For a movie about dolls made out of plastic, "Barbie" shows an unexpected heart and humanity.
If you were thrown by the big themes in this story about toys, don't worry. We've got you.
Warning: Spoilers for "Barbie" ahead!
﻿"Barbie" begins with Margot Robbie's Barbie in Barbieland, the fantastical,
pastel-colored feminist utopia and home to every Barbie who has ever lived. There's also Issa Rae's
President Barbie, Hari Nef's Doctor Barbie, Alexandra Shipp's Author Barbie, and so many
others. There are Kens, too. They're all named Ken, including Ryan Gosling's Ken. Every day,
Barbie has the best day of her life, while Ken just hopes Barbie will look his way. In
Barbieland, Barbies are just being Barbie, building one another up with praise and
support and love, while Kens pine on the outskirts, trying to outshine one another
in the hopes of getting some attention or respect. It is a never-ending cycle.
But one day, Robbie Barbie's idyllic little routine begins to crumble with strange,
unfamiliar symptoms. Barbie discovers the issues
she's facing, including cellulite and pervasive thoughts of death…
"Do you guys ever think about dying?"
…are the result of the tether between Barbieland and the real world. Basically
the Barbies in Barbieland are tied to the humans who play with them in the real world.
Whatever child is playing with this particular Barbie is struggling with more complex issues,
and they're poisoning her otherwise perfect existence. The only way for
her to restore herself to factory settings is to physically go into the real world,
a place that the residents of Barbieland have some major misconceptions about.
Once she traverses the theoretical wormhole between the two realms with her stowaway
Ken in tow, Barbie is immediately struck by the power structure in the real world. Simply put,
men rule the world here, and women do not, a paradigm shift that perturbs Barbie but intrigues
Ken. If that culture shock wasn't enough, when she finally finds Sasha, the young girl Barbie
saw in her visions as the disaffected child causing her issues, she is stunned to discover
that she and her Gen-Z friends hate Barbie. She's shaken by the passionate, damning indictment they
inflict upon her, noting Barbie's toxic cultural footprint, crass consumerism,
and noxious effect on beauty standards, and by extension women's mental wellness, over half a
century. At her lowest point, Barbie is kidnapped by Mattel agents at the order of their CEO.
Everyone at Mattel just wants Barbie to get back in a box and teleport back home.
"Ken isn't something we're worried about."
But soon her and Ken's presence has the same effect on the real world Sasha's
cynicism has had on Barbie. Barbie flees and is saved by Sasha's mother, Gloria, a Mattel
employee who is revealed to be the real cause of Barbie's plight. She had been playing with her
and her daughter's old dolls in an attempt to reconnect with her grouchy, disaffected child.
Barbie convinces them to join her back in Barbieland, hoping the paisley majesty of
her home will inspire Sasha to be less jaded and to stop hating Barbie as a
cultural icon. Perhaps it'll help repair Sasha and Gloria's relationship in the process and,
at least on a smaller scale, fulfill some of the destiny Barbie had thought already
was cemented before her unfortunate sojourn to the real world. When they actually make it
back to Barbieland, they discover it is not what it once was. It is now…Kendom.
Robbie's Barbie has no real allies among the dolls, and doesn't feel special enough
to enact change with President Barbie and the others having given into being housewives. So
our Barbie lays down and gives up. To escape the macho madness that Barbieland has become,
Gloria, Sasha, and Barbie hide at Weird Barbie's compound. Gloria gives Barbie a
dramatic and heartfelt speech about the inherent difficulty of being a woman and it snaps Barbie
out of her doldrums. The gang deprograms Author Barbie and puts together an elaborate plan to
do the same to the other Barbies, one by one. The liberated Barbies will distract
the Kens while Gloria gives the other Barbies the talk that brings them back to their senses.
Step two of this plan is to systematically deflate the Kens' egos and set them against one another,
continuing to hide in plain sight under the guise of obedient housewives until the right time to
strike. Gosling's Ken is hurt by the sight of his Barbie flirting with his arch-rival,
Simu Liu's Ken, leading the Kens to go to literal war with each other.
The initial violence and brutality don't last for very long, though. Ken's solo song "I'm Ken" seems
to strike a chord within all the other Kens, as their dance-fighting becomes something more
collaborative. In spite of themselves, they've stumbled upon the solidarity and brotherly love
their short-sighted existences had been missing out on this entire time. The war now over,
Barbieland reverts to normal — with some added concessions for the Kens.﻿﻿
﻿ When Barbie
first gets to the real world, she's horrified to discover its patriarchal structure. Ken,
however, isn't scared of it. He's elated. After getting a bunch of library books about the
patriarchy from the library, he fails to get an important job for the simple reason he is a man.
"But I'm a man."
"But not a doctor."
"Can I talk to a doctor?"
"You are talking to a doctor."
Ken thus decides that the real world is doing patriarchy wrong,
and he needs to take those ideas somewhere new to fully realize them.
So he functionally takes over Barbieland, teaching all the other Kens to subjugate their respective
Barbies. They turn the dream houses into man caves. The choreographed disco parties become
acoustic guitar covers of Matchbox Twenty's "Push." The Kens convince every Barbie to stop
being a girlboss and just pass her boy a brewski. The Kens throw out the constitution and corrupt
everything Barbieland once was, much to Barbie's chagrin when she returns with Gloria and Sasha.
