Film Review: ‘Barbie’ takes on the Patriarchy

The Barbie doll is awash in controversy. Does it harm a girl’s self-image with the not-ordinary proportions and beauty standards? Or does it help girls imagine they can be anything – including president – with all the iterations it has released throughout the years?

The Barbie movie takes on this controversy fully, and director and co-writer Greta Gerwig has no problem slamming misogynistic stereotypes with jokes (and comments about the patriarchy) a-plenty. Note: spoilers below.

Margo Robbie plays one of many Barbies in Barbie Land (she’s actually ‘Stereotypical Barbie’: “the Barbie people think of when you talk about Barbies”). She has a perfect life: gets up in her Barbie Dream Home, has a non-existent breakfast, says hi to several of the other Barbies in her neighborhood, and then goes about her day talking to both other Barbies and Ken (with ‘beach Ken’ played by Ryan Gosling). And then that night is girl’s night with the other Barbies.

Everything is perfect: until one day, she asks if anyone has thoughts of dread. Yes, she somehow has experienced existential dread and as such her perfect life starts coming apart. (The best evidence is that her feet – designed to go in heels – turn FLAT!) She finds out from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) that this means the girl who is playing with her has turned sad and that she needs to go out into the ‘real world’ in order to fix it.

The plot is basically a combination of The Lego Movie and Toy Story, with a twist. It deals with the mix of ‘the play world’ and ‘the real world’, and it also deals with the idea of toys being somehow real on their own.

The plot takes a turn when Ken (the Gosling one), jealous of one of the other Kens (played by Simu Liu) decides to join Barbie on her journey. It starts out okay, but when they get to our world, they both see how men are more prominent and in charge than in Barbie Land. While Barbie is horrified by this news (she thought that she would show up and be thanked for helping end misogyny once and for all), Ken takes a different lesson – and eventually goes back to Barbie Land intent on making it more like the real world. The rest of the plot involves trying to get the land (and Barbie) back to what it was.

I admit: I played with my Barbies well into high school. I used them to play out various scenarios that years later I would realize was me just writing stories. (In fact, in college, I went through a phase where I re-bought some in the hopes that it would help my writing. Listener: it did not.)

While I understand why some people have issues with the doll, I never quite had a problem with it. And of course Mattel’s official movie is going to promote the positives just as much, if not more, of the negatives of the Barbie brand. But Gerwig also gets a dig at Mattel’s all-male corporate board. I also went through an anti-pink phase when I was trying to be ‘different’, but have since realized that being anti-pink is just as misogynistic as the other side.

The point of the movie is that it’s difficult to be a woman – more so now than ever before. There is no way to do it ‘right’, and no matter what you do, someone won’t like it.

Based on the reactions I had been seeing from others, I went in expecting to like it. But I came out of it loving it. And yes – I did cry at one moment (but it was a good cry). I also laughed far more than I was expecting. (The Zach Snyder joke alone is <chef’s kiss>.)

Is it perfect? No. But it’s not trying to win the Nobel Prize (although Barbie does have one). But it’s a lighthearted take on patriarchy, misogyny, and dealing with the complications of fourth-wave feminism.

Barbie is playing in a theatre near you. More information can be found on its official website.