Mattel’s legendary high fashion gal on the go Barbie is pushing 65. Most of the jokes in Greta Gerwig’s monster, monster hit of the same name have a similar vintage. Seriously, is there a single gag in this movie that couldn’t have appeared on Saturday Night Live back in 1975? But the monster success of Barbie shows how little Hollywood and “reality” have to do with one another. To add just another layer of irony, a movie that is little more than a package of the kind of jokes “smart girls” have been making about Barbie for decades, wrapped up in an eye-jarring Day-Glo palette that resembles an episode of “My Little Pony” on acid and set to an ear-splitting, pseudo-ironic score of deliberately insipid bubble-gum rock, has hit the male-only cultures of such countries as China and Saudi Arabia with all the psychological impact of a multi-megaton nuclear device, a veritable consciousness-raising Barbie bomb, cleaning up at the box office world-wide and proving that there is simply nothing more insidious than American popular culture.
In case it isn’t clear, I didn’t enjoy Barbie at all, sitting there wondering when the “there” of the film would arrive, only realizing at the end that there was no there there, unless you count as “there” a couple of ineffably tedious morality lectures, condescendingly chicksplaining why we need to dispense with our false consciousness and devotion to a shallowly materialistic way of life, though whether Barbie is actually going to give up her wardrobe and wear flats for all eternity is never made clear. And even if she does, which I doubt, she’ll still look like Margot Robbie.1
The story, such as it is, begins with a parody of the pseudo-woke Barbie world that the Matell toy company is apparently now retailing, a world of high fashion presidents and Supreme Court justices,2 a world where not only can a woman have it all, every woman does have it all, where one Supreme Court Justices by day and then parties all night, a world where no one ages and high heels never cause lower back pain, not to mention hammer toes.3 Guys are there, sure, and they’re gorgeous, but they’re just another accessory, really—sort of like a really cute little dog that’s been toilet trained. They never bark or bite, and they always come when they’re called. How cool is that?
As for “downers”, well, there isn’t one in Barbieland, except for “Alan”. When I watched the film, “Alan” went right over my head. The idea seemed to be that “Alan” was a total loser, a walking wimp, and everyone knew it, but why? Was he supposed to be gay? That seemed seriously “unwoke”. Or it has just been a long-running gag in our culture that all Alans are losers, a gag that, somehow, I’d never been aware of? If so, it would explain a lot!
As it turned out, I was being seriously paranoid, as usual. In fact, “Alan” is a Barbieverse-centric in-joke: “Alan” is Ken’s friend—his wing man, you might say—probably invented as a marketing device by Mattel to date and eventually marry Midge, Barbie’s best friend, to tap into the rich market of mommy accessorizing while still leaving Barbie’s single gal life style marketable and unharmed. I still don’t know why Alan is supposed to be such a loser, but at this point I don’t care. I’m tired of researching the life history of a fucking doll.
Okay, more than enough about Alan. What about Barbie? For whatever reason—to move the plot along, obviously—Barbie has a strange, sudden attack of “real worlditis”—intimations of both mortality and flat feet at the same time! Desperate symptoms call for desperate measures, leading Barbie to venture a visit with the one official weirdo in Barbieland, “Weird Barbie”, so named because she’s ugly and no one likes her. Bummer!
Weird Barbie is played by famed SNL gal and LGBTQ+ “icon” (so I’m told)4 Kate McKinnon, best known to me as the sour old broad who’s always talking about her “cooter”, which is not my favorite euphemism for “vagina”. Kate brings a lot of this seen it all old broad/lesbian swagger to the role, though for some reason it’s kept entirely as subtext, almost as though even a satire on Barbieland is afraid of introducing the possibility of chick on chick action.5
“Weird Barbie” McKinnon tells Über Barbie Margot that if she ever wants to get her heels off the ground again she needs to visit something known as the “real world”, where a little girl is playing with her. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but, well, the plot of Barbie is not intended to bear up under close scrutiny. Barbie jumps in her convertible and heads on out to “reality”, while Ken, who’s feeling neglected, stows away in the back seat.
