Movie Review: Barbie

So I heard this movie was all the rage, and I knew about the phenomenon called “Barbie-heimer,” during which Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same day. And I saw the trailer. So I thought, Ok, I need to see what all the talk is about this movie. Especially because I really loved Greta Gerwig’s movie Little Women, and also loved her in the movie Frances Ha. I didn’t know how I was going to like the movie, to be honest, but after watching it I was left with a lot to think about. It’s actually a pretty philosophical film if you think about it.

To give a brief summary, the movie takes place in Barbieland, where Stereotypical Barbie (played brilliantly by the very talented Margot Robbie) seems to be enjoying her life and being happy every day. It seems her life is so perfect on the outside. She wakes up to Lizzo singing her theme song and Helen Mirren narrating Barbie’s seemingly perfect life. Her waffle comes out perfectly out of the toaster, she wakes up without bags under her eyes, she always manages to fit perfectly into heels and stay on her tip-toes, and all the Barbies, Kens and Allan (there is only one Allan, and he is played by Michael Cera) knows her and says hi and she knows everyone and says hi, too. She also has a lot of Kens competing with her (the main Kens are played by Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir), but Ryan Gosling’s Ken just can’t seem to get her to be with him. One evening, while everyone is dancing and having fun, Barbie asks out loud, “Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?” And everyone immediately freezes, and when Barbie realizes what she said, she covers it up by saying “I’m dying to dance!” And then things seem to go back to normal. However, Barbie can’t seem to sleep because she really is thinking about death.

The next morning, Stereotypical Barbie’s life starts to seem a lot less perfect: she wakes up and feels tired instead of perky, her waffle comes out burnt and the milk in the carton is spoiled, and worse of all: her feet are flat and she can no longer walk perfectly in heels. All the Barbies think something is deeply wrong with her or that she is malfunctioning, so they take her to Weird Barbie (played by Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon), who everyone ostracizes and gossips about. Stereotypical Barbie goes to Weird Barbie and asks what is wrong, and Weird Barbie tells her that she needs to go to the Real World to repair her relationship with the girl who used to play with her because there is something off in their relationship that is causing Barbie’s life to feel off-kilter. So Barbie goes on a mission and goes to find the girl who used to play with her. She intends to go by herself, but then she finds that Ken (Ryan Gosling) snuck into her car and now he is going with her. I seriously thought this was going to be them in the car just having a long road trip and getting on each others’ nerves and then falling in love when they realize they have a crush on each other.

But that’s not how it works out. They get to the Real World, and they end up dressing in these roller blading outfits and Barbie gets catcalled by men and she finds that the Real World is very different from Barbie World (especially because in Barbie World all the Barbies ran the show: there’s a Barbie who is president, there is a Barbie who is a doctor, there is a Barbie who is a lawyer, and other intelligent confident Barbies in positions of power). Ken, however, ends up soaking up all this male energy and when he walks around he sees men in positions of power, and he starts to read books about the patriarchy. Meanwhile, Barbie is trying to figure out which girl she belonged to. She closes her eyes when she stops at the bus stop and sees a young woman named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mom, Gloria (America Ferrera) playing with Barbie and then when the girl becomes a teenager, she becomes moody and stops playing with Barbie, which hurts her mother because her mom loves Barbie. She goes on a quest to find Sasha, and she finds her sitting at a cafeteria table outside with her friends. She walks up and introduces herself to Sasha and her friends, but Sasha dismisses her, telling her that Barbie is the reason why these girls hate themselves because she seems so perfect and these girls think Barbie sets this unattainable standard for beauty. Her and her friends call Barbie a “fascist” and tell her to go away, and Barbie is hurt and pained that this girl no longer wants her. At the Mattel Corporation, everyone gets word that Ken and Barbie are in the Real World and not in Barbie Land where they are supposed to be. Gloria (played by America Ferrera) works at Barbie and draws the designs for Barbies. The drawings are of an ordinary Barbie, a Barbie with every day human problems. When Gloria is picking up Sasha from school, she finds that Barbie and Ken are being escorted into a black van to take them back to Barbie Land, but then Gloria gets Barbie to come with her and Sasha and hide from the vans. Sasha isn’t receptive, of course, but then Barbie explains why she is in the Real World, and she ends up taking Gloria and Sasha to Barbie Land. Gloria is so excited to be in Barbie Land, but Sasha is not. However, they arrive in Barbie Land only to find out that all the Kens have taken it over, and not only is Ryan Gosling’s Ken now in charge, but all of the Barbies, who once held positions of power, are serving them beers and wearing maid uniforms and being the Kens’ casual girlfriends. The new theme song for the Kens is “Push” by Matchbox Twenty, and after watching this movie hearing this song when I am out and about is going to remind me of the Kens.

