It’s Barbie’s World!
Promotional image from Barbie movie
A few weeks ago, a friend mailed me an article she clipped from Architectural Digest (of all places) talking about the Barbie movie. “I’m sure you’re dying to see this!” the attached note said. Honestly, not really. I had heard about the movie of course. I had seen the preview when it dropped and broke the internet. But I assumed it was just going to be really lame. After all, most movies are these days. I can count on one hand the number of movies I’ve seen in a theater since 2019. Most of the time, I wait until they’re streaming on one of the multitude of services I pay for (and it’s usually not a long wait.) My general reaction is “I am SO glad I did not pay $20 to watch this in a theater.”
Why was my friend so sure I would want to see this movie? Well, confession time: I am a huge Barbie collector. I must have over 100 of them. I’d count, but they’re basically all over my house. Let’s just say my guest room closet is full of pink boxes. That’s right. Like the collector dude in Toy Story 2, I have spent hundreds (thousands) of dollars over the years for dolls that I never even took out of the box. If you buy them on Ebay, the slang is NRFB. Ironically, I wasn’t a big Barbie fan as a child. All my Barbie’s were hand me downs from a neighbor who out grew them. And my Barbies didn’t look like the new ones I saw in the toy store, so I was convinced mine were fakes and thus had a disdain for them. What I didn’t know at 6 years old is that mine weren’t fake, they were VINTAGE. Barbie has changed her looks over the years. Mine were the 60’s bubble cut with the side eye look. They might be worth money today if I still had them – and if my dog hadn’t chewed on them. In high school, I worked at Toys R Us. I loved being assigned the Barbie aisle. These Barbies were blonde and smiling and had such cool clothes. In college while working for an upscale toy store, the owner told me that PEOPLE ACTUALLY COLLECTED THESE THINGS! “You mean, they’re worth money?” I was astonished. And hooked. For Christmas, he gifted me the very first 1988 Holiday Barbie (I sold it a few years later for $800.) Since then, I collected about a decades worth of those. I have an Elvis Barbie (that I bought at Graceland), a Star Wars Barbie (with Ken dressed as Captain Kirk) and Lord of the Rings Barbie. I have Barbies wearing clothes designed by Nicole Miller, Donna Karan and Bob Mackie. I have dolls sold exclusively at Toys R Us, Macy’s, Bloomingdales and Spiegel. I have African, Brazilian, Chines, Parisian and Irish Barbies (and probably other countries buried somewhere in my closet.) And as penance I purchased reproductions of those old Barbies I failed to respect as a child. The new ones are either mint in box or lovingly displayed and undamaged. I love my dolls, but I still wasn’t really interested in the movie.
But the hype finally got to me. The New York Times did a whole interactive piece on the history of Barbie’s Dream House. The Washington Post has written more about the Barbie movie that the DeSantis campaign. It is literally everywhere. The trailers looked amazing. And of course Mattel came out with a line of dolls based on the movie characters. But what finally pushed me over the edge was the announcement that AMC would be selling a popcorn bucket shaped like Barbie’s corvette, complete with Margot Robbie Perfect Day Barbie. I nearly lost my mind. If you’re a “collector,” you know the overpowering feeling that I MUST AQUIRE THIS. People on social media were flipping out. So, I purchased a ticket to see the movie at my local AMC theater on Thursday. (In fact, I was so determined to get my hands on this popcorn bucket I went to the theater first thing that morning only to be told they weren’t selling it yet.)
So, did I like it? Here’s my review: IT. WAS. AWESOME.
Sets were stunning. Actors were great.
Adults will love it BUT DO NOT TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO THIS MOVIE!
