Editor’s note: Hahaha I broke the email length limit with the stupidest topic imaginable. Read this post on the site to access every last footnote!
Friends. Dear ones. Women and sympathetic others. Lovers of art and havers of taste. A grave injustice has been committed. The powers that be have sinned against truth and spat in the face of righteousness. Those who walk the hallowed path of beauty have been shaken to their knees, and I am here to tell you that I, too, have felt the blow; I, too, have bellowed to the stormy heavens like a beast whose young is slain, cursing my enemies for their wickedness in my grief.
I, too — like all who strive to dwell in the houses of virtue and wisdom — am bewildered and appalled that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had the gall to nominate Barbie for its stupid fucking screenplay.
I know, I know: awards shows are stupid and don’t matter. No one out of grade school seriously believes the Oscars are any kind of reliable metric for artistic achievement or cultural impact. I just thought that we lived in a society. I thought we agreed, even in these fractious times, on certain baseline truths. I thought, for example, that we still had consensus on the belief that a “screenplay” should be a “screenplay” and not “a collection of stuff happening.” Is that old-fashioned of me? Perhaps. But judging from the recent Barbie-related furor on social media, which I assume is about this because I for one can’t imagine what else it could possibly be about,1 I am not alone. We bear the weight of this crime collectively, and the strength of our bond is to be our solace.
But I have not come to you today to mourn; rather, I bear tidings of hope. For — okay, so you know how James Cameron in his head thinks of himself as a deep sea explorer tragically burdened with having to make and release a bazillion dollar movie every few years so that he can continue to fund his true passion? I think Christopher Nolan is like that but for time travel, only he can’t tell us until he’s done. When that day comes, though, after he’s gone on an Endgame-style quest to go back in time and murder however many physicists it takes to convince the field to knock that shit off and turn their attention to wormholes or something else less existentially fraught, I feel really confident that as a writer-director who knows what it’s like to live with the legacy of movies you made when you were so much worse at writing,2 he will be amenable to loaning out his invention so that we can rectify this wrong. Thus is the nature of my errand today made clear: I come not to bury the Barbie screenplay, but to fix it.
Now, I want to note one thing before we get started: I am not, I repeat NOT, planning to fix the politics of Barbie. The reason for this is that I don’t care and also I think it’s literally fine for there to be the occasional feel-good girl-power movie about pink and believing in yourself or whatever. I think it is fine for Barbie to carry on the legacy of movies like Mean Girls and Legally Blonde,3 and the fact that Barbie is more diverse and less weird about lesbians than either of those films4 is sincerely one of its strengths (along with, and this is not exhaustive, Margot Robbie’s performance,5 every single set, and a musical number clearly shot by someone who has seen a musical before6). I am simply here to propose one of many available paths for transforming Barbie from several different half-assed and variably successful ideas in a trench coat into a glossy toy commercial with milquetoast normie lib politics like Feminist Jesus and the Mattel corporation intended.7
When I told my mom, in the middle of a conversation about Barbie, that America Ferrera had been nominated, she said, pleasantly and without guile, “Oh? For what?” That’s so much funnier than anything I could say about the Gloria “character” (and I use that word generously) that I won’t try to top it. It’s a shame, because she did have what was probably my favorite character moment in the movie, which was when her daughter asks her why she’s taking this cockamamie trip to Barbieland and she says, “Because I’m a boring mom and I never do anything!” I thought that was great: funny and human, familiar but not overplayed. It used a light touch to express something very real that many women can relate to personally and even more people can connect with by thinking about their own moms. To me, that could have been the heart of the movie.
