The Rule of "Barbie"

What works and, mostly, what doesn't in the feminist blockbuster

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a film driven entirely by its ideas, a strategy that almost never works, even when those ideas are good. Most political films—and make no mistake, Barbie is 100% a political film—have a strong underlying idea or two, but the best ones explore those ideas through character or plot, and Barbie doesn’t really have either of those. 

It opens in Barbie Land, a matriarchy where its characters, almost all of whom are either Barbies or Kens, live contentedly under cartoon skies. Their lives are cake. They party, they hang out at the beach, and they flirt. There is a Barbie President, a Barbie Supreme Court, and Barbie mail carriers, but they don’t seem to do anything. There are no real problems. No one struggles to pay their bills. No one gets married or divorced. Of course, there is no sex. These characters are essentially children, and despite the efforts of Gerwig and her co-writer Noah Baumbach to imbue them with existential conflict, they are severely limited by their nature. All their personalities are unformed, so every interaction seems surface-level. There is conflict in Barbie but no drama. There are giggles, but none of the laughs that come from our shared understanding of human weakness.

That’s the “character” problem. The plot is just a mess.  First, Barbie’s idyllic existence is shattered by a terrifying, creeping humanity that begins with thoughts of her own mortality and manifests in the sudden flattening of her feet. She is mortified. Her friends tell her to visit Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a doll who has been played with too hard and is now, for some reason, believed to have all the answers. Weird Barbie gives her instructions to reach the Real World, where Barbie must find the woman who plays with her, and then…I don’t know, something will happen. 

This is a problem. The film never explains how Weird Barbie knows this stuff, or why the other Barbies assume she will. They never explain why all the other Barbies have shunned Weird Barbie (aren’t they supposed to be nice and accepting of each other’s differences?). Weird Barbie never bothers to explain how Barbie will find her owner, or what to do when she finds her. We could give the film credit for inventing its own logic, but the end result is more of an outline than a story. The screenwriters seem to be relying on the fact that Barbie Land can have its own rules, but it never really outlines what those rules are.

That’s not to say, however, that Barbie feels aimless. It’s driven by an earnest motivation to expose the hypocrisies society imposes upon its women. Once in the real world, the film finds some laughs in Barbie’s first-time reactions to the patriarchy. Her stumbling attempt to describe feeling “self-conscious” for the first time in her life made me giggle, and her confusion at being called a fascist (“I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce!”) was fairly clever. Still, I’m not sure the film even needed to vocalize the ways that Barbie is out of touch with the modern world. Simply seeing her cruise down Venice Beach in her chartreuse rollerblades and neon bodysuit, while grimy men laugh and leer, might have been enough. Sometimes images can do the job.

Yes, the look of Barbie is delightfully inventive, but Gerwig and Baumbach seem to think the dialogue is the thing here, and they’re wrong. Far too often, the characters express feminist thought in place of character development or even plot, and those thoughts aren’t exactly revelatory. If you’ve read feminist commentary at any point between 1962 and today, they will feel so familiar that they barely even register. Sure, it’s always useful to reinforce them—it’s not like the patriarchy has disappeared in that time—and it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the film’s insights will be life-changing for younger audience members, but for me, it feels feels a bit like stumbling upon a piece of film criticism by a 24-year-old who just discovered the French New Wave and is excited to explain it to the reader. I’m happy for them, but they should have checked to see if someone (or a thousand someones) had already done this work.

Most of what occurs in the “real world” of Barbie could easily have been set in 1962, with very few changes. An early real-world scene finds a construction crew ogling Barbie and tossing tired, ancient pick-up lines at her. They could have at least updated the insults. Meanwhile, Gloria (America Ferrera), the working mother whose sadness inadvertently lures Barbie to reality, is an executive assistant, a job that many women certainly still do but which signifies a postwar mentality. I expected a reveal that Gloria was a single mother; instead, her husband shows up periodically to show what an unhelpful idiot he is. If you’re going to build your film on political ideas, they need to be original, or at least put them in a contemporary context, and there are few sentiments in Barbie that couldn’t have been written verbatim in Ms. Magazine fifty years ago.

Then there’s the problem of Ken, or rather the problem of Ryan Gosling, or rather the achievement of Ryan Gosling, who gives the most compelling performance in the film by far. Ken travels to the real world with Barbie, where he is immediately smitten with the patriarchy. The hardest I laughed in Barbie was at Ken’s innocent embrace of a world ruled by men, particularly his snap imitation of a rude businessman condescending to his female assistant and his wide-eyed wonderment at his discovery of police officers on horses, a perfect and indelible image of masculine power.

Ken gets the biggest laughs throughout Barbie because the screenplay is more liberated with him. It feels no need to take him seriously, and Gosling makes the most of the opportunity. His characterization of Ken—funny, sad, stupid, endearing, and sexy—seems to combine every male Hollywood archetype into one. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Cary Grant, and Gene Wilder are all present. It’s a scene-stealing performance that the film can’t look away from, even when it should. There were even times I found myself wondering if this was a Ken movie or a Barbie movie, which is perhaps another way that the film is stuck in an antiquated view of gender relations. It ultimately finds the patriarchy more inherently compelling than any alternative.

This is the problem with a film based on ideas. They can’t really have giant holes in them. Films about people can be messy, disjointed, and even contradictory, if the people are well-realized and the story is sound. It’s what they should have done with Barbie. It’s what Taylor Swift can do in three minutes and Barbie can’t do in two hours: express the pain and joy of being a woman in 2023 without ever sacrificing narrative or character. Instead, it feels like a lecture with really good production value, and lecturing the audience is bad, not because it's patronizing or because there’s something wrong with voicing your moral position, but because lectures are boring, particularly when you’re expecting to see a movie.