I think it’s amazing that something like it exists, it never really excels at what it’s doing but it tries to balance so many different aspects and influences while keeping the centre of its story about this coming to understanding and ultimately accepting that change is good, an idea can linger around for years and ultimately believe it is the one that had this idea that it had and that it’s easier to be a doll but it’s so much more meaningful to be a human.
It feels fragile, the foundations of it but the movie keeps going without caring about any of that and ultimately just says what it wants and I like that it’s committed.
It weirdly reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once, both have very similar protagonists, both excel at taking elements from years of film, books and tv to comment on being a person and both take a very wild turn to get to the core message. I do feel like EEAAO is just a better film mostly because the message is more coherent, it feels more emotional and tightly written but Barbie is a rare meta-commentary of the movie that it is, it’s the first time a movie has reminded me of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Doki Doki Literature Club and I love it for that.
7.5/10 also Kate McKinnon was just awesome in this movie
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I hated Barbie and felt relieved we are still in a world where a corporation can’t effectively artwash itself out of being a corporation.
It’s many things but the biggest one is how self-indulgent the movie is in portraing the lovable Ken and its goofy, fun sized and deserving of comprehension, and even sexual satisfaction, rapist society.
In general men has the agency, the talent, the trasformation while the women learn it’s ok to cry.
I spent the entire other post being triggered by the EEAO comparison and the placement of EEAO as higher than Barbie, and I need to write about Barbie specifically and why I think it’s better.
So first off, I really had 0 expectations for this movie. Greta Gerwig hasn’t been my favorite screenwriter/director. Beyond her rework of Little Women, I’ve seen Ladybird and Frances Ha. To me many Greta Gerwig movies are really about the ennui of being a “girl” from a “serious perspective”. I do like the “I’m just a girl” style memes, and I can appreciate the emotional valence of the “I’m just a girl”, but attempting to paint it with a “serious” brush is a bit off putting for me because ultimately it’s not serious by definition because it’s a gendered impulse. I had this huge problem with Ladybird because it’s effectively a “my life a movie” movie for any woman whose ever been a teenager and did the incredibly lame thing of having a huge crush on a guy who thinks People’s History of the US is a “deep book”. In essence Greta Gerwig movies to me up until Barbie and outside of Little Women (which she was a good director for), have been about modernizing the essence of Jane Austen in a serious way but without the discernment of a Jane Austen style society. In essence the follies of Ladybird are follies but they are never actually contrasted against the “serious” portions of Ladybird. To put it more bluntly there’s never a serious arc for Ladybird where someone tells her to pull up her pants and her follies are filmed from a play stupid games win stupid prizes perspective – the writing and camera forces us to take her seriously and take her agency seriously as if she knows what she’s doing even if she doesn’t. Tones of this appear in Frances Ha, but Ladybird is a much better and more in your face example.
With this in mind, Barbie was a real fucking treat. Immediately I understood the setup. Barbie lives in a gendered society that’s a corporate feminist matriarchy. It skewers corporate feminism essentially as a “top dog” style system where the in-gender is women instead of men. Barbies can do anything, Kens are defined through Barbies, and the tertiary characters are the LGBTQ and minority accessories that cosmopolitan women (e.g. Barbies their avatar) wear to show their virtue. I think Ken learning “patriarchy” as a turn of the century / mid century masculinity from Will Farrel as a caricature of a modern CEO was extremely well done. I think the tying of women in the real world to Kens and not Barbies was a great idea. I think reifying Barbie as a real world woman at the end where she has to contend not just with the gendered place in society as a Ken but with the specific forms of how society polices women as also really well done. Contrasting this with the political issue at Barbieland is great because Ken’s aren’t policed as much as women in the real world but the main point is that they are only seen as people through the dominant gender (Kens to Barbies, women to men). I think the movie could have been a little harder on Barbie in terms of the treatment of the LBGTQ and minority coded characters, but “i guess” there’s limited run time. It’s still disappointing that that conflict is introduced and resolved within the scope of like a 5-10 minute scene. Ultimately this has an extremely pleasant amount of depth for what should have been a “fun” and empty headed movie about a toy line.