If we start there, from the premise that a boring mom who never does anything deserves not only to have some adventure but to have the very mundanity of her life be treated as a problem worthy of artistic representation, it becomes immediately apparent that the movie needs to treat Gloria as something closer to a co-protagonist than to the plot device who does a speech that she currently is. I’m happy to keep the general set-up wherein Barbie awakens one day to a wrinkle in her previously flawless Barbietopia8, but we need to spend more time with Gloria in the real world before the two of them collide. This does not have to be a huge investment of screen time — such is the power of film as a visual medium! — I’m talking, like, two to three scenes of Gloria juggling household and work tasks, feeling distant from her teenage daughter, being bored at her unfulfilling office job. (I guess she can work at Mattel still. Whatever. It should go without saying but we are definitely dropping the entirety of the Mattel C-suite plot because it is boring and pointless and whatever it contributes to the film’s satire is too toothless to be worth keeping, although if the real-world Mattel executives of the future-past reading this feel strongly in its favor, I am happy to negotiate finding a place for it for the low low price of eight million dollars.) In other words, we need to see and feel her actually living through and struggling with the impossible dichotomies of womanhood that she articulates in her speech but which the movie as it exists does nothing to justify narratively except assume that we’ll roll with it because Woman, which I honestly kind of appreciate politically but is unfortunately not how movies work. In some particularly erudite circles I believe they refer to this kind of maneuver as “showing” rather than “telling.”
For what it’s worth, I think the mother-daughter stuff is potent enough that sticking to the well-worn terrain of the sudden distance that can appear between the two at the onset of puberty gives us enough to work with. However, if you want to go a little crazy with it, I actually think (pin this for later) you could structure the conflict between them around the fact that Gloria has raised a very smart, ambitious, socially conscious, academically driven daughter — perhaps she is a Mathlete, or on the school robotics team — and Gloria is torn between being so proud of her awesome kid and a little bit sad that, in her view (again, we will come back to this later!), her sweet baby is so eager to leave childhood behind. After all, childhood is the only chance we get in life to be carefree and creative and full of wonder before the adult world saps our lives of color and exuberance, and as a mom, it breaks her heart a little that her kid, who is still so young, never wants to do kid stuff anymore. She doesn’t want to have a mommy-daughter coloring party. She doesn’t want to put cute stickers on her notebooks. She doesn’t want to play with Barbie.
So, plot-wise, the movie proceeds much as it already does: Barbie must leave Barbieland to find her human and the human world is scary and the kid is mean to her and she finds Gloria and the two of them realize, omg it’s you! And they must go back to Barbieland, not because they are being chased by Will Ferrell’s stupid unfunny face (again, Mattel, my price is eight million dollars), but because… uh… magic Barbieland worldbuilding don’t think about it too hard reasons. They have to do a… thing… where only by working together as human and Barbie can they fix the fabric of Barbieland. Weird Barbie says so. Happy to flesh this out in detail when my check clears. The key change is that in this version, the notion of What Barbie Stands For is clear: she stands for creativity and childlike wonder. And the lesson that Gloria must learn through her travels, as a character in a movie undergoing growth and change and not a marionette whose job is to read feminism 101 off a set of cue cards, is that even though she’s a grown-up and a mom, she’s also still a person, and she’s allowed to carve out room in her boring mom life to find ways to be creative and have adventures and seek out the beauty in life. (Advanced readers will observe here that What If A Mom Was A Whole Human Being is in fact a longstanding concern of feminist thought! #girlpower) To rebuild Barbieland, she needs to tap into the creativity and joy and curiosity and play that she’s shut out of her adult life. She reconnects with her inner child, who is also her inner artist, and that’s what she takes with her back to the real world.
Here we can also come back to the daughter shit: by letting herself feel, perhaps through exposure to the glorious nonsense of Barbieland, just how badly she’s missed making things and doing fun stuff, and how hard she’s been working to tell herself she has to lock that part of herself away because that’s what society tells her is necessary to be a good mom and proper adult, she can finally see that her daughter isn’t growing up too fast. She’s trying to preserve her own childhood through her daughter, projecting her own longings and buried dreams; her daughter is actually perfectly capable of balancing work and play. By listening to Barbie and thus learning to listen to herself, Gloria can finally also hear what her daughter is telling her, which is that she feels the same way about her robots or whatever9 that Gloria once felt about Barbie, and now feels, really, if she’s brave enough to be honest with herself, about making art.
