honestly a little disappointed. i don’t want to say i expected more, because lowkey the film was already very… much. but i think i expected it to be a bit more cognizant? a bit more self-aware/meta?
one definite thing is that going to see barbie was a product as opposed to a cinematic experience like oppenheimer. it felt like it was more about the act of buying the ticket and the ‘scenario’ of going to the theatres in pink, than the film itself.
and yeah, that’s alright, because barbie is more about the idea than the toy or the story or the character. barbie is an idea. and we know that the film knows this because “Humans have only one ending. Ideas live forever.” i recognize the temptation to treat barbie as if she’s an actual human girl in this film - a la greta gerwig coming of age drama, but the fact is that barbie is an idea. but the film sets that ‘idea-ness’ in opposition to individual freedom: “I want to be the one imagining, not the idea”. the naive non-human → chooses to be human arc is a story we know though. i feel like it could’ve gone the other direction, of her choosing to remain an idea, to commit to the power and influence an idea has. in other words, to acknowledge that the flow of agency isn’t only human→idea, but also the other way round.
focusing so much on barbie as a character instead of as the manifestation of an idea (godhood?) also pushed a more individualistic version of ‘progress’ reminiscent of white feminism. it felt like those pink mugs white millennial women bring to the office that proclaim “i’m a boss bitch!” in gold cursive. in fact, why is it that margot robbie barbie is the only barbie to become human? what about the other barbies? and more than that, why is it that margot robbie barbie tells ken that he’s more than his job (Beach!), but when the other barbies are deprogrammed it’s with reminders of their occupations = their identities (you’re a physicist!). i strongly feel that there could’ve been something more there, something more in the sisterhood of ideas that the barbieland community should have been.
i think part of that could’ve been an exploration of motherhood and girlhood in relation to the idea of barbie. barbie as an ‘idea’ should have no concept of children or motherhood or girlhood. and yet, maybe that barbie could strengthen the mother-daughter relationship between gloria and sasha without being ‘human’ — by being an idea. maybe barbie as an ‘idea’ wouldn’t immediately make ruth handler into Mother, because it wouldn’t need a Mother at all. to barbie-as-idea, all women are women, and all women are important: earlier in the film she looks at an older woman at a bus stop and tells her sincerely that she is beautiful. that moment is exactly what i mean. barbie-as-idea is a woman goddess with no vagina, a goddess for a femininity divorced from sex and motherhood.
and that is also why barbie felt so cisgender and heterosexual. making barbie human in everything but the technicalities allows the film to skirt around the fact that she is a queer symbol. if barbie-as-idea is a woman-ness beyond motherhood and girlhood, then she is also woman-ness beyond the female biology. but it leaned so far into the woman=body that it came out like a primary school playground with the girls refusing to play with the boys because “they have cooties” and the boys refusing to play with the girls because “they’re gross”. barbieland came out childishly divided along the gender binary, presented to us as a gender-bended version of reality where the kens are decorative and the barbies make all the decisions. also, i don’t really care about how much the kens want the patriarchy… or the democracy in barbieland.
another part of moving away from barbie-as-human towards ideas and symbols is the barbie-as-product. we know that barbieland’s events influence toy sales (ken’s dojo casa house), but how? and if you were to make a movie about toys… why would you not reference toy story?? wouldn’t it have been amazing to get something like barbie saying “Men look at me like I’m an object” and then seeing rows upon rows of herself as an object in a box in a toy store? how would we reckon with barbie-as-idea and barbie-as-product? are they one and the same?