Film Journal 2023: Barbie

Film Journal 2023: Barbie
Directed by Greta Gerwig


If you’ve seen Gerwig’s previous films then you know she has a unique and signature style. Given that Little Women was a direct adaptation, then you also know her interest in potential subversion of the text/IP. Barbie comes out of the gate swinging, leaving little doubt that Gerwig is all in on the IP’s endless potential for color, fun, and over the top zaniness while also leaving little doubt that this is hers to shape and mold in line with her vision and her style. Unlike Little Women, where there is a history of adaptations and source material functioning as the necessary foundation of what becomes a larger conversation with and about the texts place in history, with Barbie the foundation is more an idea. If both Lady Bird and Little Women tackled the challenges of being a young woman growing up into the modern world, Barbie functions as a broader and often meta take on the systems themsleves, especially as it pertains to history.

It might seem weird to suggest that an IP like Barbie would function as a foundation for such lofty ideas, but Gerwig leaves little doubt that for careful readers of the text this is exactly what we would find. That she wraps this in a careful and respectful celebration of the iconic doll, and has a ton of fun doing so, is simply who she is and what she does so well. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Barbie is the way Gerwig has crafted a film that speaks across the lines of our constructed ideas of gender roles and expectations. She cleverly notes the irony inherent in the idea of a Barbie world where Ken is an afterthought and men are facing the oppressive and powerful forces of an alternative feminist imagination, and the real world governed as it is by the patriarchy. The film uses these constructed realities to explore the interplay between the messiness that the doll represents as both idea and ideology, caught between selling the promise of liberation on one hand and perpetuating stereotypical and impossible images of perfection on the other. True solutions to the problem must find a way to cut underneath or to run inbeteeen the clutter and the noise.

The film also embodies this conversation in a mother-daughter relationship from the real world, which allows Gerwig to explore the generational gap that exists between the idea and the evolution of an idea. Binding these two things together is the idea of “stereotypical” Barbie, played with gleeful commitment by Margot Robbie. The original idea set in contrast to the evolution. There is a line in the film uttered in its climatic moments that explores the relationship between “becoming” (changing and evolving and experiencing and growing in time) and “being” (those ideas or realities that stand outside of time and are eternal). This provides a fascinating exploration for how it is that we relate to the eternal (the idea) through these acts of becoming. I’m not sure Gerwig is quite able to flesh this out to the level that it needed in order to be really and fully substantive, and she ultimately takes some of the easy roads around what are in actuality big and messy and complicated ideas. This typically results in a tendency to romanticize mortality rather than facing its complications and conundrums head on. There is an irony that exists here in the fact that it is tackling the messiness of an idea (the perfect, stereotypical Barbie) by avoiding the full implications of a messy reality, but this is unfortunately a familiar characteristic of a lot of Hollywood films.

There is no doubt however that she is able to locate the emotional core that lies at the heart of the questions she is asking, and she does the work to make it visible and accessible. And the work she does to transcend the lines of our social constructions and speak to everyone at the same time has real payoff. Even further than that yet, Gosling’s iconic and off the rails performance as Ken, the nod to Barbie’s nostalgic pull, the incessant in film references to other films (there’s even some odes to Elf with its imaginative take on a journey between worlds and the search for ones bonded human), the exhuberant dance numbers, it all pays off by being a whole lot of fun. Especially with an interactive and hyped up crowd decked out in Barbie outfits.