Barbie is (rightfully) angry at Ken for doing this, but he tells her she made him feel bad for rejecting him, so this is his payback to her for rejecting him, otherwise he wouldn’t have done all of this. Barbie loses her self-confidence and gives up and starts saying negative things about herself, and Gloria and Sasha try to cheer her up, but Barbie tells them to leave her alone because there is nothing they can do to stop the Kens from taking over. However, on their way back to the Real World, they find that Allan is going with them because he can’t deal with the stress of being with all these men who are treating these women like crap. They find a bunch of Kens trying to stop them from going to the Real World, and Allan fights them off. Meanwhile, the Mattel CEO (played by Will Ferrell) and his fellow board members are still chasing Barbie and Ken down, so they go to what is now Ken-Land to track them down (earlier when Barbie is at a board meeting the CEO tries to get her to go back into the box she came packaged in, and Barbie escapes and goes into another room and meets Ruth, played by Rhea Perlman from the movie Matilda) who gives her sage advice about life and getting older.)

Gloria and Sasha team up with Weird Barbie and Allan to encourage Barbie to regain her self-esteem and not let those Kens make her feel worthless. They end up hatching a plan to reprogram the Barbies to be independent and confident again and for the Kens to all fight amongst one another. Seeing how they execute this plan was brilliant. They pretend to be interested in watching The Godfather with their noncommittal Ken boyfriend or asking them to teach them how to play certain sports, while they bring each other back in secret to Weird Barbie’s place so they can be reprogrammed again. The Kens no longer have control over these women’s lives, and so they fight amongst each other in a very fun and also very well-choreographed dance to the song “Just Ken.” Ken is upset because he feels that Barbie has taken away his power from him, and when Barbie takes over again he cries, and when she comforts him he thinks that she wants to be his girlfriend, but she lets him know that just because she is nice to him doesn’t mean that they need to be a couple, and she lets him know that she needs time to figure her life out and that he himself needs to take a moment for himself and not depend on her for his happiness. Barbie realizes that she wants to live life as a human being even if it’s not perfect.

This movie reminded me of this Disney movie I saw a long time ago called Life Size, with Lindsay Lohan and Tyra Banks. It’s about a teenager named Casey who plays football and hates dolls. She is struggling with grief after losing her mom, and has stopped hanging out with her friends. She finds a book at a bookstore called “The Book of Awakenings” and she recites a spell to try and bring her mom back to life. However, the next day after reciting the spell she finds out the spell brought Eve to life, not her mom. Casey is of course freaked out that this small plastic doll is now a full-grown human being, and she sets out to change Eve back to being a doll. However, things change when Eve saves Casey from getting hit by a truck after the owner of the bookstore chases Casey down for stealing “The Book of Awakenings,” and Casey’s dad lets Eve stay with him and Casey. Eve gets a job working at an office, and thinks she needs to handle everything and know everything but she ends up needing her coworkers to help her. In return, she helps them learn to love themselves and become more confident in who they are. However, Eve learns that she isn’t perfect and doesn’t have to be perfect. In one scene, Eve is making a cake and Casey comes home only to find the kitchen is smoky and the cake is on fire and Eve doesn’t know how to put it out, and after wrestling with the fire extinguisher, Eve gets fire extinguisher foam all over herself, and she beats herself up and calls herself stupid. Casey laughs and Eve is upset at first, but Casey gets Eve to look in the mirror at her face, and Eve ends up laughing it off. As Casey and Eve get to know each other, they become good friends, and that is why it is so painful for Casey when Eve goes back to her world of being a doll because they created such a beautiful friendship. It reminded me of Sasha and Barbie’s relationship. Barbie learned from Sasha that girls want someone who they can relate to, not someone who has everything figured out. And Sasha realized that just because she is a teenager it doesn’t mean she needs to throw away Barbie or pretend like she didn’t care about Barbie, because that connection with Barbie was always going to be in her heart no matter what stages of life Sasha went through.

