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Review by Branda Gorgies
July 31, 2023 (San Diego’s East County) – Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, has just been released on July 21. The Barbie movie has been long-awaited for this summer, with many coupling it with the film, Oppenheimer, which came out the same day but had a wildly different energy, as you can tell by the title if you know your US history. Barbie broke the record for the biggest box office opening weekend for a female director, making $155 million in North America and $377 million globally. Barbenheimer, the combination of Barbie and Oppenheimer, made $235 million in their opening weekend, making it one of the most successful opening weekends in box office history.
Barbie stars Margot Robbie, who plays stereotypical Barbie, and Ryan Gosling, who plays beach Ken. In Barbieland, all the Barbie dolls live their perfect lives in a world dominated by women. The president is a Black Barbie, the houses are all owned by Barbies, the Nobel prize winners are all Barbies, the entire supreme court is female and the Kens are just Ken. In this world, the Barbies live under the idea that they’ve cured all the problems women face in the real world. This isn’t true, and stereotypical Barbie realizes that when she has to go to the real world to save the girl playing with her doll, whose depressing thoughts of death are affecting Barbie. Due to these thoughts and the connection between Barbie and the girl playing with her doll, Barbie becomes imperfect. She has bad morning breath, expired orange juice, burnt waffles, a cold shower, flat feet and the worst of all: cellulite.
Because of these malfunctions, Barbie has to meet weird Barbie for help. Weird Barbie tells her to go to the real world and find the girl who’s playing with her. The Barbies have this sending-off ceremony, and while Barbie thinks she’s going alone, Ken sneaks into her car. They head off to the real world together to fix all this.
Barbie realizes that the way women are treated in the real world is far different from Barbieland, and Ken realizes it too. Ken learns about patriarchy and decides it’s the perfect system to bring to Barbieland, partly because he thinks it’s about horses. While Ken discovers patriarchy, Barbie finds the tween girl who owns her doll, Sasha. But it’s not the tween girl playing with the doll; it’s her mother, Gloria. Mattel is notified of Barbie and Ken being in the real world, so they chase them down, but Ken is already on his way back to Barbieland to instill patriarchy and Gloria helps Barbie escape Mattel. Sadly, when Barbie gets Gloria and Sasha to Barbieland, she discovers that it’s now the “Kendom.” All the Barbies are brainwashed and the Kens have taken over. The story goes on from here.
The use of color is an important aspect of the film. In Barbieland, everything is pink and bright. This is meant to signify two main things. One is the fact that Barbieland is a place run by imagination, more specifically, the imagination of young children, so it would only make sense for everything to be so brightly colored. The pink comes from the fact that Barbieland is ruled by the Barbies. Everything there is owned by Barbie, not the Kens, and since pink is the poster color of Barbie, everything there is pink. There’s also a contrast between the bright and colorful Barbieland, and the bleak, dull real world. Even in the real world, Barbie and Ken still dress up in their colorful outfits, and that sets up more contrast.
While Barbie does deal with some serious topics like patriarchy, morality, depression and such, it’s a pretty light-hearted film with some humor. The film has plenty of jokes to get a laugh out of you, such as when Ken asks Barbie if he can stay over the night because they’re girlfriend and boyfriend without having any idea what that means, or when weird Barbie wonders what kind of “nude blob” Ken is packing under his jeans(this is a good time to mention that the film is PG 13, so not the most kid-friendly). The ending does get a bit more sentimental, but throughout the film, don’t expect the same exact mood as some of Gerwig’s other films, and definitely don’t expect the same mood as Oppenheimer.
Barbie isn’t an exact replica of Gerwig’s other films, but there are similarities. The film has an overall theme of exploring girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. Most obvious is the montages used in the film. When Barbie is in the real world thinking about how to find the owner of her doll, she sits down to clear her mind. A montage of memories of Sasha’s life plays, and the same thing happens when Barbie finds out it’s actually Gloria playing with her, but the memories switch to Gloria’s point of view. Another montage is the one at the end where it’s a montage of girls and women going through life.
