What more to say about the summer of “Barbie”?
I think I can admit, now that I’ve been thoroughly proven wrong, that I was only moderately excited about this movie. That I had three or four Barbie-universe dolls growing up, that they neither scarred me nor particularly inspired me, that for 25 years I’ve remembered that one of them was named “Keiko,” but a quick Google has just informed me that Keiko was apparently the name not of the doll but of the doll’s accessory killer whale (??).
On opening weekend, I took myself to a “Barbie” matinee and ended up loving it. But after a monsoon of coverage about Barbie fashion and Barbie feminism, and actress America Ferrera’s fiery monologue in the movie (“It is literally impossible to be a woman”) and commentator Matt Walsh’s brainwormy monologue about the movie (It’s a “man-hating sledgehammer”), and after think pieces about how “Barbie” was uplifting girls and saving cinema — after all that, it seemed like there couldn’t possibly be anything more to add.
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Then, last week, the movie set a record. It became the first film solely directed by a woman to break the $1 billion box office. Only 28 male directors have ever reached that benchmark either, and “Barbie’s” Greta Gerwig got there with remarkable speed — faster than any movie in Warner Bros. history, the studio’s president of domestic distribution told the New York Times.
This is the final word on “Barbie.” It’s spelled out with numbers, and it adds up to this: The movie made more because it showed us more. Women doing more, wanting more, being more. (And, as it ultimately turns out — Kens, too.)
For anyone who ever elbowed through a swarm of cosplaying Captain Americas at the opening night of a Marvel flick, and who believed that superhero worship was a guy thing, “Barbie” was the rebuttal. Women unearthed pink they didn’t even know they had and showed up at multiplexes in droves. At my theater, I saw a group of resplendently dressed elderly Black women, six or seven college-aged Muslim women in matching pink hijabs, and a bachelorette party of blondes.
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Women needed this, is what I’m saying. All kinds of women, in a melting-planet July, in a disappearing-bodily-autonomy post-Roe America, needed to sit in air-conditioned darkness and watch something with smart dialogue, elaborate dance sequences, Ryan Gosling, a chase sequence and a Bechdel test passed with flying colors. The movie has come to be a lightning rod in current culture, but it’s also just really fun.
A quick refresher: The movie follows the adventures of Stereotypical Barbie, who is played by Margot Robbie and who lives in the matriarchal paradise of Barbieland along with many Scientist Barbies and Politician Barbies and Supreme Court Justice Barbies. One morning, her world goes mysteriously wonky — her high-heeled feet fall flat; she becomes aware of her own mortality — which turns out to be because the woman who once played with her in the real world (Ferrera) is also struggling. Doll and woman must team up to get things back on track before Ken, who has been massively red-pilled by his own visit to the real world, turns Barbie’s Dreamhouse into the “Mojo Dojo Casa House” and changes the constitution to take away the Barbies’ power.
If you participated in “Barbenheimer” — making a double feature out of “Barbie” and World War II epic “Oppenheimer” — you might have noticed that the mojo-dojo patriarchy of Ken’s dreams was essentially the state of affairs in Los Alamos, N.M.: a rugged frontier where scientist men (plus exactly one scientist woman) carried out the orders of politician men and military men, where wives were left to fold laundry or mix drinks or, if they were especially lucky, take dictation.
Does that mean that “Oppenheimer” was, to flip Matt Walsh’s phrase, a “woman-hating sledgehammer”? No, of course not. What it means is that the men who populated that world were doing serious, monumental work, and the interior lives and needs of the women surrounding them were an afterthought.
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The female residents of Barbieland don’t hate the Kens who live there. They just don’t think much about the Kens who live there. They’ve got a country to run and lives to lead, and a nightly slumber party requiring sequins.
I can see why a commentator like Walsh, who admitted he hadn’t actually seen “Barbie” and had no plans to, would misinterpret this dismissiveness as an affront to men. But for the women buying popcorn, it was a revelation. Do you have any idea how liberating it is to imagine a society in which women do not need to plan their attire, their speech, their behaviors and their routines with male reactions in mind? Where women’s interior lives are more interesting than their romantic ones? Gerwig, who also wrote and directed “Lady Bird” and the 2019 adaptation of “Little Women,” has become a master of that form, and of recognizing that a cinematic experience isn’t “niche” if it’s targeting a full 50 percent of the population.
In one of the most biting scenes in the “Barbie” movie, Ken announced that it was time to sing “at” Barbie, pulled out his guitar and began to strum the chorus of Matchbox Twenty’s “Push.” As Barbie sat frozen on-screen, smiling through her discomfort, a woman in my theater shouted: “GOD. NO.”
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It seemed obvious she had been there, sung at, and had no desire to ever return.
Here’s the thing, though — and, spoiler alert. At the end of the movie, Ken doesn’t succeed in overthrowing the government of Barbieland. But he does articulate that living in Barbie’s world has felt hurtful and diminishing to him, and that he wants more. And Barbie realizes that she wants more, too. That a plastic world in which one group of people gets jobs like president and astronaut and one group of people gets jobs like “beach” isn’t going to satisfy her anymore. She’d rather get wrinkles and make gynecological appointments in the real world.
It’s a lovely idea. It’s worth a billion dollars.
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