![]() ![]() Like a college freshman taking an intro class on gender – or perhaps like a high-schooler seeing a mass-market blockbuster with a developed political streak for the first time – Barbie becomes abruptly aware of the untenable societal pressures heaped upon womankind, released in a cathartic monologue by normal-person surrogate America Ferrera. The reactionary weirdoes decrying Barbie as peddling the “woke” agenda haven’t pulled much of a gotcha, accurately summarizing the textual substance of a film about one woman’s sudden burst of institutional consciousness. With a little help from walking #NotAllMen counterpoint Allan (Michael Cera), Barbie must open her sisters’ eyes to the reality that there’s more middle ground to womanhood than being an accessory to a man or a flawless exemplar of femininity. Before you can say “Simone de Beauvoir”, he’s instituted a full-blown patriarchy with all the once-empowered Barbies brainwashed into submissive, beer-serving pleasure slaves. She’s shattered to find that she isn’t the inspirational role model she imagined herself to be, but he’s delighted to discover a power structure that places him and his brethren on top, and carries this thrilling new ideology back to Barbie Land. As in their feminist Eden, Barbie and Ken came expecting a female president, female garbage-haulers, female Nobel laureates and a coterie of adoring, pliable men just grateful to share their presence. Her search for a cure directs her to the real world, where she’s shocked to find that our Earth bears little resemblance to the estrogen-fueled paradise she left behind. ![]() Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures/Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures Horror of horrors – she’s becoming a real woman. In this land of rictus smiles and relentless sunshine, imperfection is a cardinal sin Barbie’s existential crisis kicks into gear as she notices a small patch of cellulite on her thigh, and that her naturally high-heeled feet now stand flat on the ground. An upbeat song by Lizzo delivers exposition like a commercial jingle, narrating each of Barbie’s actions as she performs them. During an argument, Ken hurls Barbie’s wardrobe out through the missing fourth wall of her home, and each outfit momentarily flattens into a display-fold with logo and caption while suspended in the air. If Barbie and Ken were to kiss, one assumes they would do so by mashing their faces together at a diagonal.Įvery aspect of the first act’s setting has been informed by the rituals and aesthetics of toys and their attendant media, harkening back to the brand-savvy of The Lego Movie. When Ken (Ryan Gosling) hurts himself, Doctor Barbie heals him in the space of a single sentence. The chipper, blunt dialogue sounds like the internal monologue of an eight-year-old’s imagination, declaring every day forever and ever to be the best day ever. This realm is governed not by the laws of nature, but by the childlike illogic of playtime: Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie drinks from an empty cup, bounces off of plastic water and floats from her top-floor bedroom down to her car on the street as if carried by an invisible hand. Read on for a discussion of the internal logic, the peppy pop politics, the cameos and everything else bundled with this shiny new cinematic playset: It’s a Barbie world, with physics to matchįollowing a Kubrick-aping prologue that introduces Barbie in the place of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s monumental black obelisk, the film descends on Barbie Land, a soundstage fantasy of Dream Houses painted in hyper-saturated color. Now that Gerwig’s latest is out there painting multiplexes an eye-searing shade of pink, we can issue the strongest spoiler alert warning possible and pop Barbie’s head off to see what’s going on inside her cavernous neck hole. ![]() ![]() Even the trailers affirming that Barbie makes the interdimensional montage from her reality to ours with Ken in tow still conceal so much of the substance and atmosphere of a film with much more on its mind than the typical Hollywood product. Gerwig’s thoughtful track record as a film-maker suggested that she wouldn’t take the gig unless she had something up her ruffled taffeta sleeve, leading many to theorize a meta element possibly sending Barbie into the real world, but nobody could have guessed the extent to which the director-co-writer has taken the concept and run with it. ![]()
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