The other thing that’s extremely well done is the story structure. You can split out Barbie and Ken into their own movies and they work, but they’re in the same movie! And it’s possible because Barbie and Ken are both protagonists (Ken in practice is actually a deuteragonist), but the antagonists in the movie are the systems in Barbieland and the Real world. We know this because both Ken and Barbie have their own hero’s (don’t take hero literally I just don’t wanna say monomyth for ease of understaanding) journey that intersects. The hero in the story is clearly Barbie who saves Barbieland, defeats the CEO of Matel and emanicpates the Kens. The villain is actually the CEO of Mattel, who not only attempts to capture Barbie/Ken in the real world but take over Barbieland by misleading Ken.
I really think that Greta Gerwig should stick with comedy or dramady because prior to this watching her movies was like watching Paul Giamatti in a serious role, and then he slips on a banana peel and you’re not supposed to laugh at it, you’re supposed to cry.
My issue with Barbie’s structure and main plot comes from the fact that it essentially feels like we have two very different films and a bridge between them. The “coming to terms with being “broken” and helping her human” and “Ken establishing patriarchy” are always overshadowing eachother. First the former plot is on the front with the latter being slowly germinated and grown and then the latter is in full force and the former is given a ig almost silent sort of conclusion and the movie doesn’t do a compelling enough script or pacing to make these parts feel whole. I agree that it does all the things you and others have been talking about and I might enjoy it better a second time because I won’t have to worry about the plot structure and where it’s going
See I disagree, that’s actually a good feature. Many “movies with a point” can only take on the perspective a sole protagonist as a totalizing force. The split protagonists in Barbie show that the actual antagonists are the systems under which the protagonists exist both in Barbieland and the real world. It’s a true solidarity movie in the sense that Barbie not only does what is good for Barbie but she also learns to make space for Ken in a society that is a gender mirror of our own. Ironically Barbie in this way does have an apotheosis as an avatar of corporate feminism (woman savior) in but in aesthetic only, because in action she is showing solidarity along intersectional lines within her own society. Something that she ultimately wants to bring to the real world. Barbie doesn’t start the movie with all the answers as an all knowing intersectional socialist, she develops that on screen by bouncing off her deuteragonist in Ken. Ultimately not only does this structure make a fun movie, it makes a good movie with a point. Very often I have a hard time watching movies with a point with other people because at one point the “fun” of the movie falls apart for the “point”, something that doesn’t happen with the complexities of Barbie.
I disliked EEAO because its message is a hugbox that doesn’t give realistic examples of healthy conflict resolution. The ironic dissonance between the action of the movie and the message don’t mesh because the action is supposed to be showing familial/cultural strife and the message is about being kind due to unknown unknowns. However it doesn’t actually resolve a significant dispute outside of a familial dynamic. As an immigrant I feel like this movie targeted me but the “lessons” I’m supposed to take home are completely trite compared to my real life interaction with cultural differences in my family. It’s essentially a fantasy that pretends that your immigrant grandma will gleefully learn your American cultural boundaries after a difficult talk, something that my inter-generational immigrant family has no real experience with (and neither do many of my friends who are also immigrants and even more targeted by this movie because they’re Asian).
Likewise outside a family dynamic this movie falls entirely flat, because despite all her flaws my grandmother is my family and I still have to take care of her. The American version of this is cutting your family out when they’re annoying. Ironically the movie is also pick and choose about what properties of assimilation its characters take which feels very pidgeon holed in terms of its messaging. But beyond the family the movie doesn’t really take a real stance on conflict resolution because of it’s Looney Toons/Stephen Chow style approach. The martial arts are a metaphor for familial conflict, but by using that visual metaphor there is nowhere to escalate if the movie were to have a real villain rather than a metaphor for a teenager with a tantrum. I’m sorry in the real world you’re not going to fight “hate” with “love” at the level of physical conflict.
