Barbie
Written by Lara Edwards
Photograph: Warner Bros.
Spoilers Ahead
Published: 23/07/2023
It wouldn't be a Greta Gerwig film if it didn’t leave us overthinking our entire lives, and Barbie is no different. What seemed to be a fun lighthearted film from the press tour, actually cuts a lot deeper for the little girls that grew up and left their own Barbies behind. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach showcases the perfect balance of emotional writing with humour which is only heightened by the performance from Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie. We see Robbie’s Barbie lose her sparkle along with her sense of self and her purpose in life the more she is exposed to our “real world”. Being forced to watch what the weight of society’s exceptions do to women as they’ve grow up not only leaves us watching with an ache in our hearts but also experiencing grief for our childhoods.
Products made from the real world’s societal pressures are shown in the film by Gloria’s doll designs of Irrepressible thoughts of Death Barbie and Depression Barbie and of course Barbie having cellulite to show how “imperfect“ she is becoming. The latter expressing that her imperfections making her unworthy of being a Barbie doll but also as she “turns“ human shows that even though it’s natural she’s told that it is not. That is only the beginning of us seeing Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie feeling “not good enough“ under the real worlds expectations. It leads to her doubting her character and self worth as she no longer thinks she’s anything important which Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) casually dismissing to the other Barbies with “She’s not dead, she’s only have an existential crisis.“.
The film is self-aware when it comes to what damage Barbie has also had on girls from how “perfect” Barbie is and how it isn’t a realistic state of being for any person to achieve. It’s also valid to say it wasn’t even the Barbie doll to put that onto the young girls but when society turned on them and told them they should look like her. But also the comparison between Barbieland and the real world shows how backwards our patriarchal society really is. While the film has been criticised for being “anti-man“, I disagree. The matriarch in Barbieland has managed to give men only a mere glimpse of what society is like for women to be apart of. That being said it was inevitable for not all men watching to understand the film as deeply because they’ve, most likely, never had the first hand experience that Barbie is showing. Greta made this film for women.
Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig.
Release: 21 July 2023
Lara Edwards.