Robbie is an obvious choice as Stereotypical Barbie; she has the same symmetrical face and unattainable perfection that has made girls and women feel bad about themselves for generations. But Ryan Gosling’s Ken steals the film. He’s very funny as a hollow shell of a man whose sole purpose in life is to get the attention of Barbie. Gosling’s early career in the Mickey Mouse Club really comes to the fore here with amazing dance routines, including one in which the story of the many Kens learning to make love not war is told through dance. And when Ken stows away with Barbie on her journey to the Real World, learns about patriarchy, loves it and brings it back to Barbie Land, we all laugh at the ridiculous Andrew Tate-ness of it all.
You wouldn’t call this film subtle. Barbie’s owner – a Mattel employee played by America Ferrera – has more than one diatribe on how impossible it is to be a woman in the Real World. But Barbie has never been a subtle character. She is stereotypical femininity dialled up to 100 and the film is girl power on steroids.
We both really enjoyed this movie and if it weren’t for the Barbie Movie-esque existential crises Greg and I both experienced in the car ride home thinking about the ways in which corporations like Mattel are essentially autonomic machines that we, largely good humans, are in service to, it would have been a Perfect Movie.
HE SAW
I was sitting next to two young women dressed in pink, who, even before the movie started, were fantastically excited, bouncing up and down in their seats, slapping their legs, clapping with excitement, fanning their faces as they teared up, hugging and grabbing at each other.
I tried to imagine how two equally excited young men might react at the screening of something they were equally excited about. It’s possible they might punch each other in the arm and call each other “dickhead”, but only if they could be sure no one was around to notice.
Why the wildly differing reactions? One common argument is that men are not as emotional as women, but as any therapist will tell you, that’s bunkum. Men are actually highly emotional – it’s just that we have spent most of our lives learning to hide it behind public expressions of love for fighting sports and Tom Cruise doing his own stunts.
This repression of emotion has been important for men, helping us to reach positions of power in the capitalist world we have created, in which the expression of emotions is seen as inferior to the expression of uninformed self–belief, because we’ve decided it should be.
What’s great about the Barbie movie is that it brings all this to the surface and makes us think and talk about it. What’s gross about the movie is that its motivation for doing so is to sell plastic and deliver shareholder value, mostly to people who don’t need it, and who couldn’t care less about the movie’s “message” as long as it returns a profit and shifts units.
I bring all this up because I went into the movie with those thoughts already in my mind, and then I sat down next to those excited young women, and I was instantly and powerfully struck by the contrast: the cynical middle-aged man who had come to roll his eyes at Mattel’s use of indie-darling filmmakers to credibility-wash their problematic product, and the young women who had come to laugh, cry and take selfies.
Because I’m a man and I therefore want people to think my judgements are rational rather than emotional, I’d like to think I would have enjoyed the movie regardless, but there’s something contagious and powerful about being in the presence of unbridled enthusiasm. I loved that feeling, I felt the movie was a triumph and I felt like I was being swept up in the joy and power of a movement. Still, I can’t help but wish that the movement was focused more on changing the world and less on changing the way the world sees a doll.
Barbie is in cinemas now.