Not only are these topics explored visually, but through the characters as well. Gloria is a mother and the movie reminds us that mothers also share memories of their girlhood and experience life as women. This can be commonly forgotten because motherhood seems almost separate from girlhood and womanhood when all it does is simply build upon the two. We also see Sasha, who’s lost the imagination and spark of childhood. She’s a stereotypical tween, moody and all, but that just adds another aspect of girlhood into the mix. Growing up, some girls do have a part of their youth where they go through the same thing as Sasha does. Not only with moodiness but also with the disconnect from her mother. She loves her mother, but she doesn’t want to be a little girl anymore. She abandons the interests that she and her mother bonded over, like Barbie dolls and art. And Gloria does love her daughter, but she has this feeling that she’s not good enough and she’s just this basic, boring mom.
Then there’s Barbie. Her relationship with womanhood in the film is more complex because she doesn’t exist in the same world as us, but she’s exposed to it and there’s this huge whiplash because it’s not like anything she’s ever experienced before. She doesn’t like it. She has an entire breakdown when the Kens take over Barbieland and creates depressed Barbie, with anxiety, panic attacks and OCD sold separately. This is when Gloria gives her speech about being a woman in a patriarchal society and the double standards of it all. Barbie does eventually find her unique connection with being a woman, but you’ll have to watch the film to see how that turns out.
Now let’s get to the topic of the Kens. In Barbieland, the Kens are oppressed. This is supposed to be a reversal of what the world is like now. There is the argument that the way the Kens were treated in Barbieland wasn’t as bad as the way women are treated in the real world, but that’s another topic. The film switched the roles to highlight the absurdity of one gender ruling over the other. The Kens in Barbieland are simply extensions to the Barbies and this isn’t a good thing because the Kens are their own people and that’s realized later in the film. Just like how women are their own people and not extensions of men. Part of the reason the Kens apply patriarchy to Barbieland is that they saw it as a way to claim their identities and importance as humans(or dolls?), but they eventually realize that the patriarchy wasn’t good for them either. At the end of the film, they finally realize they can be their own people not connected to their Barbies, and that they’re “Kenough.” They realize they don’t need supremacy to do this, they just need to evaluate themselves and get support from their friends, both Kens and Barbies.
In Barbieland, there is a diverse array of women all partaking in very important roles. As said before, the president is a Black woman and all the Nobel Prize winners are women; women are lawyers, journalists, supreme court justices, astronauts, doctors and anything they can set out to be. There are women of color, plus-sized women, disabled women and even dear pregnant, discontinued Mitch. Even among the Kens, there are various versions, and there’s also Allan, who’s just kind of there and one of a kind. But the variety of Barbies in Barbieland and all the positions they hold is supposed to be a reflection of the real world and how any woman, regardless of background, can set out to do anything she dreams of. Barbie is representative of all these women and all these women are Barbie.
On the topic of Allan, he can be representative of many things, but surprisingly, a lot of transgender men and non-binary people have found a connection to him. This is because, in Barbieland, Allan doesn’t fit into the binary. Barbieland is very black and white. The Kens are muscular and manly, even when under the rule of all the Barbies. The Barbies are all feminine and pink and perfect. Allan doesn’t fit into either category. While he does get along with the Kens, this changes when the patriarchy is applied to Barbieland. This is because he wasn’t seen as “man enough” to be part of the supremacy the Kens indulged in. He ends up playing a more subservient role, like the Barbies. But he is very manly. I mean, he fights off an entire construction crew of Kens, but it doesn’t seem like it because he doesn’t partake in the patriarchy and supremacy complex. Now how does this connect back to transmasculine people? Simply put, many transmasculine people feel rejected by both sides of the binary, just like Allan, and they also don’t support the system of the patriarchy, especially if they’ve been affected by it, as Allan has. Either way, a lot of trans men and non-binary people have found themselves in Allan’s character, even if that wasn’t the intention of him.
I personally loved Barbie. I got my nails done for it, planned out an outfit like everyone else and went to the Pink Rose Cafe. I would recommend giving that local shop a visit too, as it’s completely covered in pink and pink roses with good coffee and food items. But I think the movie does a great job of accomplishing what it set out to do: translate the strange system that is gender supremacy into terms that everyone should be able to understand. Part of it, as I mentioned before, is the role reversal, because as you see how the Kens are being treated, you think to yourself “that’s weird, they shouldn’t be treated like that, they’re their own people too.” Then you see the parallel between that and real life with how women are treated. Overall, the film did a great job displaying that all while not being overly serious or boring to watch. I would fully recommend getting dolled up and heading down to a theater to watch this.
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