Thus the big takeaway of Barbie is no longer [checks notes] “what if there was a normal Barbie” (? k) but rather — smash the normal/Barbie dichotomy! It’s possible to be a rich and complex enough person to be a stressed frumpy boring mom and also a sparkly creative dreamer! There are always ways to add sparkle to your life, such as by going to Mattel’s website after the movie comes out and spending as little as $8.99 plus shipping and tax on a sticker pack! I said I wasn’t going to fix the politics of the toy commercial, and by God, I won’t! There is no wrong way to Barbie. Barbie is a state of mind. Let’s cue up a montage of America Ferrera trading in her drab corporate grays for neon-bright Barbie-inspired clothes (coming soon and for a limited time to a Target near you) and, like, I dunno, digging up that flier for an art class she’d previously sighed sadly over and actually signing up. Decorating her work desk. Date nights with Duolingo Dad (I love Duolingo Dad), but they’re doing something more exciting than TV dinners and NCIS, like, uh, paintball? (Paintball is horrible, but as we know from Ten Things I Hate About You it looks super fun when hot people play it in movies.) Cheering on her daughter at the Robotics Olympiad in her zany outfit and then some other lady also dressed wild compliments her earrings and now she’s made a friend. You get it.
As for the TITular role10 of Barbie herself, it seems clear to me that Gerwig really wanted to include the theme of Woman As Artist, which we know is important to her based on Ladybird (which I liked a lot) and I assume based on Little Women (which I have not seen11) because what other kind of person would adapt Little Women. The issue is that she, um, forgot to do this until the very end of the movie and then never went back to go put the movie she wanted to make in the movie she was making. We’ve all been there, to be sure. Usually two sugar-free Red Bulls deep into an all-nighter hammering away at the keyboard until we hit the page minimum, but I guess a major studio production with a nine-digit budget isn’t so different…? I like this idea in theory! I just think that if it’s going to be in the movie, it should actually be in the movie.
I think it makes sense (arguably it makes more sense in a version of the movie where all of these characters are actual people) to keep a sense of mounting frustration and despair, this time at the ongoing dissolution of Barbieland as it continues to fall apart. (One can imagine some incredibly fun production stuff happening here, as Gerwig takes the wonderful visual playfulness of Barbieland and applies it to the increasing havoc of these life-size toys breaking down, like the design of Weird Barbie writ across the landscape.) And, sure, I guess this can culminate in America Ferrera Gets To Give A Big Speech. The speech itself, though, could use… tweaking. Honestly — the more I think about it, the more my issue with the speech is not just that it is a recycled post from literally any feminist blog fifteen years ago, or that it comes out of nowhere and is transparently a plot device with no organic connection to the character giving it. It’s also — like, Gloria derails her already stressful (? presumably?) life and drags along her real human daughter to follow her childhood doll into a make-believe land, and her response to Barbie’s capitulation to despair is to be mad on Barbie’s behalf about the double standards in a society that Barbie herself has never lived in? That’s… baby shit, sorry. It’s chickening out of an opportunity for a meaningful emotional moment rooted in conflict between two characters (what we in the biz call “a story”). In a version of Barbie, such as this one, where Gloria is an actual person, the main thing to change about that speech is that the emotional undercurrent becomes Fuck Barbie. She should be pissed that Barbie pulled her into this and is so ready to give up, and that anger should then drive her to go fix Barbieland her own damn self with the power of (see above) reconnecting to both her own inner child and her prickly teenage daughter.
And that should be what sells Barbie on the idea that the glories of humanity are worth its pains: witnessing the living, human flexibility, resilience, and creativity Gloria demonstrates in the face of darkness. The ability to bend like a branch rather than break like plastic, to transform one’s self and surroundings in response to the direst of circumstances. It reawakens Barbie’s own fighting instinct, and as she joins in the effort by Gloria’s side, the more she time she spends with this woman who has given her life so much beauty simply by dreaming it, the more she wants to take the gift she’s been given and see if she can be the one to fill other people’s lives with beauty. And, because of Gloria’s growing understanding that the boring mom/Barbie dichotomy is false, Barbie comes to see that stepping out into the human world doesn’t have to be only scary things and mean people and being sexually harassed. It’s also about learning things and seeing amazing sights and meeting people you had no idea you needed in your life. And she can do it while retaining the essential sunshine that makes her Barbie. Mattel Barbie Be the Dreamer® Art Kits starting at $34.99 with expansion packs available! These would be a holiday juggernaut like we are printing money here Mattel can you even afford NOT to give me eight million dollars?
