I had a wonderful outing to see Barbie with my sisters yesterday, on the big screen, sitting in an amazing recliner chair. After a few decades of always falling asleep in the planetarium ("they pump something in there, I swear"), I found that I even managed to stay awake the whole time. Either it was the older ages of my children (and the concomitant increase in sleep) or perhaps the extreme volume of the movie (get off my lawn).
My first impression of the movie was that I loved it. I usually give top rating to any entertainment that makes me laugh, makes me cry, and doesn't make me afraid to go to sleep at night. Barbie was a winner on all three counts. It also did a great job with the magic realism of the doll world and what it might be like for characters to adapt when changing from one world to the other. I love that in a movie, and it reminded me of Enchanted and even the best parts of Crocodile Dundee. The music and dancing were amazing, and the cast was outstanding, including my celebrity crushes Simu Liu and Kate McKinnon. I was able to refrain from judging Ryan Gosling for looking and acting like a plastic doll, because he was literally supposed to be a plastic doll.
When I was in college, I really enjoyed seeing True Lies...and then I read a feminist review of it and I couldn't ever enjoy the movie again. If this sounds like you, it's time to stop reading my post! Also...spoilers ahead!
Unfortunately, the ending of Barbie was ineffective and kind of depressing. I actually didn't think too much about the ending, and didn't really understand it when I saw it. I saw Barbie (now "Barbara") checking in at a front desk, and I found it jarring that she said "gynecology appointment" instead of "job interview" which I had expected to be her first stop in the real world. After all, she was depressed in part because she had no specific goal in Barbieland. But it took watching Ryan George's "pitch meeting" and his explanation that she finally got a real vagina, to illustrate to me what a Little Mermaid ending this really was. Barbie apparently decided that it was worth being in the patriarchy to have a real vagina...to do what exactly? Have a baby? Have PVI?
(Side note about Ryan George: I love his pitch meetings! I always refer to him as "those guys" because for a long time I would see my kids watching him and think it was two actors, whom I referred to, once they explained it to me, as "Ryan George and George Ryan." Now it's a family joke.)
I understand that the ending of the movie had to show the continuation of our real patriarchy, and had to leave Barbieland more or less as it was. But it seems clear to me that this ending would be for Barbie to conclude: our job as dolls is to keep Barbieland a place where girls can be (play) when it is too tiring or depressing to be always fighting the patriarchy in the real world. Not: I want to be a real girl so I can have a vagina, regardless of all the crap I will deal with, and by the way, Barbieland is also going to not be women in charge all the time because that's not fair.
Another flaw in presentation was Weird Barbie (WB). The concept was fairly well-executed about why she would look and act the way she does. But it would have been so much more satisfying to have WB be a trusted source on the outside world because of her outsider status and maybe what she was able to observe in her process of becoming WB, instead of having her be a mysterious magical doll because she's ugly and therefore a witch, like the tired trope.
The patriarchy infection was also glossed over way too much. I liked when Sasha alludes to Barblieland being susceptible to patriarchy like a disease to which they had no immunity, but that needed more elucidation. Why would it be infectious? I think an improvement would have been to treat the patriarchy as an enchantment, something that needed magic to remove. It was a fatal flaw of this movie that logic convinced the dolls to disbelieve something that non-logic had convinced them of in the first place. Or, if that's how doll logic works, it needed to be explained (if only by a Helen Mirren voice-over the way she covered a few other leaps of magic realism).
And of course the movie was glurgingly heteronormative, seemingly for no reason. The Kens could easily have had a romance, perhaps introduced by that very homoerotic, campy, anthem and dance. I didn't even see evidence of gay couples in the movie's real world. And no, the inclusion of Hari Nef (who is trans) as one of the Barbies is not sufficient to make the movie queer-positive. It could have been interesting if the movie ever questioned what defines gender in the Barbie world, since of course they are explicit about all having only molded plastic genitals.
Finally, one thing that Barbie was not, is "too anti-patriarchal". I don't even understand that criticism, which even my beloved Ryan George and George Ryan make fun of in their video ("did you just literally hit me in the head with that message?"). Apparently some men think that the movie was too feminist? How does that even happen, that feminism always seems like "too much" to patriarchal people and their willing media? Everything that America Ferrera said in her manifestos was true, and then some. The guitar scene and the Godfather scene were underdone if anything. Saying that Barbie is too anti-patriarchal is like saying that Amistad is too anti-racist. Like...that's the whole point of the story.
I'm very glad I saw the movie, and glad that I did the whole experience of wearing pink and going with my sisters in the theater. But sadly, we're still just as deeply in the fight against the CPO.
