Thank god for Greta Gerwig. On Sunday morning, after I skipped church (…) and saw Barbie, I walked past a woman on the sidewalk. She had the writer/director/hero’s name pressed on her shirt in bold, black letters, the blocky capital font of billboards and exit signs.
“HEY I LIKE THAT SHIRT!” I told her, uninvited, from about 20 feet away, maybe a little too aggressively. She smirked and awkwardly, hurriedly, quietly said “thanks” and went on her way.
It reminded me of the scene in the movie where, entering the Real World for the first time, Barbie and Ken realize they’re getting attention but in different ways; he feels powerful from high-fives, she feels self-conscious from stares with “undertones of violence.” (The script is so good.) It’s the Garden of Eden on rollerblades.
On that sidewalk on Sunday, I had forgotten we weren’t in Barbieland. A strange, giant man running up to you to say he likes your shirt could risk being the fashion equivalent of passing a construction site – and not one with that good female energy. (Again! The script!)
And of course it would be – because that’s how we have to navigate our lives. Some of my favorite scenes were of Ryan Gosling’s Ken, shortly after that entry into the Real World, where he discovers the patriarchy and how truly seeped in our culture it is. (“Oh, we’re very good at patriarchy,” one man tells him. “We’re just better at hiding it now.”)
Of course, the trolls are out. Saying it’s too woke, it’s anti-man (which I don’t even know what that means?), it’s dangerous in whatever way. I saw one quote that said “they won’t be happy until we’re all gay.” Which…
Anyway.
It’s funny to me that people can be so scared of Barbie. Kate Kennedy on her (excellent) Be There in Five podcast about the millennial zeitgeist brought this up over the weekend. (She is also pregnant right now and I really enjoyed her POV on Midge and what it felt like to experience the Barbie movie with thoughts about her own changing body. She’s so gd smart. Plus, she’s hilarious. It’s worth the listen.) Sure it was super commercial and there were a ton of products leading up to the launch. And yes, psycho bros may be insulted by what it suggests, and scared of the feeling that Ken has when he’s ignored or doesn’t have an identity outside of Barbie. It’s Adam and Eve (again) in reverse, where man is created from woman, and look how powerful and destabilizing it can be. All of these things are the point.
The film is incredibly meta — it’s is at its best when poking fun at Mattel and its own existence. As such, Barbie becomes its own thesis – if girls and women and we as a whole can’t even play with dolls without projecting these images and self-consciousness and fear of female power onto them then yes, god damn, we really are built on this system we can’t escape.
When Ken takes over Barbieland, it reminded me of another (female-directed) movie of recent, Don’t Worry Darling. (More spoilers!) An entire alternate world is also created there, with gender roles laid out like a freshly painted parking lot, straight out of Leave it to Beaver. Men build a system of power based on their feeling that it’s all slipping away in the real world. (It’s dark.) In the end, both Florence Pugh’s character and Margot Robbie’s Barbie go to the Real World permanently. In Don’t Worry Darling it’s an escape; in Barbie, it’s a choice, Peter Pan leaving Neverland behind. I thought both suggested that even the Real World as we know it is less dangerous and more rewarding than an alternate reality where we shield our eyes from it all. Barbieland is great until you’ve tasted water and realize Kool-aid is a little too artificial.
But also I want to go baaaaack.
Maybe that desire to live in Barbieland where everything is pink and fun is where I found the gall to go up to that woman on the street and compliment her shirt. I regret not doing it more gently. I regret not making sure I was smiling when I was doing it. I spent the afternoon questioning if I should have even done it. Oh, the irony of it all.
It’s a parallel of one of the movie’s points – there’s no right way to do it because we’re already starting from a place where a man has the free agency to approach a woman on the street and talk about her clothes.
Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps. Did Barbie, of all things, make me think more about my actions and place in the world? Yes. But what I really regret is not asking her where she got it, and if it came in a men’s large.