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‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century

By David Fear

It’s tough to sell a decades-old doll and actively make you question why you’d still buy a toy that comes with so much baggage. (Metaphorically speaking, of course — literal baggage sold separately.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you know that it’s an attempt by Mattel to turn their flagship blonde bombshell into a bona fide intellectual property, coming to a multiplex near you courtesy of Warner Bros. And they’re also well aware that the announcement that Greta Gerwig would be co-writing and directing this movie about everyone’s favorite tiny, leggy bearer of impossible beauty standards suddenly transformed it from “dual corporate cash-in” to “dual corporate cash-in with a very high probability of wit, irony, and someone quoting Betty Friedan and/or Rebecca Walker.”

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Except, in the middle of one of their regular super-cool and totally awesome sing-alongs, Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever think about dying?” No one, least of all the shiny, happy person who said it, has any idea where that random bummer came from. The next morning, Barbie’s imaginary shower is cold. Her imaginary milk has curdled. The collective perkiness of her friends and neighbors only seems to highlight her inexplicably bad mood. Her stiletto-ready arches suddenly fall flat. And then, she comes face to face with what can only be described as the Thanos of the Barbie Cinematic Universe: cellulite.

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“Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell

It’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I. animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially, fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life, the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived reality, as Wes Anderson recently did in “ Asteroid City ,” and as Greta Gerwig has done spectacularly in her new film, “Barbie.” Unlike Anderson, who has spent his entire career on the far side of the imagination, Gerwig’s previous features as solo director, “ Lady Bird ” and “ Little Women ”—both ardently crafted, both modestly literal—did little to foreshadow the overwhelming outburst of inventive energy that makes “Barbie” such a thrilling experience. Though “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s breakthrough feature, is a fictionalized story of her own adolescence, her family life, and her home town, “Barbie”—yes, a movie about a doll made under the aegis of its manufacturer, Mattel —is the far more personal film. It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

The underlying subject of “Barbie” is how to play with Barbie dolls and why. Playing with Barbies, after all, is the D.I.Y. version of adaptation, the enactment in private of the kind of free and wild play that Gerwig (who wrote the script with her romantic and creative partner, Noah Baumbach ) enacts in the movie. “Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of making preëxisting subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property. Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of them. “Barbie,” in other words, is a film of the politics of culture and, by extension, of the need for a creative rebellion to reëstrange the familiar for the sake of social change.

The movie begins with one of the most ingenious parodies I’ve seen in a while, an origin story of the Barbie doll based on the opening sequence of “ 2001: A Space Odyssey .” A group of girls is stranded in a barren primordial landscape. A voice-over narration (by Helen Mirren) explains that, since the beginning of time, they had only baby dolls to play with, leaving them nothing to imagine themselves as except mothers. Then came Barbie (Margot Robbie), who, with her many varieties and guises, offered the girls (who now smash their baby dolls to pieces) the chance to imagine themselves as astronauts, doctors, judges, even President, and thus heralded a future of equality and opportunity. It’s in the abyss between this promised utopia and the world as we know it, between the merchandising of professional feminism and the endurance of patriarchal realities, that the movie is set.

“Barbie” contains a potent paradox that is fundamental to its effervescent delights. A single frame of the film packs such profuse and exquisite detail—of costume and settings, gestures and diction—that it’s impossible to enumerate the plethora of inventions and decisions that bring it to life. With its frenetic pace and its grand-scale, wide-ranging inspirations, it plays like a live-action cartoon, and captures the anything-is-possible spirit of classic Looney Tunes better than any other film I’ve seen. Yet its whimsical plot is constructed with a dramatic logic that manages to transform phantasmagorical leaps into persuasive consequences, with the result that the details of the story seem utterly inseparable from, and continuous with, the riotously ornamental visual realms that it sets into motion.

The driving conceit is that Barbie comes to life and enters the real world, but Gerwig grounds that transformation ingeniously by giving Barbie a prior life of her own as a doll. The Barbie played by Robbie, who’s called Stereotypical Barbie, lives in Barbieland along with all the other Barbies who have been put on the market, whether Astronaut Barbie or Doctor Barbie or President Barbie, as well as Barbies of a wide range of ethnicities and body types, all named Barbie, all residing in doll houses, all calling to one another every bright and sunny morning, “Hi, Barbie!,” and offering identical side-to-side hand-wave greetings. Stereotypical Barbie drinks imaginary milk poured from a carton to a cup, eats a plastic waffle that pops from a toaster as a perfectly shaped dollop of butter lands atop it, and—because, as the narrator explains, Barbies can be carried and placed anywhere—glides from her balcony through the air to behind the wheel of her pink fifties-style Corvette convertible.

Stereotypical Barbie has a stereotypical suitor, the hunky blond Ken (Ryan Gosling)—one of many in Barbieland—who courts her with a droll sexual ignorance to match hers. There’s a strong gay subtext to the movie’s well-coiffured and accessorized Kens; in one scene, Ken and another Ken (Simu Liu) get into a dispute and threaten each other to “beach you off.” (A nerdy friend of the Kens, called Allan, played by Michael Cera, is the only non-himbo around.) The narrator makes the distinction—one that proves to be of great narrative significance—that for Barbie every day is a good day, whereas for Ken a day is good only when Barbie looks at him. Ken takes awkward pains to get Barbie to look, but she’s content in her Barbie-centric world. In lieu of a date, she invites him to a girls’-night bash at her house—the best party ever, but then, they all are—complete with a whirlwind-spectacular dance sequence. In the middle of the festivities, though, Barbie embarrassingly blurts out her own sudden premonition of death.

