A doll that is pleasant in every way – Weekend
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Barbie, which recently officially became the most successful film of the year (more than $1.3 billion in box office receipts), was released digitally on platforms around the world. The film by former indie film actress Greta Gerwig seems to be trying to sit on all the chairs at once and please everyone. Judging by the hype around Barbie, she succeeded, but the aftertaste is not very pleasant.
Welcome to the doll world called Barbieland. All the girls here have the same name, Barbie, they all live in houses without walls and do nothing but enjoy life. All the guys are called Kenami, they are just an addition to the plastic utopia of Barbieland, so they live on the beach and are busy impressing the numerous Barbies. It seems that there will be no end to this – but in the life of one of the Barbies (Margot Robbie), something begins to change, as if playing with dolls went wrong: things break in her house, cellulite appears on her legs, thoughts suddenly come to her head about of death. They explain to the heroine: the girl who plays with her in the real world is depressed, Barbie will have to leave Barbieland and find her owner in the real Los Angeles. Driving a plastic car and with one of the Kens (Ryan Gosling) tagging along, Barbie heads to California.
The biggest sensation of the Hollywood season – the highest-grossing film at the global box office in 2023 and in the history of the Warner Bros. studio – “Barbie” aptly fell into all the important trends of American cinema in recent years. Greta Gerwig’s third film (“Lady Bird,” “Little Women”) is a film adaptation of “intellectual property”: not even the original plot source, like, for example, films based on Marvel comics, but simply a famous image for which a story was invented specifically for the movie (like this happened, for example, with “Transformers” and “The Emoji Movie”). It’s a colorful spectacle, largely computer-generated, and designed with wit and attention to detail. It’s a nostalgic movie, just like the second film this year to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, Super Mario Bros. Finally, this is a statement on the burning topic of the role of women in the modern world (apparently, the Russian Ministry of Culture considered this topic not in line with “traditional spiritual and moral values”, refusing the film a distribution certificate – despite the fact that “Barbie” had no plans for official distribution in the Russian Federation) . Moreover, the issue of gender relations is revealed in the film in the relationship between the fantasy world (Barbyland) and the real world – which again reminds us of comic book films, in many of which superheroes move between a fictional utopia and a conventional reality.
This is precisely the relationship between fairy tale and reality that is the main conceptual move of “Barbie” and the basis of its plot. “Life in plastic is fantastic” was sung by the group Aqua in the hit of the nineties called “Barbie Girl”; and that motto is essentially adapted into the first act of Gerwig’s (and her co-writer and co-star Noah Baumbach’s) plot. In Barbieland, everything is unreal—milk doesn’t pour out of a toy carton, you can’t drink a cocktail out of a plastic glass, and you can’t ride a surfboard on a frozen sea wave near the beach. At the same time, the girls with the same name who inhabit this world are completely happy in it. Barbieland is both a feminist utopia, in which all positions, including the presidency, are occupied by women, and at the same time, a false world of ideal capitalism, an emasculated and absurd version of the American dream, where there is no need to work, and every day ends with glamorous parties.
This duality of “Barbie” causes confusion: Gerwig seemed unable to decide how to relate to the famous doll. On the one hand, the film works with the nostalgic feeling that many adult viewers feel for Barbie, including, probably, Gerwig herself. On the other hand, there are many questions about the image of a doll with unnatural body proportions, living inside an impossible fantasy of adulthood, which ultimately amounts to one big question: what are these games preparing girls for?
Most likely to great disappointment. In the film, Barbie, having found herself in real-life California, is surprised to discover that living in the real world is quite difficult, and also that it is controlled by men. The film, which was produced by Mattel (which produces Barbie dolls itself), includes a scene in the office of this very company. Barbie finds herself on the top floor of corporate headquarters at a board meeting – it’s all men in expensive suits, discussing among themselves how they can make more money from the ideas of feminism. It’s a good joke – but it turns out that the film “Barbie” itself helps these men earn more money from the ideas of feminism. And quite successfully, if you look at the box office figures. Gerwig criticizes capitalism directly from within capitalism – and, by pointing out the hypocrisy of the system, she herself falls into hypocrisy.
Therefore, the discussions about women’s emancipation built into the film ultimately sound like empty statements. In the first part of the film, we are shown the ideal Barbieland – much of it was invented by the authors with wit and love. The thesis is followed by an antithesis – and the contrast of Barbieland with the real world also generally works: the misadventures of Barbie and Ken in Los Angeles comically collide expectations and reality in the spirit of the film “Last Action Hero” with Schwarzenegger, who has fallen from the screen world into the real one. But it’s impossible to synthesize all this into clear conclusions in the third part of the film – we have to resort to lengthy monologues, where ideas about gender relations are directly presented by the heroes (or rather, heroines), as if they were reasoners in an old-fashioned theater. That’s because Gerwig doesn’t want to draw conclusions. She wants to please everyone at once – “both those who adore Barbie and those who hate her,” as the film’s promotional materials promised.
Quoting Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey in a movie about a plastic doll is funny. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling ironizing their own images as sex symbols is also great (for Gosling, it seems, this is only the second purely comedic role after Shane Black’s Goodfellas). But what of this? In classic Hollywood drama, heroes change themselves and change the world around them. At the end of Barbie, everything is largely back to normal. Life in plastic is too pleasant to give up – and this turns out to be a billion-dollar idea in the modern world.
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