At this point you may be thinking, Hey, wait a second. She hasn’t talked about Ken yet. (Very astute!) Ken was so funny. (Sure!) Remember the Matchbox 20 gag? (Haha, yeah! Great stuff!12) Ryan Gosling totally deserved to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor over Charles Melton. (Shut your useless, hateful mouth, you ungrateful piece of shit.) The thing about Ken is that I don’t care about Ken, and I kind of resent the movie for asking me to care about Ken. On the Rewatchables podcast13 episode about Mean Girls, Bill Simmons, of all fucking people, correctly identified that one of the good things about Mean Girls is that none of the guys in it matter in any real way, which is true and great and why it’s actually feminist that the love interest in Legally Blonde has no discernible personality and is played by a cardboard cutout of Luke Wilson.14 Going to the movies, even to some very good movies, and even to some very good movies with a complicated and critical view on the men at their center, so often means being asked to care about men in a way you are mostly not being asked to care about women, and that’s not inherently a flaw in any individual film, but in the aggregate, I do sometimes feel the weight of the imbalance, enough so that movies that flip the script can feel like an pleasant vacation (see also: Killing Eve), even when they’re not that good (see also: the later seasons of Killing Eve). I can, of course, roll my eyes and move on from the movie I would have preferred to watch,15 but the movie also can’t make up its mind exactly how much or in what manner it wants you to care about Ken, other than wanting you to think Ryan Gosling is funny, which, sure.16 Ken’s feelings clearly need to matter for the “structure” of the “plot” to be emotionally legible, but the political grievances of the Kens are seen as laughable, which maybe they are because who needs houses or rights in a world that is pretend, like how exactly are the Barbies preventing the Kens from doing anything here, but also… whatever. Mess.17 The patriarchy arc could potentially (and generously) be taken as a structural metacommentary on how this dude totally commandeers the plot of a movie that set out to depict girls and women if the movie felt more in control of its structure or betrayed any interest in Gloria and her daughter as actual people with a set of relationships (to themselves, to each other, to Barbie) worth exploring, but it… doesn’t, so.18
Ken is also responsible for the only moment during my viewing of the film (which, and I recognize this may be hard to believe at this late stage, I found a pretty fun two hours in the theater!) where I got actually angry, which is the scene where he and Barbie reconcile and not only does Barbie somehow have to nurse his wounds over the time he stole her house and brainwashed her friends, but she actually tells him it didn’t need to have always been girls’ night! Sorry, WHAT? This is… evil, to me. I do not understand why one of the lessons Barbie needs to learn is that it was wrong of her to clearly and not unkindly state her intentions and her boundaries instead of changing her lifestyle for a guy who wanted something from her she had no interest in giving. Like what in the 500 Days of Summer hell. It is actively depressing to me that a self-proclaimed feminist would put that in a movie. At most, Barbie could maybe apologize, I guess, for “leading him on,” although I also don’t love the optics of putting that in an ostensibly feminist movie, even a feminist-lite one. Barbie doesn’t owe Ken shit! It’s not her fault he’s a loser with no life who needs to get a hobby and make his own friends!19 She can make it girls’ night all the time if she wants, and if he doesn’t like that he can go pal around with Marvel’s Simu Liu!20 It’s HER DAMN HOUSE!
So… I don’t know. I’m inclined to keep Ken, if we must, as a one-dimensional sidekick/running gag (much like Allan, who is perfect, flawless, 1000/10, no notes, incredible validation for those of us who got on the Michael Cera train in 2007 and refused to let the fickle waters of mass opinion push us off). But I also want to demonstrate to the Mattel executives reading this that I am flexible and a team player, so if we must give him something weightier, I would say that on our day-one tour of Barbieland, Ken should give the appearance of perfect, frictionless contentment to Barbie, while perhaps revealing to the viewer through the occasional sigh or longing glance that something is amiss. Then, after Barbie has already noticed the darkness creeping into her utopia, Ken shoots his shot for real re: taking things to the next level. Barbie is appalled! And terrified! Ken is her Ken! Now he wants to be her… some other thing??? This must be yet another facet of reality crumbling!
