Remake/Remodel/Revision: "Barbie" (2023)

Out of the gate, when I first heard Amy Schumer was working on a Barbie movie, I leaped ahead trying to wrap my mind around the bits that Schumer would frame. There'd be plenty of innuendo, some shrewd observational and slapstick comedy, and likely, a sure thread of subversion throughout. What I couldn't figure out is what would drive the plot? A Barbie come to life like some out of control mecha? An Ex Machina with Barbie in place of Eva? 

Then the project halted as Schumer and Warners parted company over creative differences. Then, Greta Gerwig's name shows up attached to the project. And Noah Baumbach. And Margot Robbie. And Ryan Gosling and before long it sounded like someone's idea of an artists' loft party gone out of control. And all of it somehow involving the IP of one of the most reviled and/or lauded products from Mattel. The convocation of two of our finest auteurs with Hollywood royalty sounded like a match made in some Warholian heaven.

After seeing the Other Big Summer of '23 Movie, all I could think of was Warhol, Richard Hamilton, and a song by one of Hamilton's students:

I tried but I could not find a way
Looking back all I did was look away
Next time is the best we all know
But if there is no next time where to go?
She's the sweetest queen I've ever seen

("Remake/Remodel" by Bryan Ferry, from Roxy Music by Roxy Music)

Barbie comes awfully close to being the embodiment of all the strains of pop influences mentioned herein. It does something else, something more; it folds into a pop art extravaganza something not just some vitally necessary feminism, but expands it along two axes. 

On the one axis, sure, the gender flipping of a ruling order is actually pretty awesome, as well as the idea of all positions of power being held by women while the Kens of the world are relegated to playing on the beach and serving as eye candy and background.

Along the other axis, though, is Gerwig/Baumbach's expansion on feminism as a humanism; hegemony eventually metastasizes into oppression and imbalances of power can have catastrophic results. At the same time, the film calls us to question the current status quo and sociocultural imbalances in much of our patriarchicentric societies. All while using one of the most visible and well-known toy figures of the past sixty years. And here comes another dialectic rub.

How is Barbie not just a two hour long ad for Mattel's most famous doll? How do we square the fairly progressive politics and leanings of the script with the overarching suspicion of a major multinational corporation reaping - let's be honest - pretty decent profits from this enterprise?

A number of people will no doubt laud Mattel for having a sense of humor about itself as a corporate entity, but I think something needs to be called out at the front of this. While Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler did, indeed, develop Barbie as a result of watching how her daughter and her friends would play with paper dolls where the dolls would assume adult roles and jobs, Barbie was modeled on the German Bild Lilli doll, based on a comic character who was typed as a gold-digger and something of a "floozy." 

Whether Handler was initially aware of the source material of Bild Lilli, I do not know. Mattel did eventually buy all the patents and copyrights so that any use of the Bild Lilli name or doll would result in infringement and thus, de facto owned the source material. We may reasonably assume she did come to know more of Barbie's progenitor's history but/and here's where our story begins.

The movie covers the other dialectic surrounding the doll; on the one hand, she does represent so much wrong with what little girls in the United States, but frankly, throughout much of the world, are taught about body image, possessions, and identifying self with superfice. On the other, the contention that Barbie is a role model, showing those same little girls that they are capable of assuming any role, following their dreams to be whatever they want to be, and similar tropes of empowerment. 

If that last sentence sounds a little dismissive, it's because it is difficult to take seriously such a contention when it issues from a corporate/capitalist entity that is hardly likely to be the fount of progressive values. 

In this regard, the movie manages the dialectic as well as, actually better than, any philosophic treatise. The point of all this is that the film encapsulates all these tensions between marketplace capitalism and its consumerist exploitation and a progressive, if not completely subversive subtext, promoting feminist values and confronting directly the societal demands made on women (for just being women; America Ferrera's character Gloria delivers a tear-inducing soliloquy of frustration and barely suppressed rage about what women face on a daily - more like momentary - basis.)

Somehow, Barbie is more than all these elements distilled into a fun-on-the-surface film but containing some of the sharpest observational wit committed to screen. The second time around, the twin engines of justified frustration at centuries of patriarchal dominance and an innate sense of compassion and empathy landed exquisitely in the form of Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie. 

Additionally, the Barbie Idealist School starts out of the gate with Helen Mirren's narrator presenting the thesis that Barbie is all women and women are all Barbie. Such is what happens when we deal in absolutist metaphysics, but the self-critique follows immediately as we learn that the Barbies of Barbie Land believe that Barbie ended patriarchy in the Real World (the one we inhabit) and as the Narrator says, who is she to tell them otherwise?

