Programme Notes: Barbie

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Warning: these programme notes may contain spoilers and may be best read after the film

Hi Barbie! You’re the most talked-about movie of the year!

I can’t remember the last time a movie generated this much buzz: a general excitement so fervent and ubiquitous that ‘buzz’ actually seems too placid of a word for it. Everyone you know is watching Barbie, talking about Barbie, has probably dressed up to see Barbie. Perhaps they’ve also partaken in Barbenheimer, like I did at GFT: squeezing into both those sold-out screenings in Cinema 1, I was bowled over by the energy of being in that packed theatre together, twice in a day. It felt like a small slice of cinematic history. Well, maybe not so small: the candied topic on everyone’s lips, Barbie has quite easily piloted her pink rocketship to the top box office opening of 2023, and broken the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend ever for a film directed by a woman.

Barbie has transcended the realm of ‘just film’, to ‘she’s everything’. We were all waiting with bated breath for the 21st of July, when the plastic curtain would finally be pulled back. Could anything actually live up to that kind of anticipation?

Greta Gerwig, the indie darling director behind Lady Bird and 2019’s Little Women, has become synonymous with a certain sweeping yet intimate, troubled and candid portrayal of girlhood and womanhood – and is most profound when she explores the ways they can’t help but collapse into each other. Gerwig’s girls have an uneasy relationship with womanhood; her women have an uneasy relationship with the way they still, after all this time, are girls. With an empathy as incisive as it is warm, she prods that constant ache: that blustering, euphoric, frustrating search for self; or more accurately, for a world that holds space for that self.

So while many were initially shocked by Gerwig’s seemingly drastic pivot towards the dreaded land of IP filmmaking, Barbie started to make sense. Gerwig embarked on Barbie’s script with her partner and fellow filmmaker, Noah Baumbach. Manufactured by Mattel, Barbie is perhaps one of the most universally recognised, iconic, troubling, contested, enduring, and capitalist symbols of girlhood. The doll’s continued existence in popular culture occupies a weird space: from her physical origins as the foremost woman-as-object, white and slim and hyper-feminine, she’s had to uneasily morph into what her makers have deemed appropriate updates for modern times. Doctor Barbie, Racially Diverse Barbie, Still Pretty But She’s Got Depth And Intelligence And Interiority Barbie.

Gerwig’s Barbie is a fantastical tale about shattering illusions. Margot Robbie plays Stereotypical Barbie, and alongside President Barbie (Issa Rae), Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), and More Barbies, the dolls live an ostensibly idyllic life in Barbie Land. The Kens are also there, and they fall over themselves for the Barbies’ attention. For a film all about Barbies, Ryan Gosling’s empty-headed Ken can’t help but feel like the star. This is a stunning comedic performance for the ages: he flexes his bicep, and it’s funny.

But when Stereotypical Barbie starts feeling not quite herself – for example, experiencing irrepressible thoughts of death – she has to journey to the Real World to find who is playing with her doll and causing this psychological rift between the world of humans and the world of dolls. Barbie is given a quick wake-up call: no, Barbies have not fixed all of women’s problems in the real world; and in fact, some girls really hate Barbie. Ken, meanwhile, has tagged along, and feels excited by his discovery of Patriarchy in the real world – and can’t wait to bring his message back to Barbie Land, which he will then attempt to transform into the Kendom.

The Barbie movie, in 2023, is a fascinating finished product. But perhaps most fascinating is how rich of a time capsule it is, how compelling of a litmus test it acts as for popular feminisms, for the ideology of the mainstream. Which is why, for all its simplicity, it can’t help but feel curiously ambivalent.

Mattel frequently tried to cut scenes from the film, like the one where Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) calls Barbie a fascist; Mattel president Richard Dickson (what a name!) flew to London to protest its inclusion, but when he saw the scene performed live, he changed his mind. Perhaps Barbie’s shortcomings can be attributed to constraints imposed by Mattel Studios; more likely, Barbie was always going to be confusing and contradictory. Patriarchal violence is depicted with as disappointingly broad of a stroke as a stranger slapping Barbie on the ass within the first few seconds of her entering the Real World. Elsewhere, a home video montage of mothers and sisters and daughters, collaged together from footage of the families of the film’s crew, feels like a brilliantly heartfelt, extremely Gerwig tribute to how often we tend to forget our mothers are girls, too.

There is a wealth of fruitful avenues for exploration around this film: from Gerwig’s cinephilic references for Barbie (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Singin’ in The Rain, and A Matter of Life and Death; see her Letterboxd chat for the full run-down); to the incredible work of set designer Sarah Greenwood, who caused a worldwide shortage in pink paint; to what Barbie bodes for our cinema-going culture, as a historically successful movie helmed by indie filmmakers that nevertheless remains a big advertisement for a doll made by a corporation.

But the same way playing with dolls has only ever been interesting because of what human beings imagine for them, Barbie the movie will live millions of lives, take on millions of meanings, through every person who watches it. Barbie falters when it tries too hard (or perhaps, not hard enough) to be feminist, to speak in hackneyed reductivisms and make jokes where the punchline is an unearned “patriarchy!” Perhaps it can only skim over the endlessly thorny and fascinating terrain of gender and its construction by power. It sometimes attempts to contend with the paradox of its own making: sometimes this works, other times it doesn’t.

But it’s left me thinking about why I was taught it was a source of pride that I’d never owned or played with Barbies; about the way I vacillate between avoiding hyper-femininity and then viciously, proudly defending it the second someone makes it the object of their derision; about why, a few weeks ago, when I told my dad I was excited to see Barbie, he scoffed at me, “You? Watching Barbie?” Barbie doesn’t have all the answers, and it never could. But it is brave in many ways, and messy, and ambivalent – and, as always, we are the people that will give it meaning.

Xuanlin Tham

Culture writer

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