Once the Barbies distract the Kens to reinstate their constitution and return
Barbieland to its former splendor, Ken still doesn't know who he is or where he
belongs. He realizes he lost his enthusiasm for patriarchy when he discovered it didn't
involve horses to the degree he once imagined. Barbie apologizes for the way she treated Ken,
but has to caution him that this isn't a happy romantic ending for the two of
them. She says he needs to spend time and energy defining his own place in this world
outside of trying to court her. President Barbie agrees to give the Kens more representation in
their government. Meanwhile, the Mattel execs who crossed the beach portal are
satisfied, agreeing to start producing Gloria's idea for an Everyday Barbie.
Everyone gets some kind of conclusion they find satisfying — that is, except for Robbie's
Barbie. She wonders aloud if there's anything left for her to do, still feeling confused
and bothered by all she's experienced. She still sees herself as too ordinary
and unexceptional to deserve the kind of happy ending a movie like this is supposed to have.
﻿﻿But that's when Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, played by RheaPearlman, appears. She's
essentially God in Barbieland, and she offers Barbie some holy counsel. Handler talks to Barbie
about the true nature of life and death, along with what it means to be a human. Moved by all
this, Barbie asks if she can be a human too. But after all she's endured on this quirky adventure,
she finds she already is. ﻿
In the film's final moments, Barbie goes with Gloria and her family to some important event,
with the tenor of the scene suggesting this will be her first day at her first human job, perhaps a
gig working at Mattel as a creative. Her earlier monologue implied that could be on the horizon.
But for the film's final joke, her destination is revealed to be a gynecologist's office.
"Here I go."
At numerous points in the film, characters including Mattel's CEO, Weird Barbie,
and Ruth the creator offer up crucial pieces of lore laden with the burning
necessity for follow-up questions, only to hand wave them away. So when the film concludes with
Barbie turning from a doll to a real human being, Ruth's phrasing implies that this
last climactic moment wasn't alchemy, but rather the final act of a transformative character arc.
Barbie goes from being a one-dimensional and idealized toy whose world has never known
struggle, contradiction or the finality that defines a human life to becoming a
thinking and feeling entity who endures the full spectrum of existence all in a single
day. By pulling Barbie out of the fictional and aspirational artifice she was born into
and placing her within our very real world and all its complications, she ascends from dollhood
to womanhood, bearing the massive weight her gender must shoulder to simply exist.
It's easier to believe Barbie became human by virtue of magical transformation,
like Pinocchio, and that's a valid reading
of what happens. But it's also clear that a more pragmatic explanation is just as valid.
Just like the true nature of Barbie's final evolution, the uneasy relationship
between Barbieland and the real world is interesting to ponder. We're told, initially,
that what happens to the dolls in Barbieland is the direct result of what the kids in the
real world do during playtime. So why then, is Mattel so afraid of a doll in the real world,
and why does that give Barbieland similar power over reality? Before Barbie is a physical
plaything in the real world, she is an idea — a big one — housed within a malleable plastic totem.
When Sasha lashes out at Barbie, all the particulars of her scathing rant outline
the many ways that Barbie, the doll, shapes reality. The doll has become an ideal that,
on some level, flesh and blood women must be compared to. How can you compete with
an object designed to be perfect when you're a human being who is, by nature,
imperfect? We shape popular culture, but we imbue art and products with the power to shape us too.
So of course the figures scrubbed clean of all our ungainly humanity bounce right back at us,
reshaping the world as we know it in ways surprising and previously unimaginable.
It's also why the ideas Ken brings back from the real world wreak so much havoc on Barbieland.
Barbieland's idyllic paradise is informed entirely by a fragile barricade of lofty tenets,
utterly undone the moment they come into contact with contradictory concepts from
the broken world that initially birthed them. "Barbie," miraculously, is able to
expand upon the reflexive nature of the dream and the dreamer, neither knowing who is truly asleep.
"Ideas live forever."
Given director Greta Gerwig's unbridled enthusiasm for the brand and the film's
commercial success thus far, sequels to "Barbie" are more a question of "when" rather than "if."
There are plenty of Barbies and Kens to follow into their own similarly meta dramedy vehicles
that evolve from the blueprint set out in the first film. Too many talented young
actors appear here for one of them to not get another shot as their respective doll
identities. But with Mattel pledging to exploit all the other toys in their massive IP toybox,
there may be a larger Mattel cinematic universe that Barbie would merely be a player in.
How, exactly, could Barbie team up with He-Man, or the cars from Hot Wheels,
or Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots? If you've made it this far and have already seen "Barbie," you know
that the doors are blown wide open for any manner of tie-in to make some kind of emotional sense,
even if it’s found to be wanting in the logic department. Barbie could end up in Eternia
and the right combination of winking, nodding, and sharply employed '80s or '90s needle drops
on the soundtrack will smooth over any rockiness between the various brands' respective identities.
Reviews of "Barbie" have called it movie of the summer, as well as one of the best of the year,
highlighting Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach's script as well
as her direction. But where will things go next? Robbie told Time,
"It could go a million different directions from this point."
Gerwig expressed enthusiasm about a potential "Barbie" franchise in an interview with Variety,
but there are no solid plans. Whether or not Gerwig herself will return to
the director's chair is a more difficult call, given the rumors around her and the
"Narnia" universe over at Netflix, but a more tantalizing question is whether the
Barbieverse will cross over with another toy-birthed franchise.
This summer, we've already seen that Hasbro and Paramount's twin-toy juggernauts "GI Joe"
and "Transformers" are joining forces, and we know Mattel and Hasbro are buddy-buddy
enough when it comes to mutually beneficial licensing opportunities;
they're even planning a Barbie Monopoly game. Who's to say the "real world"
Barbie has entered isn't the same one with robots that turn into cars and
stealth ninjas working with independent military contractors to fight terrorism?
"Yeah, I'm…confused about that."