Barbie

 Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) is pretty bad.  Heralded as a witty, feminist romp, the movie's defects mostly arise from its compromised premises --  the film endorses the notion of Barbie as a widely derided Trojan Horse for reactionary attitudes about body-image and women's roles in our society; at the same time, the film wants to present the nine-inch plastic doll as a freedom-fighter for women's liberation.  Mattel, the company that produces and markets Barbie dolls is alternately portrayed as an insidious misogynistic force and a benign maternal influence. Two things can be true at one time, but Barbie is without any nuance -- it presents wildly incompatible ideological perspectives on the hapless doll that seesaw back and forth before descending into complete bathos; the film ends like Pinocchio with the plastic mannequin longing to become a real girl, something that is achieved by the installation of a vagina in the figurine's otherwise pristine and polished bald crotch.  It's hard to imagine how a film like this gets made, let alone marketed and touted from one end of the Internet's cybenetic universe to the other as a fun, politically correct and, even, radical masterpiece.  In fact, the movie is shockingly inept.  This is epitomized by song-and-dance numbers that are instantly forgettable and unimaginatively choreographed -- the dance scenes in the film are massively inferior to what you used to see on TV variety shows (Jackie Gleason for instance) in the early seventies; it's all slipshod, a mish-mash of routine High School dance-team maneuvers shot from inexpressive angles and edited to conceal defects in the choreography and its execution.  The movie relies upon the contrast between Barbie-world, a plastic landscape with a beach constructed with impenetrable plastic waves set in a day-glo desert that looks like outtakes from Wes Anderson's similarly botched Asteroid City and the real world, portrayed as an overlit, sunshiny Venice Beach and Santa Monica.  The viewer hopes to perceive some sort of radical discontinuity between the colors and lighting and locations in the idealized Barbie-land and the real world -- but the same bright, perky, TV commercial esthetic is applied to both places, thus, cheating the audience out of a clash between imagination and reality that might be productive of some interesting effects and ideas.  Reality with its dozen black-clad suited male corporate executives is no more plausible than Barbieland and so the movie devolves into dull and tendentious whimsy regardless of where it focuses its camera.  Similarly, the film's dialogue, a bizarre combination of radical chic, post-modernist cliches and retrograde advertisement-speak also rings false -- nothing sounds right, probably an intentional effect, because the movie oscillates between specious corporate diction and New Age proselytizing for self-actualization and fashionably progressive social causes.  The picture can't take itself seriously -- after all, it's about the adventures of plastic talking doll -- with the effect that its both wholly forgettable and light as a feather, a whiff of reality would blow it away, the reason, I think, that any thing even remotely grounded in reality is so strenuously excluded from the movie.

The movie gets into trouble at the very outset, a parody of the famous opening scene with the apes in Kubrick's 2001.  Helen Mirren, the narrator, says that, from the dawn of time, little girls played with dolls representing babies or small children.  But, then, Barbie appeared, here visualized as a stark linear form of glistening plastic very much like the monolith in the 1968 film.  To the music of Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra, the homely little girls, clad in rags for some reason, smash their baby dolls to pieces, using the Barbie figurines as clubs.  This is wildly and idiotically far from the mark.  Barbies didn't supplant baby dolls; rather, they simply infantilized adult women so that they could be played with as hapless, passive objects no different from the baby dolls that shared the same toy chests with them.  Furthermore, the sequence fails to understand the film's own logic:  in consumer capitalism, it's not one commodity or another, not either/or but both together.  (The movie exemplifies this logic by presenting Barbie as both a feminist warrior for equal rights and a monstrous specimen of misogynist rage against women's real bodies and social destinies.)  The opening scene is confusing and the confusion is simply compounded as the movie continues.

