Barbie in the Demy-Monde

Greta Gerwig's spectacle sparkles and stumbles

Barbie is a film whose veil of self-knowing irony falls quickly, because, at its heart, it doesn’t really know what it is. Is it an A24 film? Is it a superhero film? Is it an advert? Is it an anti-advert? I went to investigate.

i. visuals

There’s absolutely no need to guess where the visuals in Barbie are coming from - see Gerwig’s official Letterboxd list of films referenced in production. As someone who coincidentally spent part of the last academic year co-writing an extremely pink screenplay that also took very definite cues from ‘30s comedy, Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man, and the Singin’ in the Rain dream-within-a-dream sequence, I don’t really know how to feel. Perhaps great minds (ie my friend Nicole and I) think alike? Perhaps Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach were pulling an alt-Hollywood Rebekah Brooks and listening in on our script meetings? Roosting in the messy pink-and-purple text of our shared Google Doc? 

‘Accidental’ plagiarism aside, here are some visual references I enjoyed: 

• Jacques Tati’s Playtime, with its moving sets and satire of capitalist individuality - see rows of grey cubicles at Mattel HQ but also the entire Barbie world of pink plastic. And compare Tati’s zoo-like suburbia of floor-to-ceiling glass with the classically open-air Barbie dreamhouse:

• All of the contrived echoing pinkness in the ‘Demy-monde’ of Jacques Demy films, particularly Umbrellas of Cherbourg:

ii good writing

Barbie’s strength is definitely its comedic writing. The bonus of quote-unquote selling out is that you get free rein to affectionately mock the corporate identity you sell out to. There is something wonderful about a good-faith film for adults set in the land of toys - Barbie is a high-concept, high-budget movie universe, but the writers are under no pressure to keep any magic alive. This is played out to its fullest potential in many strokes of actual genius: the inability to surf on plastic water, Barbie’s ‘expired’ carton of drinkable air, Ken’s job being ‘beach’.

The most prominent doll characters - Barbie, Ken, and hanger-on Allan - are characterised brilliantly, with Dougal-from-Father-Ted levels of lovable naivete caused by being, well, dolls. This only gets better as they begin to clash with, and to misunderstand, human-world. A contrast can get you anywhere.    

iii bad writing (spoilers!!)

Barbie is a film set between doll-world and human-world, but almost all of the clever midcentury referencing and funny writing concerns the dolls. This is its major failing. The doll-world is so well-thought-out that the film’s human characters are abandoned. They are abandoned to a prognosis much worse than what is usually expected of badly-written entities, ie. being a bit limp. Cue low lights, ominous music, the chuckling faces of ghosts: it’s the 2020s trauma therapy character arc.

The two main characters in human-world, a middle-aged mother and her tween daughter, seem to be written as if to avoid cardboard-cutout-itis. The mother has, for instance, thoughts and hobbies (death, drawing). Her daughter is rebellious and independent (used to like Barbie but now thinks she’s a fascist). They are cardboard cutouts anyway, and there purely to fulfil some imaginary screenwriting rule of an external impetus. Their writers fail at the first hurdle of making them several-dimensional.

Where do the mother’s recurring thoughts of death actually come from? Is it some life event that could have been mirrored in Barbie-world? Her drawings are, telekinetically, the driver of the film’s entire plot - but why are there only about ten seconds dedicated to this explanation, when it’s such an interesting and pivotal concept? Why does her daughter also have zero backstory? I welcomed the film’s relatively compact runtime, but later wondered whether it could actually have been longer. 

The film’s moral awakening comes when the middle-aged character delivers - in word-perfect MFA register - a long speech about the complicated, messy nature of womanhood. None of what she says is wrong: it’s insightful stuff about Madonnas and whores and weight and leadership, and it would have raised gasps at a bookshop reading about ten years ago. It gives Margot Robbie’s Barbie the kick she needs to redeem herself in the third act. It’s clearly written as a mic-drop moment for circulation on a form of social media that no longer exists. As is the danger of all topical social messaging inserted into big-budget art, it feels immediately dated. 

I appreciate that many people have ‘cathartic’ reactions to films that reflect their own ideals and life experiences, similar to those reactions experienced in, eg., a therapy session (I question this transactional approach both to therapy and to filmmaking, but that’s for another article). I do not, however, think that catharsis is an effective substitute for the basic mechanics and bits of context that make a feature screenplay engaging in and of itself. The mic-drop speech means very little in the big picture, because we have no idea what has happened to cause the character to give it. There is no point relating to characters who have no impetus to relate to each other. 

Barbie is legitimately supposed to be a film for adults. Its jokes, when they land, land very well. I can sort of envision, under the wreckage, a witty primordial moving-part comedy Barbie made after old master Jerry Lewis, and I can envision myself liking it. The real Barbie has been bogged down twice with things it doesn’t need: action-adventure story beats plucked from the Marvel corpus, feminist speeches and therapy plotlines that feel as tired and overdone as your university’s mandatory DEI induction does after a long night of clubbing. Is this part of the Faustian bargain you make when you quote-unquote sell out? Is it self-censorship? Was the script simply written a long time ago, when impassioned autofiction still held an air of revolution? 

PS. I used to be a devotee of Rumer Godden’s doll books so nothing can get past me. The Doll’s House is basically Tolstoy in porcelain. It is possible to do a genuine plumbing of the depths of human love and fear via personified toys, and I know because this author was doing it in the 1940s and it still works, both on adult-level and child-level! 

( <3 )