There’s no nudity or profanity (except one really bad word Issa Rae says that is bleeped out by the Mattle logo!) but there’s a lot of sexual reference that will go way over their heads. Throughout the movie the adults would often laugh out loud. The kids were probably just confused. The basic plot is that all the Barbies live in the perfect Barbie World where everything is pink and women run the world. They are president, Supreme Court, Nobel Prize winners, doctors and astronauts. They come in all races and sizes. And they’re ALL Barbie. Nobody really pays attention to Ken or knows where he lives. Then Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) starts having thoughts of death and her feet go flat. She visits Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who explains that the dolls in Barbie World are played with by girls in the real world and their behavior affects the dolls (which explains why WB had her hair hacked off and permanent marker on her face.) So SB travels to the real world to talk to her girl before she breaks out in cellulite. Ken stows away on the trip, and in the real world he discovers patriarchy and brings it back to Barbie World – WHICH TOTALLY RUINS EVERYTHING! Then all the Barbies have to band together to take back their Malibu Dream Homes, with the help of the ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman).
That’s the whole movie.
It’s very Meta.
America Ferrera goes on a long feminist rant. Apparently, the message Mattel wants us to take away is that “We love girls and women and want Barbie to be a symbol of feminine empowerment, not an unobtainable standard.” There is a joke about Zack Snyder. The cameo of John Cena as Mermaid Ken is worth the price of admission. My favorite joke is when the now flat-footed Barbie declares “If my feet were always like this, I would NEVER wear high heels!” I feel you, sister.
It’s a little heavy on the feminist message. Ben Shapiro posted a 45-minute rant against the movie bitching about multiple uses of the word “patriachy” (so there’s another good reason to see it!) The ending is a contrived let down. Not that any of this matters.
It’s a fun movie and an enjoyable 2 hours of entertainment in an air-conditioned theater. That gets a big thumbs up from me. Take your girlfiends and go see this movie. Just maybe leave your kids and your husband at home. Especially if he’s a fan of Ben Shapiro.
I would like to take this time to apologize to my childhood Barbies. It made me sad to think of them living over there in Barbie World with all their hands and feet mutilated and their hair messed up. At least I didn’t draw on any of them or chop their hair off. I promise to take good care of your replacements. Party on.
Below is actual photo of my prized popcorn bucket.
Frankly, I watched this review, looked at the images, and thought: NOPE NOPE. 1) it’s just too plastic looking 2) Don’t care about Barbie AT ALL, 3) Well, this review. YMMV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J7aJtGphVs&ab_channel=TheCriticalDrinkerReport
I’m sure I know someone who could come up with a good Barbie movie. It could be a fish out of water story, where Barbie comes to the real world, and learns that “people have different body types” (picture her poking fatties, and getting a job in a gym b/c she doesn’t know anything, “How did you get that perfect body?” “I dunno? I was made this way!”).
I think it could be decent, as a “not trying too hard” comedy (Like weird science reused unused Simpsons material). After all, we already know Barbie thinks “Math is hard.”
Or you do Barbie as a makeover artist. As in, she’s a master of disguise, and whatever outfit she wears gives her magical powers to “Do Normal Things.” (In her normal outfit, she’s a ditz).Report
Can’t say, as I said, the subject matter really doesn’t hold any interest with me. But at 145M to make the movie, I’ll be interested in it’s take.Report
I mean, if you had a time machine and were making a Barbie movie 20 years ago, yes.
Barbies have actually had different bodies types since 2016…and before that, Mattel had differently named dolls with different body types in the ‘Barbie universe’ before realizing that kids wanted ones named Barbie, so they’re all just Barbie now. (Which is almost exactly how it introduced non-white Barbies, in the 80s.)
And…they’re like that in the movie.Report
If I take off my glasses, isn’t that the same plot as The Lego Movie?Report
Hmmm…. no, not at all actually. Like, not even in the same neighborhood.Report
Barbie is being played with by a real girl and she learns that the stuff she’s going through is the stuff the girls are going through. Will Farrell shows up.Report
Well lego dude was being played with by a real kid and Will Farrell did show up. I don’t think the middle bit really works but zoomed out that far you may have a point.Report
That’s the problem with going meta. “It’s a toy. But it’s being played with! And the trauma the toys are going through represent differences in play styles! AND WILL FERRELL!!!!!”Report
The Barbie movie can be described as a lot of things, but meta isn’t really one of them. I know that’s how Merrie described it, but…it really isn’t.