In an idealized, cloying Barbie-Land, our heroine lives an idyllic existence.  Barbie-land is a complete gynocracy with exclusively women presidents, Nobel laureates, and an all female Supreme Court.  The Ken dolls, exemplified by Ryan Gosling (who is supremely creepy and stupid in this film) are mere fashion accessories like Barbie's jet skis, high-fashion purses and shoes.  Ken wants to kiss Barbie but she always forces him away -- after all, neither of them have genitals, a proposition that the castrato Ken sulks about and, even, disputes.  Barbie discovers one day that her feet, permanently formed to elevate her to a tip-toe stance high heels stance, have gone flat.  She now walks about on the soles of her feet.  (This sequence is the sole clever and witty part of the movie.)  Barbie also starts thinking about death -- she says "I'm just dying..." then, pausing to complete the sentence "dying...to go dancing."  Barbie consults with "weird Barbie", the representative of dolls that have been mutilated, and otherwise abused by their little girl owners (my wife identified with the little girls who tortured their Barbies, cutting their hair and disfiguring them, and twisting them into "forever doing the splits.")  Weird-Barbie is a sort of sibyl, an oracle who knows how to reach the real world.  Weird Barbie, played by Kate MacKinnon, says that some Barbie dolls have owners with dark thoughts and bleak imaginations and these children can color the experiences of their surrogates in Barbie-land.  (The rules of interplay between Barbie-land and reality are not worked out in any detail and, the more you think about this aspect of the film, the more confusing the film's narrative becomes -- best to just accept the premise on face-value, but, again, an odd problem for a movie that purports to analyze, or go beneath, the social-psychological implications of the Barbie phenomenon.)   With Ken in tow (he's stowed away in Barbie's pink convertible), the doll crosses into Reality where she encounters a world in which sexism and gender inequality is rampant.  The cartoonish villains at Mattel try to capture her and "return her to her box", but she eludes them, meeting a ghost in their corporate tower who we understand to be the woman who actually invented the doll.  Barbie finally gets back to Barbie-land with  the sad intelligence that the real world has not been transformed into a girl's paradise like the fictional world that she inhabits.  But things have gone badly wrong in Barbie-land.  Ken, who has been infected with sexist ideology, has returned to Barbie-land in advance of his consort.  He has taught the other Kens to rebel against the gynocracy and has transformed the whole place into parody patriarchy -- Barbie-land is now like the world in The Handmaid's Tale, missing, of course, the rape and anti-abortion subtext, because the dolls are all neutered and without reproductive organs.  Now, the Barbies who have become strangely passive and submissive have to be inspired to revolt --  under Barbie's tutelage, they urge the Ken dolls to fight against one another, using the weapons of feigned female helplessness and male vanity.  The wicked Ken dolls are defeated and the gynocracy is restored, albeit now with some lip service to equal rights among the male and female dolls.  Barbie, meanwhile, has suddenly developed a hankering to become a real girl complete with vagina and uterus.  She encounters the benign matriarch, Ruth Handsley, who invented Barbie and is granted her wish.  The movie ends with a bizarre flourish with Barbie making her first visit to a gynecologist's office apparently in Santa Monica:  does she have a sexually transmitted disease? is she pregnant or suffering from endometriosis?  In what world is Santa Monica visualized as representative of reality?

The movie wants to be on all sides of every issue:  it wants to be vehemently anti-Barbie and vehemently pro-Barbie; it wants to endorse "girl-culture" and yet rail against "girlish things" as superficial.  There is a subplot featuring the mother whose dark imaginings have destabilized Barbie-world.  This woman has an irritatingly precocious teenage daughter who despises Barbie as a false ideal as to women's body image and aspirations.  But the girl comes around to loving Barbie and this forges a renewed and positive relationship between mother and daughter.  Mattel executives are portrayed as comically inept, nasty, sexist villains but Mattel produced the picture and, at the film's end, it is said that Barbie and love of Barbie is a tie that connects succeeding generations of women in bonds of love and affection.  Margot Robbie is okay in the thankless role of Barbie; Rhea Perlman is cloying, but touching, as the woman who invented Barbie; Ryan Gosling is utterly annoying as in every picture in which I have seen this actor, a perfomer who somehow manages to combine both the most extreme vanity and false "aw-shucks" humility -- this guy always plays idiots and it's not surprising that he can neither sing nor dance.  Greta Gerwig directs in a flat-out panic, like someone rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  

The film, as a cultural artifact, exemplifies a disquieting aspect of movie-marketing.  For months before the film's premiere. the internet buzzed with articles describing the actors, their relationships with one another, and other information about how the movie was made.  There were literally innumerable articles of this sort, accompanied by lots of pictures and interviews.  Then, in the dozen days before the film's premiere thousands of critical accolades, presumably all of them bought and paid-for, were dropped everywhere on the internet.  The effect was to create a tidal wave of interest in the movie which is, in fact, profoundly dull and uninteresting.  This sort of carpet-bombing media blitz inevitably creates a huge audience for the films that it promotes.  The same campaign was conducted for Oppenheimer, a better movie but, nonetheless, not that good and, later, for Killers of the Flower Moon (and Napoleon).  The key point to understand here is that the positive reviews are all purchased and that the movies marketed in this way may or may not be any good -- but they certainly aren't accurately described by this tsunami of media posts.