Imagine that you have a small collection of Barbies and you can play with them after school, before your mom calls you to lunch. You are 6, 7, 8 years old, and with the sun from the playground still warming your cheeks, you have some time to be distracted by them before you sit with your family, listen to adult problems you still don’t understand, laugh with your sister, take some scolding from your dad, do your homework, and watch cartoons. Maybe, like me, you play at making houses with cardboard boxes; or like my cousin, to cut their hair and change their looks with little clothes sewn with our childish hands and little shoes with burrs bought in the tianguis; or like my friends from elementary school, to marry them off and make them live happily ever after. Barbie can be whatever you want her to be.
In 2021, director Greta Gerwig took it upon herself to imagine her version of Barbie and tell a story. Fortunately, he didn’t just have to build them homes out of shoeboxes, but instead had a $145 million budget to polish every shade of pink, every hairstyle, every life-size piece of clothing, every member of a cast led by Margot Robbie (also a producer) and Ryan Gosling. For the filmmaker, the task was not as simple as killing time before lunch, but rather helping to breathe new life into the doll of impossible proportions created by Ruth Handler in 1959, one of the most iconic and polarizing pieces of a toy company; an object that many of us grew up treasuring or longing for, but that when we got older we saw as the representation of ideals that suffocated us. At the risk of doing the task for one of the greatest symbols of capitalism, the task seemed to become more complex and contradictory if one takes into account that Gerwig, in addition to having a career as an independent film actress, positioned herself as an openly feminist director and screenwriter, who in films like Frances Ha (2013, lead and co-writer) Lady Bird (2017) and little women (2019) explores the anxieties of growing up as a woman: creative aspirations, the relationship with our mothers, the desire to be the best, the anguish of not being enough. With all those backgrounds, buts and expectations above, Greta Gerwig delivers Barbie (2023) to movie theaters and embraces those contradictions with the ability to make a task that many thought impossible seem simple and fun.
The film plays lightly and tells a story that on the whole seems simple: Stereotypical Barbie (Robbie) wakes up one day to discover that the perfection of her life in Barbieland is undergoing changes; In a world where every morning is just as pink and every night there’s a girl’s sleepover, her toast is starting to burn, the milk in her fridge is rotting, and most alarmingly, her feet aren’t pointy anymore. To solve this, he resorts to the advice of Barbie Rare (Kate McKinnon), who gives him a choice between staying in her normality or going to the human world in search of her owner to fix the damage. There really is no choice, and though Barbie would rather stay in her pink plastic world, she is forced to cross mountains and seas of props to accomplish her feat, restore order, and avoid cellulite at all costs.
Back in California and accompanied by Ken (Gosling), Barbie knows a world that is far from perfect for women and begins to experience insecurity and aggression, while Ken receives a bath of testosterone and power, as well as discovering his fascination for horses and the aesthetics of the cowboy (archetypal figure of virility in the American imagination). The doll’s break comes when she finds her human, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), and instead of the applause and thanks she expected, she discovers that to the teenage Barbie she is an outdated figure, embodying the ideals that crush women. The Mattel businessmen appear on the tape as the men in suits who try to contain and return the protagonist to her box, until Barbie flees from them and returns to her home, where the foundations of a patriarchy have been established led by Ken, who has invaded her home and brainwashed her friends.
Being reductionists, we could summarize the film to the journey of the hero (heroine in this case) and a story of a fish out of water and good guys against bad guys; after all, the film follows classic narrative structures and recurring tropes in popular cinema. But one would have to be very shortsighted not to glimpse that, through apparently simple and even basic elements, Gerwig delivers an immense amount of details, layers, and possible readings. As if it were the little bag in which we kept the changes of clothes for our Barbies, the director takes out hat after hat, boots, shoes, and all those accessories that were sold separately in the form of jokes about patriarchy, criticism of the mandates of femininity, and reflections on our experiences in the world of flesh and blood.
