Ruth for permission to become human and Ruth says it’s not something she can give permission for. Then we cut to human Margot Robbie in the car with America and Sasha and their husband/dad (respectively) who has spent the entire movie playing Duo Lingo (relatable). She has a tiny diamond pendant with a “B” and PINK Birkenstocks. She walks into the building and gives her name, “Handler, Barbara” and announces she’s here to see the gynecologist. Then the movie is over! And we see all the original ads for the different Barbies while Barbie World (with Aqua) by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice plays.

Okay, I loved the movie, the music was great, everything was so fun and funny. It seemed like both an indictment of the world we live in, and an embracing of it which feels right and beautiful. I was surprised by the complexity and scope of the ideas tackled, and for the most part how well they were handled. Months ago when there was the Barbie selfie generator and you could upload a picture that would be in a hot pink circle in a background of blue clouds then fill in the sentence “This Barbie is…” with whatever you want, I did one that said, “This Barbie is experiencing dissociative nihilism” and that was quite literally the plot of the movie! Proud of me.

I liked having this absurdist backdrop to explore the issues of patriarchy and sexism. I loved seeing Barbie Land before it was tainted, I think we’re all so steeped in patriarchy it’s hard to name and see. I also just finished The Will to Change by bell hooks which is about patriarchy and how it harms men and how to move past it we as women have to not see men as the enemy, but the enemy as these systems that force men to harm themselves, and in turn, everyone else.

The America Ferrera plotline was the most unclear to me, everything else felt supported, that’s the only one that felt a little thin. She played with the Barbies because she was sad, but then being sad and weird let her daughter see her true self, then at the end she wanted a Barbie that was normal so more women and girls could see themselves in it, I suppose? It lines up on paper but it felt a little flimsy in the movie, but I didn’t care.

Allan was incredible, he’s just there. All Ken’s clothes fit him! I like that they didn’t make him gay, he just was Allan. Every person you’ve ever seen in anything was in here, especially if you saw Sex Education, a lot of them were in here. Clothes were fab obviously, also Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie knocked it out of the park.

Ryan Gosling was so funny, I think being funny in a big movie is the hardest acting job there is, harder than drama by a lot. It’s just hard to be funny! And he nailed it, the mannerisms, how he presented the character, the physical comedy, the facial expressions! He didn’t do it over the top where he’s this huge big character who’s a joke, he played it so grounded where you can tell these things really matter to him but with the tiniest wink like he’s in on the joke. Impressive. And Margot Robbie my god, it’s easy to think she was cast because of how she looks and while that’s clearly part of it I don’t even think it’s most of it because I know it was going to be Amy Schumer for a while and I don’t think she fits that image so I think they were considering other things.

But she plays this with so much heart and manages to feel authentic in a way that I think is hard to pull off. When Barbie is feeling negative feelings for the first time, like sad or anxious, there’s a huge range, sometimes it’s funny-like where she’s describing the emotion and it’s in a foreign way but sometimes she’s just experiencing it and cries a single tear and it’s so moving. I just thought this movie would be fun I didn’t expect to confront the human condition, but that’s what we did.

I left this movie feeling happy and grateful to be alive? In the parking lot walking out a girl came up to EJ and I (dressed in perfect pink and denim with jewels and purple and pink sparkly eyeshadow) and said how good the movie was then said, “I’m autistic Barbie!” and we talked for a while and she said that she also had TMJ and that she ate a pretzel. It really solidified for me that from the marketing to the messaging, the movie is all about using this platform for imagination to envision a funner better world. It kind of reminded me how a lot of abolitionists point out that people who are skeptical often go to the worst parts of ideology and live there: “What would we do with the rapists?” but so much of abolition is about imagining how much better and beautiful things that could be. There’s this poem called Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?” where Junauda Petras imagines a group of fly grannies cruising around in a top down convertible, keeping us all in line.

I just remembered that at the end there was this part where Rhea Perlman is asking Margot Robbie if she wants to be human even though people die and after she says yes a tiny child’s voice in the back said, “Did she say we die?” Which was HILARIOUS and wild at the same time. The range of people in the theatre confirmed this thing I have been saying and feeling too, there were different ages, races, genders, people were just having fun and wearing pink.

Emma Mackey was in it and I thought they were going to do more with the fact that she looks exactly like Margot Robbie but she had brown hair the whole time and no comparisons were made. Just another Barbie.

I noticed that the screenplay was written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, and one of the production companies was NB/GG, which I also assume is them. If you don’t know, she’s the director of the movie (and Little Women, Lady Bird) and he is a director too (The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) and he directed Frances Ha which Greta Gerwig starred in and they also wrote together. They’re married, I thought Marriage Story was based on them but after some light googling I see that it’s based on his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh. So good for them.

Sharon Rooney was in this, the actress from My Mad Fat Diary who I love, and Hari Nef who did this really interesting interview, Ritu Arya, Dua Lipa, Ncuti Gatwa, John Cena, etc. It was so fun seeing all these people in such a fun alternate universe.

It was really fun. 5/5 burnt heart waffles, will masturbate again.