“The best thing about the Barbie movie? It’s going to annoy all the right people”

barbie film

Credit: Warner Bros

Film


“The best thing about the Barbie movie? It’s going to annoy all the right people”

By Helen O'Hara

2 years ago

4 min read

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is going to piss some people off… and that’s a great thing. 


Good news from the dream house: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie is probably the most fun you’re going to have in a cinema this year. It’s funny, original and deeply weird underneath all the cute hair and pink accessories. Box office predictions and glowing reviews suggest that it’s going to make a huge amount of money and spawn dozens of sequels and lesser imitations. 

But because it’s also a sneakily feminist tale about empowerment and injustice, it has an added bonus: it’s going to infuriate all the worst people on Earth.

Why would people get angry about a doll movie? Well, check out the deliberately heightened portrayal of Barbie Land, where gorgeous women win Nobel prizes and fill the supreme court, a court where lawyers argue intelligently and passionately and are not criticised for being ‘too emotional’.

The Barbies are a diverse bunch, representing different races and sizes: they don’t all look like Margot Robbie, but they’re all beautiful and desirable. There’s a Barbie who uses a wheelchair, a trans Barbie and President Barbie is a Black woman (Issa Rae). We learn later that this way of being is written into the Barbie Land constitution; here, Barbies are naturally assumed to be in charge. How else could it be?

While this is still a fun, fizzy doll movie, it also becomes a story about patriarchy and sexism

Already, you can sense certain far-right hackles rising. In Barbie Land, women don’t fret about how they look; it’s the men – or rather, the Kens – who worry and pose and desperately hope that a Barbie will notice them. It’s not a feminist utopia, because that would be more equal, but a hilarious upending of our own reality. This is a world where pink is a totally normal, serious colour, instead of being treated as somehow frivolous because it’s associated with little girls.

That’s why, when Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken leave Barbie Land to visit our world, they discover things are not as they expected. The Barbies have long believed that the mere existence of President Barbie, Astronaut Barbie and the rest means that feminism has won and sexual equality now rules on Earth. The revelation that things are, well, the way they are is a huge disappointment. That leads to some sharp satire of the inequalities that we all live with and (mostly) put up with every day, especially in the scenes where Barbie meets America Ferrera’s Gloria, a working mother who’s holding on to her sanity by her fingernails.

Barbie movie

Credit: Warner Bros

So while this is still a fun, fizzy doll movie, it also becomes a story about patriarchy and sexism. It shows how men have sometimes co-opted the language of feminism but retained positions of authority. Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, is portrayed in this film with an all-male board that talks about empowering girls and inspiring equality – but also wants to lock up Robbie’s trespassing Barbie. Who, naturally, outwits them all.

The entire premise is a challenge to the sort of reactionary people who hate to see women having a good time, and those who – more than anything – hate seeing women in positions of power. The entire film is an implicit rebuke to those who harp on about men and women’s ‘natural’ place in the world: people can be anything they want in Barbie’s view. 

Sure enough, as soon as the first screenings revealed just how subversive Gerwig’s film was, the US right wing started shouting. The wife of one US congressman called for a boycott of the film because of the representation of LGBTQ+ people and its lack of religion (would a Barbie in church be weird to anyone else?). Fox News accused it of “toxic femininity”. Others have complained about the casting of Hari Nef, a trans woman, as a doctor, and one pundit bafflingly complained that the trailer was “the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen”. 

The film has of course been accused of being “woke”, because including all types of people is inherently suspect. With a few sideswipes at stereotypical male preoccupations and a little light satire of male hobbies, the internet discourse is only going to get more heated in the coming days.

barbie and ken in Barbie movie

Credit: Warner Bros

The encouraging thing is that, so far, none of these complaints seem to be sticking. Early indications for the box office suggest it’s going to be a huge hit, with women planning group outings with friends and even people who weren’t Barbie fans are tempted to see what all the fuss is about (or ogle Ryan Gosling and the other Kens – no judgment).

Unfortunately for the haters, they face one nearly insurmountable obstacle. In order to really dig in to all the things that Barbie gets ‘wrong’, they will have to admit that they’ve seen it. And Barbie is so pink and so girly that it would compromise their fragile masculinity to admit that they watched it. 

Greta Gerwig’s greatest defence to those who want to charge her with obvious feminism is that she folded her message into a Barbie movie – and what self-respecting misogynist is going to admit that they saw that?


Images: Warner Bros

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