My analysis/thoughts/review of the Barbie movie, in no particular order, and in case this working title doesn't make it clear,
THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE BARBIE MOVIE
First of all, the attention to detail is incredible. I knew that much was true from watching the trailers; yet none of them prepared me for the giddiness I felt in the opening minutes when the Barbies escorted an injured Ken to a medical van that folded out to become a hospital room complete with a pink stretcher! And seeing Barbie's fridge perfectly filled with painted-on cartons of milk had me clutching my husband's arm and whispering to him "it's just like the real Barbie dream house!"
Speaking of being transported back to my childhood, so many buried memories came crawling back when the different Barbies graced the screen, but I never thought I would get triggered by, of all things, Growing Up Skipper Barbie???? Again, I clutched my husband's arm and loudly whispered to him "I remember her!" and he responded with "Really? There's no way she was a real Barbie doll." (He's wrong though. She does exist.)
Here is where I'll really dive into the plot. After the audience gets introduced to Barbie and sees her undergo an existential crisis, our heroine gets introduced to the Real World, where she discovers that she did not, in fact, solve the patriarchy with her existence. Now, some may argue that her introduction to the misandry of the Real World is very on the nose, but I'd argue that that's the point. The whole movie is supposed to be self-aware and at times uncomfortable. They practically state at the end of the movie that to be human is to feel uncomfortable sometimes! Unfortunately, a lot of the folks who left one star reviews for this movie were clearly not okay with this. A lot of them seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking subtle = good and overt = bad. What they perhaps fail to consider is that they only like subtle themes in movies because it doesn't bruise their egos as badly.
So while Barbie is spiraling into a deeper existential breakdown, Ken is enjoying life in the Real World because as a man, he's suddenly important. But the icing on the cake of Ken's adventure is that he wholeheartedly believes that the patriarchy has something to do with horses??? Ken's obsession with horses got to a point that every time I saw him and a horse on screen all I'd see was this
Even though Barbie is overall having a horrible time, we get an absolutely beautiful exchange between her and an older woman at a bus stop. Not going to lie, I cried at this part of the movie. In a society that champions youthful beauty, it warmed my cold dead heart to see an old woman living her life with the confidence of... well, Barbie. "You're beautiful," Barbie tells her, to which she replies "I know it." ICONIC I TELL YOU! And when I tell you that I would kill for this old lady, I'm only partially joking -
Speaking of the old lady, my SIL mentioned a theory she had heard that the old lady is Barbara Handler. It's not canon - or at least, it's not confirmed. Deep down in my heart though, that woman is Barbara Handler.
Barbie finally finds the kid that had been playing with her, a tween named Sasha, and gets torn to bits by this girl. Watching piranhas eat a poor animal live is less horrifying. At the same time, I could kinda see it coming because I was totally that girl when I was a tween. At that age, I thought that it was silly of me to like glitter and pink, and like Sasha, I resented Barbie for promoting unrealistic beauty standards. So when it was revealed that Barbie isn't actually Sasha's Barbie but her mother's Barbie, I was not really surprised. Older women tend to look at Barbie more favorably than their daughters do. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but maybe it's because the older you get the more you realize that Barbie isn't just a pretty face but an accomplished woman in her own right. Greta Gerwig hides this reveal with some clever misdirection, so it's a satisfying twist in my opinion.
While Barbie is going on her wild adventure, the CEO of Mattel and his goons try to capture her and put her in a box. Again, it's a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for how a lot of people try to keep Barbie in a box of their own pre-conceived notions of her, but once again it's cleverly done. I love the detail of the twist-ties that slowly tightened around her wrists. As a small kid those twist ties were my biggest enemy.
Barbie returns to Barbieland with Sasha and Gloria and discovers that Ken had brought back something as well: the patriarchy. I honestly did not expect to see Ken go on a corruption arc and turn into the villain but it was such a riot. The movie got even better when Barbie gave up trying to fix Barbieland and the plot cut to an ad for Depressed Barbie that called out the entire theater for our collective obsession with BBC's 1996 Pride and Prejudice series. Everyone in my theater was SCREECHING with laughter. It was a great time.
Gloria breaks Barbie out of her depression with a speech about the difficulties of being a woman and how women's lives are contradictory. It was a great scene in my opinion, especially considering that Barbie can be quite contradictory herself - she's supposed to be the paragon of an empowered woman, yet she is never allowed to step outside the bounds of idealized beauty standards. The narrator even reminds us the irony of Barbie saying that she feels ugly when she's played by Margot Fucking Robbie in what was one of the best fourth-wall breaks in the entire film.
The Barbies enact a plan to restore Barbieland, which turns out to be quite simple - they just let the patriarchy tear itself apart. This was also one of the best scenes in the entire movie, in my opinion. Not only does Ken lead a D-Day style beach invasion against the other Kens, but they even break out into an awesomely-choreographed musical number. But even better than that, this scene perfectly demonstrates that in a patriarchy, men's biggest enemy isn't women, but other men.
The conflict resolves with Ken admitting his feelings of inadequacy and Barbie encouraging him to discover his self-worth outside of his relationship with her. And then Ken wears the best hoodie in existence. I cannot stress enough how much I want to own this hoodie.
And now I will talk about my favorite scenes: Barbie meeting Ruth Handler. The first time she meets her creator is when she stumbles upon her in the Mattel headquarters. The gray, symmetrical office space is transformed into a cozy home, where a woman sits at a kitchen table. Some people that I talked to didn't realize that the woman was Ruth Handler at first, but the sewing machine on the table was a dead give-away in my opinion. It's a very touching moment where Ruth offers Barbie some tea and remarks that she "looks different than she expected" - a reference to her daughter, Barbara. But if this scene almost made me cry, the scene where they meet for a second time made me bawl. Ruth holds Barbie's hands and tells her that she can't let Barbie become a human without letting her know what it is really like. We get this montage of Barbie becoming human - she breathes, her heart beats. She exists in a body that she can call her own. When she returns to the real world, she isn't a doll named Barbie, but a woman named Barbara Handler.
And then she goes to the gynecologist
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