The Barbie movie is not aware it’s a movie (Well, the narrator is, but narrators always are aware a story is being told.) The Barbie movie is aware the Barbies are dolls, but that’s because it has built a universe where dolls exist in an alternate dimension and are influenced by dolls here and they know they are dolls as opposed to humans and that’s just how the universe _is_, it’s not ‘meta’.
Meta is when a movie steps back and pokes its own structure or the structure of parts of itself with a wink, like when the Lego movie steps back and shows us the kid playing with legos or even what things really look like outside of his imagination. Barbie does not do that…Barbie does not even _have_ anyone playing with Barbie dolls in it, at least not in the present of the movie, and even if they were they would not be directing the human-sized trans-dimensional entities also confusing called dolls.Report
No. The Lego movie is about a bunch of toys who never figure out they are toys. To them, their world is entirely real, even if they do sometimes glimpse the eldritch entities that control them from beyond reality.
The Barbie movie is about a bunch of sentient creatures that live sorta in another dimension (Do not expect hard science from the Barbie movie.) that call themselves ‘dolls’ but are not the actual physical dolls that kids are playing with, but the kid’s dolls and how they are played with just sometime influence them (Hence the ‘irrepressible thoughts of death’ and the actual plot.). And the Barbies are completely aware of the situation and can even travel to the real world. So there’s not really a lot of similarities in the constructed universes.
And the higher-level real-world conflict in the Lego movie is ‘Things have instructions and sometimes you have fun following instructions and sometimes you have fun not following them.’, which is…now that I’ve said it, a kinda silly point, but whatever.
The higher-level real-world conflict in the Barbie movie is…I’m not actually sure there is one, but if there is, it is ‘Barbies think that they have actually solved sexism in the real world by providing a good example for little girls, and our heroine Barbie utterly falls apart when she realized that this is not true and men still mostly run things, and in fact there are feminists who have issues with Barbies promoting bad body images’, which…which does not actually get solved.
In fact, the real world problem is so unsolvable that Barbie _literally gives up_ on solving it and just goes home, and the rest of movie is her trying to fix Barbieland, which her Ken has broken. I mean, she’s right, she has zero skill at solving this problem, she’s literally worse at solving it than a random woman picked off the sheet would be because she doesn’t even have a good conceptual framework of what is going on, but it’s a sorta funny conclusion by her.
Also, it’s interesting that _there are no little kids_ in the movie. Unlike the Lego movie. Literally none of the people who are supposed to be playing with Barbies are in the movie.Report
I read a story about how the kids these days (like actual kids) are seeing movies where tropes are being subverted but they never experienced the trope in the first place.
They’re seeing the evil stepmother subverted without ever having seen a story where there is an evil stepmother.
So Barbie features people to whom Barbie meant things but no one to whom Barbie means things?Report
I appreciate the review. What I appreciate even more is that you confirmed you got the popcorn bucket shaped like Barbie’s corvette, complete with Margot Robbie Perfect Day Barbie because as soon as I got to the part of the article where you mentioned arriving too early and not getting it I thought to myself “but she got it eventually, right?!”Report
It was truly the highlight of my week!Report
Several previews of the movie suggested that Ken is the butt of various jokes, and hinted that we’d eventually come to feel sorry for him for being left out of all the cool things Barbie does with her Barbie friends. I thought he’d turn into an antagonist because of that and Barbie would Learn A Valuable Lesson About Inclusiveness because Ken deserves to be treated well too even though Girls Do All The Things, thus all the fragile male egos exhibiting butthurt. But, this may be a more clever move by the writers, and if Ken winds up being the one who Learns A Valuable Lesson after his Import-the-Patriarchy move, that explains the degree of Fragile Male Ego Butthurt that’s been on display.Report
The way I basically see it is that Barbie is Poptimism, the Movie and there is something about the marketing strategy which feels like it is supposed to intentionally needle anyone who prefers to see Oppenheimer * or is suspicious about how subversive a movie based on IP from an international conglomerate.
