Spoilers!
I am processing the new Barbie movie by Greta Gerwig and I’m sure I’ll be processing it for a while. Part of me thinks it gives us too much to process. But it’s also taking on some very thorny subject matter, and in that regard the overfortification of itself to inevitable criticisms is a better problem to have than not going far enough.
I’m actually glad I’m processing it so heavily, and want to see it again. Sometimes whether I “liked” a movie has no bearing on how it continues to live with me afterward. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City was quite sweet and thoughtful, but it’s a closed case, to be filed away — in contrast to his Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, where the characters’ archness was always a peeling, sweaty Band-Aid over a fathomless emotional stab wound, carrying a prolonged ache Anderson would send us home with like Thanksgiving pie. These films are imperfect, but I don’t go to art for perfect. Never have. I just want it to ring a bell.
I do super-duper love when movies are vehicles for ideas though, and the Greta Gerwig/Noah Baumbach power couple and writing-directing juggernaut is really in this pocket lately.
Gerwig directs movies about girlhood and I suppose by association “feminism,” so it’s meaningful to me that with Barbie she presents such a thorough analysis of feminism as An Idea. Thinkpieces galore are tripping over themselves to ask whether it’s “a feminist film,” and it’s a flawed, insufficient question and my eyes glaze over when I read it. Does Barbie support women? Well, yeah. Does Barbie support feminist theory? Well, certainly a contemporary feminist theory of intersectionality, inclusivity, and a pushback against the “girlboss” everything-or-nothing shit that e.g. Mattel’s Barbie franchise sells us with its CEOs, astronauts, etc. It’s not even a radical feminism; it’s just modern. It’s empathetic toward hyperfemininity, a relief after decades of “sensitive” bros and their mousy girlfriends bragging about how their disinterest in, like, tits makes them enlightened. It could be more Marxist, but it’s financed by a toy company and it’s not fucking going to be very Marxist, and that’s okay too, because in the real world its star Margot Robbie has said on the red carpet that she supports the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. A high-visibility labor win.
The Gerwig/Baumbach project prior to Barbie was one he helmed and she co-starred in, the DeLillo adaptation White Noise (my review here). It wasn’t that well-received on release but I felt warm toward it. White Noise was in large part a meditation on a different sort of academic mode of thought in flux — a ’70s/’80s pop postmodernism via Jacques Derrida, acknowledging the implicit tensions in parallel streams of deconstruction and post-structuralism, as the need to hold on to a fixed idea (so it means something when you take it apart, like ripping off a Barbie doll’s head) duked it out with the study of “lived experience” and the platforming of underrepresented voices.
It’s so obvious to me now that the couple used the adaptation of DeLillo’s 1985 novel as necessary conceptual groundwork for Barbie. In both films there’s lots to say about whether iconicity is a movable or an immovable force. If we, in 2023, have a mental image-flash of “Elvis,” is that the same image-flash someone even 20 years ago would have had? And who is the “someone”? Subjectivity is temporal as well as cultural. Elvis as An Idea is a living document, a text that grows or shrinks in relevance as the days roll on. (The notion of a “college Hitler Studies department” as plot point diminishes in scope through the film, which is not even to say old Adolf looms any less large, just that there are material present-day concerns the characters find more pressing.)
There’s no true vacuum an icon can exist in. That’s my a big takeaway from Barbie. She, as a product, has to keep changing, but at the same time we’ll never allow ourselves to be rid of her “stereotypical” iteration as something that haunts every last corner of womanhood. Disney princesses haven’t stayed the same either, in a DEI prima facie sense, but the archetypal “princess” concept still reaaaaaallly has its tentacles into little girls. Go check the tax returns at a ballet school if you don’t believe me. Go look at your local magazine rack and tell me how many titles have Lizzo on the cover versus Robbie and, like, Anya Taylor-Joy. The work is not finished.
And it’s unclear where Gerwig was going with her chosen ending. Can Barbie (and by extension girls/women) only find liberation through a sort of death? Through starting over and shedding old selves, old expectations, old baggage? Is the ending Gerwig’s take on the despondent Bruno Ganz abdicating his angelhood and becoming human in the third act of Wings of Desire? Is Hari Nef in it because it’s secretly a trans allegory? Is Barbie’s eventual rejection of Ken just an ice-cold callback to Jo’s of Laurie in Little Women? Do Mattel and/or Warner Bros. have a clue about any of this?
Like I said, still processing. That’s a good sign.