And I loved when Gloria breaks down all of the double standards that women are expected to adhere to (e.g. have money but don’t ask for a raise, be thin but not too thin, be a boss but don’t be mean).

It reminded me of this book I read by Reshma Saujani who wrote a book called Brave, Not Perfect, and she breaks down all of these double standards in the book as well. Girls and women are often held up to these unrealistic expectations and while they are told to “lean in” and ask for raises and be bold and confident, they still don’t get the respect they deserve and society still has a long ways to go in challenging all of these traditional ideas of how women and men should think, act and behave. It reminded me of this Amy Schumer sketch I saw a while ago in which three women are on a panel and a man is facilitating the discussion and each time they introduce themselves they apologize for taking up space, making a mistake and even correcting the facilitator when he incorrectly says their names or what they do for a living. The women also apologize to each other when they interrupt each other, or when they express their viewpoints, and at the end when one of the women asks for a coffee, the person bringing her the coffee spills it on her, and the woman cries and apologizes for being alive. The male facilitator at the end doesn’t apologize, but instead says “whoops.” This was very real for me as someone who tends to apologize a LOT. I have been saying sorry to people for the longest time, and many people have told me that I don’t need to apologize all the time. Even still I continue to do it, but I think that is why I love Buddhist practice because it gets me to look within myself for what I need to change in my life, and as I started to see my behavior more clearly, I really am seeing that I do tend to say sorry a lot and that I need to work on saying sorry less. Gloria’s speech showed me that even though Barbie was telling women they can be anything they want and to have self-confidence, Ken destroying Barbie Land really wrecked her self-confidence and made her feel powerless and worthless, so Gloria was letting Barbie know that she needed to look within herself to find that self-worth because no man can really take that self-worth away even if he tried. Not even Ken, who ended up being a really insecure man who needed to find his own self-worth outside of being with Barbie and running the patriarchy.

This movie also reminded me of a concept in Buddhism called relative versus absolute happiness. Relative happiness is when all of your desires are fulfilled. You get a nice car, you get a nice house, you get the partner of your dreams. Those things do bring a sense of joy when you get them, but over time, the joy you feel when having those things doesn’t last long and we can’t hold onto them when we die. Plus, even with those things, you’re still going to go through problems in life. However, absolute happiness is something you experience when you can view life itself as a joy, no matter what your circumstances are. As I have continued to practice and study Buddhism, I am realizing that while it’s okay for me to want things, I am still responsible for my own happiness and no one can hand it to me. I felt like my life was a living hell when I was in the depths of suffering, and I felt like there was no meaning in life. But as I chanted and studied about the Buddhist view on life and death, I began to understand that life had much deeper meaning and purpose than I thought, and I started to just appreciate being alive on this Earth. Barbie realized that she needed to seek a much deeper sense of fulfillment within herself rather than always seeking it outside of herself. Even though her life seemed perfect on the outside, she was really figuring out what her purpose in life was and no one around her could tell her what the answer was because everyone was busy running around running Barbie Land and trying to fulfill these prescribed roles that they were given. No one had time to think about death because it seemed in Barbie Land everyone was just going to live forever and not ever experience dying. Ken didn’t really understand who he was until he had that moment of reflection, but it took Barbie time to reflect on herself, as well as her relationship with Gloria and Sasha, to figure out that she didn’t need to continue to fulfill this prescribed role that she was given by someone else just because that is the way things have always been. Because she had that journey of self-actualization, she was able to encourage Ken to go through his own journey of self-actualization, and so he could encourage the other Kens to figure themselves out. I really love the song in the film “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish because it illustrates Barbie’s journey of figuring out what her purpose in life is and what happiness means to her.

Overall, it is a really good movie and I am really happy Greta Gerwig got to get the movie made. I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

Barbie. 2023. 1 hr 54 min. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language.