As this blog’s resident “eat your cultural vegetables, they are important” person, one of the things I have grown to resent about Poptimism is its “heads I win, tails you lose” argumentation strategy (this is not unique to Poptimism). There is nothing wrong with Barbie marketing itself with parties, stickers, pub crawls, etc. I do not think it is great when it comes with an implied dosage that people only pretend to like movies about serious or “serious” topics. I think Poptimism has valid points to make about notions of authenticity and how we code things as authentic when they are white and male and not when they are female and/or by non-white people. ** That being said, I think it also overplays the point and it can devolve into an anti-Intellectualism of “people only pretend to like (insert difficult art X) to look smart” mode and that is not good.
And as Lee notes below, this is a movie about a toy and Mattel probably had a huge amount of control over the entire script. This makes it very hard for me to think of it as a subversive work of anti-Capitalist and anti-corporate revolution.
*Greta Gerwig and Margo Robbie posed on social media with their tickets to see Oppenheimer and are not part of this marketing ploy to my knowledge.
**Bro country is a good example of something that gets marked as authentic when it probably really is not. See a certain singer from Macon, Georgia (population 200K) seeing an ode to lynching (“Try this in a small town.”) Bro country is filled with suburban kids posing as small town good boys. Indie rock is filled with private school kids trying to seem less privileged than they really are too (The Strokes, Interpol, Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are all private school kids).Report
Nearly all arguments are “heads I win, tails you lose” because nobody really changes their mind.Report
It was truly the highlight of my week!Report
At the end of the movie, Ken learns that he doesn’t need Barbie to have meaning. Which I guess is good! And he goes off wearing that says “I am Kenough!”Report
Is it really a more clever move or is it saying that that some groups or people get the right to eternal support and inclusion while others have to be brave and loyal and good and true but if they do everything they are supposed to should expect nothing more than the screaming violence of the universe against them when they need a little help or want to be included? Everybody wants to have the power to impose absolute demands with one hand while dishing out complete denials with the other.Report
He not only learns his lesson, he is extremely sympathetic, because he and the other Kens have a really good point: They are viewed as mere accessories to very successful women, they barely have lives or any defined traits of their own (Ryan Gosling’s Ken is ‘Beach Ken’…he’s not even Lifeguard Ken or Surfer Ken, literally just a guy on a beach.) and at the end, after the Kens lose, they end up begging President Barbie to just let Kens have _one_ Supreme Court Justice (Which they don’t get)…well, even the most clueless man is going to figure out the filmmaker’s metaphor at that point.
Of course, it’s possible that fragile men were already butthurt from the over-the-top satire of patriarchy as reinterpreted by a himbo spending a few hours learning about it and introducing it to other himbos that the film had just finished, which is mainly Kens asking Barbies to get them a beer and sitting around admiring horses. (It helps that, canonically, sex doesn’t exist there, so the male takeover is a lot less sleezy than it could have been.)Report
There was a debate over the weekend on the other blog on how subversive the Barbie movie could be because of its connections to Mattel. The Pro-Barbie faction argued that Barbie is very subversive because of its meta nature and that it makes both good feminist and anti-capitalist points. Others, and I’m inclined towards this faction, argued that Mattel was not going to let anything too bad into the Barbie movie and they ultimately controlled most of the strings if not all of them. Plus the sheer amount of merchandise and other indicators show that most people are going to take it at face value.
My brother pointed out that releasing Oppenheimer and Barbie at the same time is basically rockism vs. poptimism debate in movie form respectively. You have the very male Oppenheimer which is a serious movie and carries a definite vibe. Barbie is definitely feminine and also more modern because it is meta and campy and using corporate property to make societal critiques.Report
Feminism itself isn’t subversive because it represents 50% of the human population.
Which is to say, that women occupy slots on both sides of every single divide in our world.
For every working class woman, there is a wealthy woman, for every white woman, there is a black woman, for every cishet woman there is a queer woman.Report
Considering the amount of male dominance in many different societies through out known history, feminism is still subversive.Report
I don’t need a movie to have a good message, particularly a comedy, but even in a drama I don’t need to agree with the writer’s point of view. If they did something other than exactly what’s expected of them, then good for them. But comedy can only rarely survive a sense of an important message.Report
Good news!
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I’ll wait for the Ben Shapiro freakout on Netflix.Report