The ”Real World”, naturally enough, is a sort of jerk dystopia, ruled by the forces of the white capitalist patriarchy, offering the film a whole new set of straw men to pummel. The “little girl” playing with Barbie, is “Sasha”, played by 16-year-old Ariana Greenblatt, who seems both a little too old and far too hip to be playing with a Barbie doll, except perhaps ironically. Barbie somehow tracks Sasha down at her high school, passing herself off as a student, improbably enough, and landing us, for about ten minutes, in “Mean Girls” land, with Sasha as an apparent Queen Bee, smart girl edition—a sort of bossy Daria, if you remember her—who, when she meets Barbie and somehow “recognizes” her as the true Barbie, whatever that is, lectures her on giving girls unrealistic expectations, unlike Margot Robbie.
Somehow, Barbie and Ken are identified as the “real” Barbie and Ken by the Mattel Corporation, whose cartoonishly portrayed board of directors (all white men, of course) believe the two have to be captured, to prevent, well, something. Adding further complexity/irony, Sasha’s mom, Gloria (America Ferrara) works for Mattel, seemingly the only woman in the whole shebang, never promoted though she does all the work and whose innovative ideas are always rejected and/or stolen. Also, Sasha hates her, but the two do join together to help Barbie escape the Mattel male oppressors and the three all journey to Barbieland together.
Unfortunately, Ken has returned ahead of them, and, having drunk the heady wine of white male privilege, rouses the oppressed Kens to revolt, overthrowing the Malibu matriarchy with surprising ease, helped immensely, it seems, by “horses”, pictured by Gerwig as somehow the world’s greatest stimulator of testosterone, confusing me just a bit because it seems to me that it’s chicks who are really into horses. Does Greta think that My Little Pony is a guy thing? Or did she just get kicked by a horse?
Anyway, the guys are in the saddle, so to speak, but Barbie, Sasha, Gloria, and Weird Barbie all conspire to reverse the revolution, with a little help from “Alan”, who is starting to seem a little gay at this point, though I don’t remember him assisting with the choreography. It seems that men are, well, stupid, so it isn’t hard to get them fighting among themselves. Divide and conquer!
Well, divide and conquer and learn! We get a pretty long lecture at this point—several of them, actually, though I don’t remember the order or from whom—about, you know, sexual equality, and freedom to choose, and that no one should be considered to be “arm candy”, and the rest of the usual after school special stuff. Barbie decides she wants to be a real woman now, in the real world, so she heads back with Sasha and Gloria, who are of course “together” now, as in any after school special, meeting Gloria’s “husband”, who unfortunately doesn’t get a name or a line of dialogue and suspiciously resembles, well, “husband candy”.
Jesus, that is a lot of words to describe two-plus hours of visual and aural pink cotton candy. I left with aching eyes and aching ears, thinking “so that is what a billion dollars looks like.”
Afterwords
The only thing that’s “funny” about Barbie is how pathetically unrealistic it is about the real “real world”. This film might have had some semblance to reality if it had been made in 1990, but not much. The current Matell board of directors has 13 members: five are women, one is Hispanic, and one is Asian. But that’s trivial compared with the real story of Mattel, Inc., founded back in 1945 by Ruth Handler, her husband Elliott, and Harold Matson, with Ruth as, well, president. The firm went through a variety of incarnations, eventually focusing on toy manufacturing full time. Ruth invented Barbie, of course, in 1959, not for any sappy, sentimental reasons, but to make money, which she damn well did, as a card-carrying, indeed, founding member of the white capitalist matriarchy.
1. In clumsy bit of ass covering, the film acknowledges that a film preaching against the cult of prettiness probably shouldn’t have cast Margot Robbie in the lead, but, hey, we do want to sell tickets, don’t we? It should be pointed out as well that, since the film is set in Barbieland, everyone is young and rich and good looking. This is intended as “satire”, of course, but somehow we stay in Barbieland for the finale, and barely get a glimpse of the “real world” again,. So now, it seems, the whole world is young and rich and good looking, and “woke” as well! Talk about a Hollywood ending!
2. In an undeveloped, throwaway “smart girl” gag, we also hear about, but of course never see, “Proust Barbie”, which would be a lot funnier if it was “Madeleine Barbie”, or “Cork-Lined Bedroom Barbie” or “Sodome et Gomorrhe Barbie” Well, they tried. But not very hard.
3. That is so gross!
4. Though not by Wikipedia, for some reason, even though Kate is officially “openly gay”.
5. There doesn’t seem to be any openly gay characters in Barbieland, even though the whole aesthetic of the place is Liberace pink, a third of the picture’s screen time seemingly taken up with ripped young lads in pastel tank tops working their little heinies off to bubble gum rock.