Something troubling is disturbing the pristine perfection of Barbie’s permalife in Barbieland, and she consults the closest thing to a troubled outcast in her midst, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), to find out what’s going on. Weird Barbie has a punk haircut, a malformed body, and something like face tattoos—the result, it is said, of a human who played with her “too hard.” To get to the source of her disturbance, Barbie will have to make passage to the human world and find her own owner, whose play has perhaps left an emotional mark just as Weird Barbie’s has left a physical one. Travelling between Barbieland and the human world involves transit via, among other Mattel-certified vehicles, Barbie’s convertible, a space rocket, a tandem bicycle, and a Volkswagen camper van. Ken stows away on Barbie’s journey, and the duo eventually lands on the beach in—where else?—Los Angeles, another land of artifices, where Barbie quickly has her illusions burst.

In L.A., Barbie encounters such human-world phenomena as catcalling, old age, anxiety, and the social dynamics of real-life girls, most notably a young high-school intellectual named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who calls Barbie a “bimbo,” a menace to feminism, even a “Fascist.” Barbie finds her way into Mattel headquarters, where the C.E.O. (Will Ferrell) wants to trap and twist-tie her in a display box. Instead, Barbie escapes, but, while she’s on the run, Ken—who’s read up in the school library about patriarchy—heads to Barbieland and exports the notion there. When Barbie returns home, she finds it transformed into a manosphere, full of Kens slaking grudges against Barbies and Barbies content with subservience to Kens, and she has to plot to restore it to its ostensible original form as a feminist paradise. Spoiler alert: the Ken-centric patriarchy that Barbie finds at home is both appalling and hilarious, with lots of horses (“man extenders,” Ken calls them) and ardent guitar playing “at” Barbie, especially of the Matchbox Twenty song “Push,” which the Kens have adopted as a male anthem.

The trait that enables Barbie to fight to take back Barbieland is the very weirdness that she’d sought to cure. It’s the “hard” play of a human owner—the use of Barbie as an avatar of a real person’s emotional crises—that gives Stereotypical Barbie the perspective to see what’s wrong with Barbieland, the wiles to take action to reclaim it for herself and the other Barbies, and the open-mindedness to see that she herself is in need of personal change. The uninhibited expression of Barbie’s human has taught Barbie, above all, the concept of freedom; and it’s no spoiler to note that the concept, here, meshes with an existentialist tradition that links such freedom to the inevitability of death. (In a magnificent meta-touch, Barbie has an encounter with the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, who, in real life, died in 2002; here, she’s played by Rhea Perlman.)

Far from being a feature-length commercial for Barbie, Gerwig’s movie puts in bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Instead of projecting their own imperfections or thoughts onto the doll, girls have been socialized to strive for an impossible doll-like perfection in their own lives. Barbie can be anything in Barbieland—a doctor, a President, an astronaut—but only because Barbieland is a frictionless Brigadoon. There’s no Fox News in Barbieland, no political demagogy, no religion, no culture. Any girl who plays with Barbie and imagines that she can do anything will discover, eventually, that she’s been the victim of a noxious fantasy. Playing weird with Barbie means ascribing the tangled terms of one’s own environment to Barbieland, one’s own conflicts to Barbie. It means turning Barbie human—into a character whom a child can use to give voice to an inner life, in the second person, when her first person feels stifled or repressed.

“Ordinary”: pay attention to the arrival, in “Barbie,” of that word, which reverberates like a tuning fork through the entire story, conveying longing for the day when a woman’s life doesn’t demand heroic struggle against societal limitations and contradictory demands. (The movie features a fervent monologue on the subject, built of familiar talking points that are energized by the fast and furious indignation of the speaker, Sasha’s mother, a Mattel employee played by America Ferrera.) The idea inflects Gerwig’s aesthetic, too, in a way that’s made clear, again, in the contrast between her filmmaking and that of Wes Anderson, the current cinema’s preëminent stylist. Anderson’s films borrow copiously from pop culture without making films of pop culture; his rigorous visual compositions set the action at a contemplative distance that keeps one eye on history and the other on the future. Gerwig, by contrast, is out to conquer the moment, and her visual compositions reflect this immediacy. Her images (with cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto) offer, in effect, a mighty sense of style without a corresponding sense of form: they teem and overflow, because they’re meant not to be limited to the screen but to burst out and fill the theatre and take their place in the world at large. She doesn’t borrow pop culture ironically; she embraces it passionately and directly, in order to transform it, and thereby to transform viewers’ relationship to it and to render that relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic. Her art of reinterpreting society’s looming, shiny cultural objects, in the interest of progress, dramatizes the connection between playing in a child’s doll house and on the big screens of the world. ♦