Part of what she’s after when she sets off to Weird Barbie’s house, then, is restoring Ken to his usual Ken self, free of all these messy, unprecedented “feelings.” She keeps assuring him that he will feel right as rain as soon as she gets this taken care of, while Ken tags along to try to win her over with dashing feats of heroic derring-do, which allows us to retain the comedically and sociologically rich vein of Ken trying to learn how to act like a man from the available cues in the human world. Pick-up artist Ken? Pick-up artist Ken! Hell, you could even have Ken cycle through a series of male archetypes (Jock Ken! Hot Nerd Ken! Cowboy Ken! Sensitive Songwriter Ken! Collect the whole set!), each time hoping to land on the model that will open Barbie’s eyes to her destiny as his one true love, while she remains irritated and unimpressed (Robbie would crush this). Ryan Gosling still clumsily cosplays an eight-year-old’s vision of a masculine ideal and the commentary about masculinity as snake oil doesn’t get dragged down in world-building that gives the in-universe MRAs some valid points. Win-win!
At the end, once Barbieland has been restored, however, Ken still wants more, and confesses that he has for a while now. And maybe — maybe, everyone’s still on thin ice here — Barbie confesses that in some part of her, she knew, but she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want things to change. But things have changed, for both of them. Things do change. That’s life, and even Barbieland is not immune. Neither of them knows who they are without the other, but they both have to find out. If you really want, it could even be Ken’s bravery in admitting what he wants, knowing that it means they can never go back to how things were, that gives her the final nudge over the line to accepting that she’s ready to leave Barbieland for good. Maybe she can even tell him that she wants, so badly, to find a way to bring beauty to other people’s lives, but she doesn’t know if she can, and he can tell her he knows she can, because she’s done it for him, always; and maybe she can tell him that she knows he doesn’t have any clue what to do now, but he’s brave and he’s good and he’ll figure it out, and in this version of the movie, we believe her, because this conversation that happens at the end of the movie is related to events we have watched transpire. Now we have connected the Ken plot with Barbie’s storyline, which is also a mirror of Gloria’s storyline and the understanding she reaches about her daughter, and we have all these character arcs telling us the same thing, no deus ex Mattel needed21: change is scary and hard and also good and exciting, and it’s better to face it than to try to run away. Barbieland is childhood is safe is stale; reality is growing up is hard is beautiful. Action is character is theme is movie. If you think it’s weird that I’m explaining that to people who have made between them so very many movies, think of how weird I must have felt sitting in the theater watching Barbie (2023)!
Okay! I believe that covers all the major points. Mattel, if you want to add another million or two, I’d be happy to explore how genuinely integrating Midge,22 Allan, and Weird Barbie into the social fabric of Barbieland by the end could further contribute to the development of the ideas presented here. I appreciate your consideration amidst what I am sure will be a flood of proposals for the project; there are truly so many different ways one could fix this stupid fucking screenplay (go the other direction and cut the mom-daughter shit entirely! Drop the real world and embrace full Barbieland farce! Mash some genres in a blender and run wild!), it’s a really exciting time for the field! Thank you for your time, and have a wonderful day.
Yes I can. Ryan Gosling stealing Charles Melton’s slot in Best Supporting. HELLO?
Have you watched Batman Begins? No, but like, recently? I revisited it for the first time since high school the week before Oppenheimer came out because I wanted to get in touch with my incredibly correct adolescent zeal for Cillian Murphy, and that movie is… camp? Like it’s not good, in really weird, fundamental ways: pacing all over the place, tone wobbly, dialogue on a spectrum from passable to bad. It’s much cornier than the Raimi Spider-Mans, which own their corniness where Batman Begins is clearly trying to be cool. Every actor thinks they’re in a different movie. It’s wild. On the bright side, watching it pre-Oppenheimer inclined me to be very generous towards the Nolan Woman situation, because Florence Pugh acting a mess and Emily Blunt looking pissy were such an enormous upgrade over whatever the hell was going on with Katie Holmes that I was like, wow, well, he’s really trying.
Two movies with, not to beat a dead horse here, some significant ideological imperfections but incredibly tight scripts. Also, while we’re here, if movies are just things we’ve already seen elsewhere now, can we do Legally Blonde: The Musical next? Speaking here as someone for whom YouTube uploads of the MTV proshot were a critical mental health resource at a dark time in my life.