She doesn't have to say a word because we soon find that Stereotypical Barbie is having thoughts of death, suffering from halitosis and cellulite, and her heels are touching the ground! "Flat feet!" shrieks her posse, followed by dry-heaving.

Stereotypical Barbie meets with Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon, once again, doing what only she can do and being both heartwarming and hilarious doing it) who tells her that whoever is playing with her (in doll form) is very sad and Stereotypical Barbie is going to need to find her to make this stop. And by "this", not just the fact that Barbie is being influenced by someone in the Real World but that this indicates that the relationship between the two has opened a portal between the Real World and Barbie Land. 

Just briefly, Barbie Land isn't quite a non-physical place but it isn't, for narrative purposes, at least, merely and idealized realm. Weird Barbie advises against thinking about it too much. This will find an echo in the Real World, later on.

Mind you, nothing I write can convey the crazy, pop art beauty of the sets, make-up, and overall visual design of the film during the first act. You could look to the early Tim Burton of "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" or "Edward Scissorhands" suburbia to get a kind of idea but really, this is a Barbie Realm fully realized. 

What's both disarming and inspiring is how each Barbie feels like her own distinct person. I kind of wanted to see a series of films centered around each one, from McKinnon's Weird Barbie to Issa Rae's President Barbie, to Dua Lipa as Mermaid Barbie, and on and on. Each scene seems to be fully realized through just plain concerted work from the actors to the set designers to the make-up to, well, hell, just blocking and framing. You get everything you need to know about each Barbie in each frame. 

The Official Barbie the Movie homepage sums up the conflict thus: "To live in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis. Or you're a Ken." Yeah, let's talk about Ken.

It's established out the outset that every day for Barbie is the best day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him. Each of the Kens is as diverse as the Barbies, but with no interior life and we come to understand that they only seem to exist because there are Barbies. Every night is girl's night and Ken has to go home. If he had them, his balls would be very, very blue.

As played by Ryan Gosling, Ken is a mass of empty, confused blondness. I was going to say "masculinity", but that hasn't entered the picture yet. All Ken knows is that without Barbie, he isn't. He is an appendage, of sorts, and not even that necessary of one; more like an accessory. However, it's obvious that there is something going on behind Ken's dumb eyes (dear God, he's thick). Yearning doesn't arise unbidden or without something inside. It might be best to think of it this way; as Barbie is beginning to come face to face with confusion, shame, and death, Ken begins to develop and interiority because he is tethered to her in some fundamental way.

Whew. I know this is sounding way, way heavy, but honestly, this is one of the stealthiest films I've seen in a very long time. 

Once Barbie's on her way to the Real World in her cute little convertible, singing the Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" to be joined by Ken who's stowed away in her tiny backseat. After relenting to his entreaties (and yes, Ken brought his roller blades - you need those to get to the Real World), he asks if he can ride up front. "No you can't." Ouch.

The journey transitions from convertible to rocket ship to boat to camper to roller blading onto Venice Beach (you have to journey to the country of Los Angeles) where Barbie discovers the Real World is nothing like the world the Barbies thought they had created. Being slapped on the ass by a guy (whom she punches back!), greeted by all manner of "entendres, which sound double"), and taking a moment to look around and take in various shades of emotion on the faces of everyone around her is a pretty traumatic revelation. Ken, by contrast, picks up on the heavy-male vibe, and finds a lot to love in testosterone in the air. No one does dopey smug masculine cluelessness better than Ryan Gosling, by the way. I really don't know how they got through shooting this film; I'm going to guess that there was more than a little corpsing going on.

Barbie and Ken get run in by the cops a couple of times, the second time for walking and then running off without paying for new clothes. They couldn't spend the whole time finding Barbie's human in neon, after all. The police let them keep the clothes and let them loose on their own recognizance, during which time Barbie finds a bench to rest on and meditate on how to find her human while Ken goes for a walk ("What should I do?" "Go for a walk." "By myself?") where he finds himself at the Century City building and bears witness to men being Men. 

As Ken watches and absorbs the power plays, high fives, big trucks, and importantly, horses, we see him growing into a Man. 

Meanwhile, Barbie takes in all around her, closes her eyes and upon opening them, discovers what weeping is. It's "achy, but kind of good". There is a lovely exchange with Ann Roth as an older woman on the same bench with Barbie that is so poignant - when Robbie turns to her and says "you're beautiful", your heart opens and breaks at that recognition; when Roth says "I know", if you can't laugh, you're missing some significant human parts. Roth is a two time Academy Award winning costume designer whose work goes back to 1964's The Life of Henry Orient. Her most recent work was Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. Look her up, she's a goddamned treasure.