One of the things that as women we learn at an early age is to say things with grace. Avoiding outright anger and catching flies with honey instead is one of the teachings that has been instilled in us in so many ways. Instead of resorting to scolding or solemnity as the ABC of feminism, Greta makes use of a humor that does not lack intelligence because it is presented as crude; on the contrary, the filmmaker drinks from her passage through the cinema movement mumblecore (which, among other things, used agile, ironic and apparently improvised dialogues) and borrows elements from physical comedy (or slapstick) and from musicals to launch scathing, cynical and frontal comments on heteropatriarchy from different angles: there are the characters coded as queer (Allan and Rare Barbie), constantly being displaced; the men in the real world who know they are still in charge, but now hide it better; the Kens who believe that we are dying to hear them sing on their guitar, or who think they can fill any position, even without the necessary preparation. We even see the strategy of giving in a little to the mansplaining to win the important battles (parodying incidentally scenes taken to the glory of masculinity, like those of 300 and other war movies).
The tape tries to shield itself by showing off the Self-Awareness and the self-reference, making fun of itself, and puts its place of enunciation on the table; After all, Gerwig herself is aware of being a white woman with privileges in a binary world, which is why her version of Barbie is too, and she expresses it that way, from the very fact of assuming that her protagonist is “Stereotypical Barbie”, the blonde you think of when someone mentions the famous doll. She does it with the limits and scope that this implies, including fulfilling the assignment of the producer (Mattel) and at the same time being faithful to her essence as an artist, another way of giving in a little to win a bigger battle. Those anxieties are palpable in the film, in which there is a perceived need to embrace everything and leave no one out, failing a hundred times (how could I?) and wandering a bit. Greta Gerwig does not only speak to her usual viewers of her, who perhaps will not find in this film a quantum leap compared to her previous films; Her intention in this work was also to speak to a wider audience, to whom she literally had to explain with dolls and jokes how limiting it is to be a woman and grow up as accessories, how violent it is to go out into the world to experience harassment and hostility. But even so, the director does not miss the opportunity to play the camera as a toy (and the company’s budget) with mentions of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), visual influences from films like Cherbourg umbrellas (Jacques Demy, 1964) and his reworking of one of the most representative (and parodied) sequences of 2001: a space odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), without leaving out such pop and 90s references as the band ‘NSync.
After the game, the director makes room for the heart and calm. The human (and diverse) side in the film is introduced by Gloria (America Ferrara), Sasha’s mother, and the real person responsible for the changes in the world of the doll. While the toy’s mission was to make women in the real world feel like they could be anything they wanted, Gloria’s is to teach Barbie how complex it is to be human and live in constant change.
I have engraved in my memory an experience that I probably share with many other women, the moment in which I saw my best friend from adolescence cry because someone did not love her and the questions around that non-reciprocity: “Am I not pretty?”, “Am I not funny?”, “Am I not interesting?” The scene has been repeated with friends in my adult years, all of them beautiful women in every way. My sensation remains the same, I still wish to be able to lend them my eyes so that they can see them with all the luminosity that I see in them. Just like Gloria in front of a Barbie who cries because she no longer feels beautiful, capable, or intelligent, it kills me that they don’t see how beautiful and intelligent they are. The genius and soul of this film lies in having all the cinematographic machinery available to make us evoke moments that are human and close to the female experience which, of course, is much more than dressing in one color or putting on heels, although it does not prevent us from enjoying it either.
What begins as a journey that paints a universe of false certainties and two-dimensional perfection in bubblegum pink, turns into a white background heading towards an unknown destination. Barbie it is an invitation to take uncertainty by the hand, enjoy the vanilla, the ordinary; no longer the brilliance of Barbieland, but the opacity of what we still don’t understand. No longer demanding that we be the best at everything at all times, the goddesses of the catwalks, the queens of the home, the shrewdest writer, the most talented actress, the pioneering filmmaker, the most feminist director, but allowing ourselves a break similar to the one we feel when we get home, change our shoes and take off our bras. Let’s imagine being what we want, knowing that what we choose knowing that what we choose will be more than enough.
fabiola santiago Journalist and film critic. She is interested in the diversity of looks in movies and series. She speaks and writes about cinema made by women, by indigenous and Latin American filmmakers.