Granted, mostly by not acknowledging their existence except by the implication of casting America’s Top Comedic Lesbian as Weird Barbie and making her a Birkenstocks devotee, which — you know, progress isn’t always linear.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about Margot Robbie’s performance not being nominated. I thought she was very good and would not have minded seeing her nominated, but it’s not like, idk, the time the Academy overlooked Charles Melton, whose embodiment of preadolescent trauma trapped in amber and fighting desperately to wiggle free was so good it made me feel physically unwell, in favor of nominating Ryan Gosling, who gave a performance I liked fine when it was the SNL Papyrus sketch.
I’m not damning with faint praise here — it was great seeing a musical number directed by someone whose “vision” for musical numbers was not “mid-budget music video but make it harder to see the dancing.” If she directed a musical I would be excited to watch it!
It was a mistake to give me access to footnotes. Anyway, did you see that interview I can’t find now where Margot Robbie was like, “It’s so funny how most screenwriters have a ‘plan’ that they try to ‘follow,’ but Greta and Noah just start writing and then keep writing until it’s time to stop :)”? It explained a lot.
I said I don’t care about the politics of Barbie and I don’t, but, uh… what’s up with a movie made for millions of little girls to view treating cellulite as horrifying for a laugh and then never going back to reframe that? We get the broad acknowledgement that even Barbie isn’t pretty enough to be Barbie, but that feels generic and insincere compared to the specificity of the cellulite gag; as a precociously pear-shaped girl who had cellulite by middle school, I know which would have hit me harder, and not in a good way. If that’s too sensitive and earnest for you, weird of you to have already read this much about Barbie, but also, like, consider basic story/joke architecture: the cellulite thing features so prominently in the sequence before she departs for the real world, shouldn’t there be some kind of call-back along the way as she makes her decision to stay there? Barbie zooming along the boardwalk, discovering cellulite is normal here? Announcing her intention to become real by clicking her heels three times and saying, “I want cellulite”? Corny, but not cornier than the entire Ghosts of She. E. O.’s Past scene, and resonant because of how it, radical idea, connects to previous parts of the story? Just some thoughts.
I really like the Teen Robotics Champion Gloria’s Daughter idea, I guess. Maybe her robotics skills help save Barbieland and even bring some exciting advancements? OMG, Gloria’s daughter brings the industrial revolution to Barbieland!!! Which is also a metaphor for how Mattel once made a Barbie that said Math Is Hard (feel free to add that to your roster of little “self-aware” jokes, Greta) but now is selling a brand new line of Barbie Robot Assembly Kits because it’s so important for girls to learn to code and Mattel really cares.
Not convinced Gerwig’s ever going to top this.
The reason I have not seen Little Women is because one of my most firmly held convictions in life is that there is a hard ceiling on how good a Little Women adaptation can be, and it sits at “fine, I guess.” I believe this based on my knowledge of the novel Little Women, which is the best book in the world if you are a girl in the advanced reading group between the ages of 8 and 12 and intolerably boring otherwise. Feel free to argue this point with me after rereading, as an adult, all 400 interminable pages of Protestant homilies, but I will not believe you. It will be like the time the world tried to convince me that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (granted, a much more cursed phrase than “Greta Gerwig’s Little Women”) could be good, and I said hahaha no it absolutely cannot, and when years later morbid curiosity got the best of me I was about a thousand times more right than I could have imagined.
Although… I don’t know. I laughed at the Matchbox 20 joke, and the Snyder cut gag, and some of the others. But the further we get from opening weekend, the more off this sequence feels to me, because it’s a series of jokes that work primarily by flattering the movie’s presumed audience, which is kind of smug but also, more importantly, feels weirdly small or unambitious, like the movie didn’t trust itself to write a climax that could stand on its own without relying on people’s willingness to laugh at Types Of Guys you can find people making fun of even on Reddit, their native environment (see? this shit is easy). I know I keep bringing up the Legally Blonde thing, but none of the big moments from that movie rely on this kind of pandering referentiality. I guess there’s a part of me that thinks it’s a little weird to see such a major movie, and one that clearly wants to be remembered as Iconic or whatever, receive so much praise for having taste rather than for making it.
We all have dishes to wash.
The musical gives him this working class single mom backstory which is really unnecessary but kinda cute. Different medium!
