Barbie Isn't A Film About Feminism...At Least, Not Exactly.

Spoiler Warning: this review makes specific reference to some dialogue and narrative points in Barbie. And so, if you are looking to retain an unspoiled view, it may be best not read this review.

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Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was, along with a certain other film I need not mention, one of the most highly anticipated films of this year, and as such, it had a lot to live up to. Luckily, Barbie lives up to the hype as a uniquely fresh and revitalizing take on the “toy come to life” trope we’ve seen before (shoutout to Life Size). I’m also very happy to see Barbie’s deserved financial success in its opening weekend, with global audiences flocking to cinemas to watch. It’s a hopeful reminder that cinema isn’t dead, and a message to Hollywood that unique and fresh ideas can succeed when given the proper dedication and investment in making them well-crafted and thoughtful movies. Let’s just steer clear of universalizing this franchise, please!

For those who may have missed the myriad of Barbie advertising, the story follows protagonist, “stereotypical” Barbie, who resides in the wonderfully colourful and highly stylized world of Barbieland, in which expressions of femininity and masculinity are heightened to match an extreme version of matriarchal feminism that has been deployed in this world by real-world toy makers, Mattel. When Barbie begins to falter from her “perfection,” she embarks on a journey to the human world with tag-along Ken to resolve her problems and restore Barbieland to its place as a visionary utopia for women. But when Barbie and Ken get a taste of the real world and its rampant patriarchy, restoring that vision isn’t as easy as it may have seemed.

At almost all moments, this film is an absolute joy to watch. If you aren’t dazzled by the gorgeously colourised world of Barbieland, then you will surely be taken by the hilariously camp yet hard hitting critiques of stereotypical masculinity in Barbie’s recurring song and dance numbers, and the absolutely hilarious commitment to over-the-top, commercialized portrayals from Barbie’s excellent cast - the three main cast members, Margot Robbie (“stereotypical” Barbie), Ryan Gosling (Ken) and America Ferrera (Gloria) deserve high praise as they were all fantastic, putting in a lot of work to make the world feel alive and real amongst the plasticity and fantasticality of Barbieland.

The film also wastes no time getting right into it, propelling Barbie into her adventure quickly and following a steady pace that never feels sluggish or bloated. The cinematography is also entirely beautiful, with that word encapsulating so much of the film’s varied sequences, whether it be the mother’s memories, the outlandish musical scenes, or the heart-warming real footage shown which grounds the film’s message. Barbie set out to be bodacious and bold, and it certainly achieves that with flying colours (and there’s a lot of colours!).

Barbie should be celebrated for really bringing to the fore the stark apparentness of our patriarchal systems. For anyone joining modern society for the first time, such as Barbie and Ken, it’s no surprise they’d be exposed to images and experiences of men in power, men making decisions, and men with authority. Indeed, Mattel, the company proposing to love women, has a C-suite made up entirely of men. Barbie juxtaposes the imagined Barbieland of female decision makers against the real world of male decision makers with such contrast that it makes the viewer really reflect on their own experiences. This applies especially to men, who too often (though not always) are oblivious to the extent to which patriarchal values have defined us for generations, and culminate in a world that is seemingly uninhabitable for women – the difference with the real world and Barbieland, of course, is that women cannot escape it, they must simply endure it. I particularly enjoyed an exchange early on when Barbie and Ken first visit the real world, where Barbie immediately becomes self-conscious and Ken revels in his new glorification and male gaze. Ken loves it saying that he loves being watched with “no undertones of violence,” and Barbie simply responds, “mine definitely has undertones of violence”. The dichotomy of how men and women view this world is so eloquently shown here, and speaks so plainly to the constant worries, anxieties and fears that women must bear which men take for granted, or don’t even register.

I have much appreciation for the well-written and poignant dialogue throughout Barbie. But for all its merits in addressing the inequalities of modern life through dialogue, especially of the patriarchal, consumerist and individualized systems of today, it disappointingly lacks any real challenge to these power structures in its narrative. The Kens are reduced to the same plight faced by women in the real world, showing no signs of equitability or feminist growth in Barbieland. Consumerism is derided throughout the dialogue as having set women’s rights back fifty years, yet is left almost empowered by the events of the film, with an agreement that Mattel creates a new line of “ordinary” Barbie (with profitability cementing this decision making, I might add). And women’s struggles, which are shoved in audience’s faces as being unfair, unjust and inequitable (a sentiment I would very much agree with), are resolved with little more than a “get on with it” attitude. Further, queer and genderfluid perspectives are somehow lost amongst this whole exploration. These inconsistencies make it hard to really feel like Greta Gerwig and Barbie are making any real ground in these regards. It unfortunately provides a slight inauthenticity to the whole project, which I found very hard to accept given Barbie’s brilliance in other aspects of its filmmaking.

This brings me to the crux of the whole review. Which is that, on the surface, Barbie is about feminism and our gendered conventions of femininity and masculinity. When, in actuality, Barbie asks a somewhat deeper, and ironically more existential question (an existentiality that is evident form the word “go” when Barbie asks, “do you guys ever think about dying?”). What Barbie asks is, what does it mean to be human? Barbie responds beautifully to this by telling us that we should always choose to embrace emotion, and the feelings of being human. It is our lived experiences that define who we are, and what our purpose and meaning truly is. Meaning is not derived from some existential force, not from the humdrum normalcy of the collective challenges we face in contemporary life, and certainly not from the things we buy. Meaning is derived from our deep and true sense of self-identity and our spectrum of human emotional experiences. Emotion and the act of feeling is innately a human experience, and Barbie tells us that we should embrace it with open arms. Indeed, this is something I have felt more and more as I get older. With the prospect of feeling pain, feeling sadness, and feeling loss, or rather feeling joy, feeling pride, and feeling love, the act of feeling is something that should be cherished and loved for it makes us human, no matter how hard it may be to feel. It’s what differentiates us from being merely objects, from being consumerist junk, or from being a toy – from being Barbie.

Barbie does well to distract the audience with light messages of corporate greed, rampant consumerism, and the challenges of gendered social conventions. But what Barbie is really trying to say is this: always choose to embrace being human, because being human, and experiencing our messiness, our normality, our misgivings, our faults and importantly, our emotions, is the most beautiful thing we can do.