On the bench, Barbie has her vision, she knows where her human is and Ken joins her as they head for the school where Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt, perhaps most recognizable as the young Gamora in Avengers: Infinity War or maybe as the young girl with Adam Driver in 65) is sitting around a table with her pals at lunch and when Barbie shows up to introduce herself as their favorite doll, is rebuffed in no uncertain terms as everything that young girls detest, ending with being called a fascist.

At the same time, Ken has been on a hunt for books on horses and patriarchy and at a pivotal moment, he sees Barbie getting in a black SUV with representatives (security agents?) from Mattel. The FBI discovered Barbie and Kens' breach of transdimensional boundaries and ordered Mattel to get this taken care of right away. This had happened before when Skipper had breached the portal between worlds and was going to teach a toddler to surf. But this was much, much worse. This is Stereotypical Barbie! The Mattel CEO - Will Farrell continuing his variation on the theme of bizarre, ridiculous/clueless authority figures - determines the solution is to put Barbie back in the box. Make of that phrasing what you will.

As Barbie gets in the vehicle, Ken decides that she'll be okay and he's going back to Barbie Land to spread the word of patriarchy and lead the Ken's in revolution. However, someone else has been watching and it's no one less than Gloria, Sasha's mother (a never better America Ferrera and that's saying a lot...well, wait, okay, Ugly Betty for the win, but as far as big screen performances, this is hard to beat), who just happens to be Mattel's CEO's admin ("word person") picking Sasha up from school having gotten the day off given the emergency at work. 

The Mattel goon squad bring Barbie back to Mattel headquarters where she meets the CEO and governing board and realizes something is very wrong: the board is all men. She almost gets back in the box but then makes a break for it. She gives the suits the slip and encounters Rhea Perlman sitting at a table in a kitchen. The second poignant moment arrives between two sterling actors, Rhea aka Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel and creator of Mattel, gives Barbie directions to getting out of the building and eventually, once outside, she sees Gloria and Sasha and they head for Venice Beach where they begin the journey back to Barbie Land.

Won't dad miss Gloria and Sasha? Cut to him practicing Spanish. "Nope, he's fine."

Once back in Barbie Land, we see how thoroughly Ken's gospel of patriarchy has permeated. There is Major Broism afoot; dudes playing volleyball, dudes being waited on by formerly accomplished Barbies, dudes drinking brewsky-beers, Barbie dream houses transformed into Mojo Dojo Casa Houses. Fist bumps! High fives! Duuuudes, brah!

Confronting him, Barbie is shut down by Ken as he asks her how it feels. Not good, he says. It's a telling moment and one that elicits the merest sympathy for the Kens, but again, given the subterfuge to execute a power grab, the lack of articulation or understanding the consequences of their actions, the sympathy for this or any other Ken dissipates quickly. Nevertheless, it appears that between the co-opted/brainwashed Barbies and Kens' complete dominance, the future looks dark, indeed, and Barbie Land's fate sealed.

Disheartened, dispirited, Barbie collapses on a lawn and Gloria and Sasha decide to leave her since it seems she's capitulated and given up. They commandeer her convertible and on the way out, find Allan has stowed away in the back seat. I need to pause here and note that in Barbie Land, discontinued figures like Midge (aka Pregnant Midge) and Allan (aka Ken's Best Friend) still live and one assumes in some kind of solidarity. Allan feels out of place in the Ken New World or as it's called in the movie: Kendom. 

"Once they discover that bricks need to be laid out horizontally, they'll build a wall so no one can get out or come into Barbie Land", Allan says of the Kens stacking bricks vertically on one side of the road. Kens, it should be added, that Allan dispatches with aplomb. I should add here that Allan is played by Michael Cera (always a pleasure to see that guy.) 

The three return to Barbie Land, pick up Barbie, and head for Weird Barbie's house to consult on a strategy to abort the Kens' enforcement of a new constitution on Barbie Land and the rise of the Kendom. We also meet Magic Earring Ken and Sugar Daddy Ken (not what you think!), which if memory serves, were themselves pretty subversive entries into the Mattel line decades ago. Short-lived, but they existed.

It's during this sequence that Gloria launches into her soliloquy (which I'll add at the end of this) and a strategy is hatched. Gloria's speech wakes up Nobel Prize Winning Journalist Barbie (Ritu Arya) and the idea is to deprogram all the other Barbies by luring them away from the Kens; each deprogrammed Barbie returns to distract the Kens by playing dumb or acting feebly. The mansplaining runs rampant but the unawareness is lovely. The next part of the strategy is to turn the Kens against each other; "Kenland contains the seeds of its own destruction." 