She says, five and a half thousand words into her Google doc.
I have spent seven months listening to people expound on how important it is for the Academy to recognize comedic performances, and to those people I just want to say: Where was this energy for Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street? Or Channing Tatum in 22 Jump Street? Or Channing Tatum in White House Down? Or literally any decent comic actor in literally any half-decent comedy in the past decade or two, basically all of whom have given performances at least as rich, compelling, and interesting as Gosling’s here? Are you prepared to tell me with your whole chest that Ike Barinholtz deserved to be nominated for the secretly awesome Blockers (another movie with a screenplay six billion times better than Barbie’s)? Because I would agree with you there, but that’s not the buzz I’m hearing. For the life of me I cannot figure out what has drawn such critical attention to Gosling’s perfectly serviceable performance, except that it happened in a movie that advertised itself as having ideas, although surveying the landscape in which men usually get to flex their comedic chops, a more cynical observer than I might be tempted to consider that some people found themselves subconsciously impressed by the revelation of a dude bringing the abandonment of ego and dignity good comedic acting requires to a girl movie.
I’ve also seen people read the aborted Kenvolution as a commentary on the success of divide-and-conquer tactics as applied to feminism, and first of all, after seeing this movie I literally don’t think Gerwig has the level of feminist consciousness that would require; second of all, you can’t have your cake in the form of biting social satire and eat it too in the total earnestness of the emotional resolution of Ken’s storyline, or if you can you need to be much, much smarter than this movie was. This is an issue with the movie generally, actually: it wants to be clever in a particular in-on-the-joke way, but it also wants to sell its big sentimental moments, and it’s not built well enough to pull that off.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s an issue, as I’ve seen some say, that there’s “too much” Ken in the Barbie movie, or that Gerwig “gave Ken the best stuff.” It’s like how I rarely think it’s warranted to say, flat-out, that anything is “too long” or “too short”; the real problem nearly always comes down to issues of pacing, balance, and perhaps a mismatch between the goals of a project and the expectations of the reader or viewer. I would have preferred a Barbie movie with less Ken, but I would not say that the problem with the one we got is that there’s too much Ken; I would say the problem is that his plot is funny but thematically incoherent while Barbie’s plot, similarly, is primarily plagued not by an imbalanced checkbook of screen time accounting but by the fact that it is boring, badly written, and largely entangled with a paper doll cutout of a feminist too unrealized as a character for her to build an engaging relationship with.
The thing is that the idea of Ken learning he both needs and deserves to be his own person is in theory perfectly fine and even potentially a sympathetic and appealing arc, but the execution of this scene just sours it completely for me.
Incredible timing for Barbie to release after season three of The Other Two (r.i.p.) had conditioned me to laugh at the mere concept of Marvel’s Simu Liu.
I wouldn’t say I am sure Gerwig is lying about having full creative control, but I would say that Gerwig saying she has full creative control is great PR for both Gerwig and Mattel, so I don’t put a lot of stock in that. I mention this because if she actually on her own without any prompting from shadowy corporate overlords came up with that Rhea Perlman scene as the best way to end her movie, like if that was her authentic artistic choice, that is so incredibly embarrassing for her I can’t think about it too long.
You end your Barbie movie with Barbie’s proud first visit to the gynecologist, but you don’t want to unpack on your way out whether or not it’s really “too weird” to have a pregnant doll, or let Midge pop her baby out in celebration of Barbieland being restored, or have her show up suddenly not pregnant because she’s only pregnant if she wants to be, like “canonically” actually, she had a detachable belly, or make use of the fact that in reality pregnant Midge was pulled off Wal-mart shelves because of complaints about promoting teen pregnancy and single motherhood? Noooo dots being connected there, at all? Okay. Whatever. It’s fine. I don’t care anymore.
Thank you so much for all of this but ESPECIALLY the cellulite part. It genuinely made me feel a little queasy the first time I saw it and I tried to talk to my (brilliant film critic and also extremely tiny) best friend about it but it was hard to articulate HOW incredibly mean and specific and hurtful it felt in context. And then it just never comes back! It's just left there!!
The rest of this is so smart and funny obviously, crazy that no one's paying you 8 millions to fix this script????