Wow, I agree with all of this and it’s likely that our different experiences lead to us having different opinions about the film. I still love it tho, I think what it says about being optimistic has a little more depth and nuance
I think what it says about being optimistic has a little more depth and nuance
I will agree with this, but I think the presentation sucks. It’s overshadowed by the conflict. There’s not enough repetition of a character getting beat down, choosing to maintain optimism, trying again only to get beat down because the alternative is personally unbearable in some way. That is ultimately the logical ends of the ideology behind optimism in that movie, but I think it’s too “sad” to show to Americans. Americans culturally, cannot deal with the end of the handsome hamburger party. We have a tantrum. Instead the movie shows optimism through the idea of being a goofy silly little guy and putting googly eyes on stuff. Which to anyone who has ever met a goofy silly little guy they’re often the most pessimistic or realistic people ever and not really optimists. In as such it doesn’t really differentiate between practicing optimism and being intrinsically optimistic. The characters are just kinda just vaguely assigned this through the googly eye motif. It becomes very confused it doesn’t have a clear presentation of the difficulty of a character choosing to practice optimism.
It really reminds me of the issue of orientalization and commodification of Eastern Philosophies. For example Buddhism is imported into America as a top down tool of corporate obedience and mindset shifting, rather than a bottom up understanding of life through a personal and reciprocal lens. A corporate American Buddhist may know that they clock out at 5PM and work stress is impermanent but they don’t share their food at the end of the day because people are given what they are owed here. A traditional Buddhist shares their food because even grace is fleeting and it’s better to share it than attempting to selfishly savor an impermanent experience.
It’s really fun but I didn’t like the ending, the kens should have all been put into labor camps
In the end barbie ends up having to apologize for Ken’s shitty behavior and isn’t that like, the point of the movie?
It’s really fun but I didn’t like the ending, the kens should have all been put into labor camps
The whole meta-commentary is that top-dog style dominance is pointless and recreates the same disparity solely through binary means. Its literally an anti-corporate feminist message diffused through feminist humor. So much of the movie is based on this ex:
- Barbie-land is a corporate feminist gender swapped society from real life.
- The characters that are LGBTQ coded are literally sidelined the entire movie as side kicks.
- The Kens main complaint is that they are only recognized as people through Barbies.
The entire thing is based on the same axioms as “MORE WOMEN CIA TORTURERES” and “They say the next one (missile) will be sent by a woman.” memes. The reason Greta Gerwig uses turn of the century mixed with mid century markers of masculinity is that so you don’t get tied up in knots about Kens starting podcasts. Apparently people still get caught up on an ironic gender flip.
I may be misremembering, but don’t they literally vote the Kens out?
Yes
What do you mean, I just didn’t like how it got to the ending itself. I felt Barbie didn’t develop enough
I didn’t get that ending with the doctor… it was supposed to be funny? Like was it deeper than just that?
Barbie becoming a real woman in the real world is supposed be a humorous peripeteia to the fact that she has had an aristocratic experience of being the dominant gender/sexual orientation in Barbieland. She has never actually been culturally policed in the way that real women are.
Same as the joke about being called a tankie, Barbie despite being an icon of feminism cannot actually navigate the real world’s complex social structures. Which is also paralleled to real world events like when libs get upset at Chappel Roan for her politics or her reclamation of her own personal experience, rather than being defined by the whims of her fans.
I think it meant two things too yeah: it was a joke because the film had been building the joke basically from the beginning but getting rid of her… Whatever cellulite thing she had was her main concerns, it represented her losing her self-worth and panicking. Barbie going to a gynecologist is just ig her character arc coming to a close and realizing that she has to take care of her problems and not look away.