This last comes about when Barbie returns to Ken begging him to accept her as his long distance long term long distance low-commitment girlfriend. We go from Ken serenading Barbie at his Ken lair to a beach scene with all the Kens serenading each Barbie with their songs. Then, each Barbie checks their phone and leaves one Ken to join another Ken. Musical Kens in more than one way. This eventually sparks division between the Kens and culminates in a song and dance battle/number of epic proportions with Gosling and Simu Liu facing off in what can only be described as a Canadian Dancing with the Dudes. It is, frankly, glorious. Both Gosling and Liu have masculine posturing and flexing down and both are dancing whizzes from earlier on in their careers. And boy, does it pay off. 

The Kens decide to vote the next day after getting up at ten and by that time, the Barbies have restored their government. The Kens arrive to find the old order restored and are plunged into their own stupefied existential crisis which finds its fullest flowering in Gosling's Ken's breakdown. He doesn't know who he is without Barbie because it's always been "Barbie and Ken"; Barbie says it's up to Ken to find out who he is. She points out to him that he's not brewsky-beer, he's not his fur coat, his Jeep, not even his beloved beach. He's not the objects he owns or identifies with. It's a lot for Ken to take in and he and the other Kens don't immediately seem the wiser for it. 

That said, Barbie also points out that exclusivity and exclusion aren't the answer. The Barbies aren't ready to bring the Kens into government yet, but change is afoot, nonetheless. Mattel's executive board has found their way to Barbie Land and the Mattel CEO is put into his place with the Barbies exercising autonomy and Stereotypical Barbie rejecting the CEO's ending for her as living with Ken happily ever after. At that point, Ruth shows up again.

The executives fall silent as Barbie and Ruth go for a walk into a pastel void and oh, boy, do Perlman and Robbie deliver the goods with a dialog about, well, everything. Women's agency, what it means to be human, what is life, where do we find meaning. It's a conversation we should have more often. By the end of it, Barbie elects to be human after a wonderful montage generated by holding Ruth's hands to show Barbie what the human experience is like.

We cut to Barbie in the back of an SUV with Sasha driving to somewhere with Gloria and her husband (who's still practicing his Spanish). Gloria tells Barbie she's got this as she heads up to a receptionist who asks what she's there for and she responds, to see her gynecologist. 

"The levels of interpretation available to almost every scene in this film are myriad. It's astonishing to me that Barbie may well hit and surpass the billion dollar box office mark. But given the current climate which in many states is tantamount to a war on women, I think it's as telling a response as anything. The political dimension of the film overrides, I think, any concerns about the consumerist/capitalist critique (although, hell's bells, those are interrelated and we wouldn't need a movie like this if a capitalist/consumerist patriarchal structure wasn't in place already.)

Cinematically, this is a marvel. Rodrigo Prieto's work here is as good as anything he's done for Scorsese (including Silence and The Irishman, or Babel, or Argo, or Brokeback Mountain). Sarah Greenwood's production design is state of the art (her work on the Disney remake of Beauty and the Beast was the best thing about it). Jacqueline Durran had worked as costume designer before with Gerwig on Little Women (and also on the aforementioned Beauty and the Beast, as well as Atonement and Anna Karenina with Sarah Greenwood.) 

I think this is Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt's first feature score. They've worked extensively with the likes of Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus as composers/lyricists but I want more of their work in this kind of setting and if "I'm Just Ken" doesn't get a nod from the Academy, then the AMPAS is deader to me than ever. Actually, the immense creativity on display here deserves all the statues they have.

This has proved to be a crazy summer of cinematic wonder. Admittedly, "Barbenheimer" has taken the headlines, and justifiably. Two major films fueled by ideas and genuinely great performances, direction, and production are shots fired across the bow to all the flaccid sequels, lazy plotting, and Hollywood's on-going dearth of genuine passion for originality. 

I don't believe that the twin releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer represent a movement toward developing sharper, smarter films in any kind of broad or wide manner, but they do show that audiences can support a cinema that includes more than infantilization or empty emotional caloric values. Whether this does point to some trend, some shift in movie-going taste, only time will tell. In the meantime, I think I'm up for another round of Barbie and Oppie. Huh. Could Mattel come up with a new addition to their line or would an Oppie be a bit much (and beside, we'd need a doll for Blunt's Kitty, RDJ's Strauss, Damon's General Groves, and Pugh's Jean Tatlock)? Just think of the accessories!

Appendix: Gloria's monologue

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault. I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know.

Source: IMDB

Actually, do yourself a favor and enjoy the rest of the quotes already posted on IMDB. If you've seen the movie, they'll bring up fond memories. If you haven't, well, hopefully, they'll inspire you to see it sooner than later.