My Barbie Hot Take
I went to see it and I have feelings.
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There is a lot of pressure to have a hot take on Barbie. Even if you are not, like me, someone who shares her opinions for a living. The question “Have you seen Barbie?” feels pregnant with questions about feminism and body image and sexism and that’s all pretty heavy for a movie about a doll.
And yet here we are.
Over the weekend, millions of women and girls went to see Barbie and me too. I invited my 17yo daughter and her girlfriend and I didn’t know whether they’d want to come because I’m never certain where teenagers are going to land on big pop cultural moments. They are notoriously cynical which I kind of respect.
But the girls were all in.
Before we went, my group chats started popping off as my friends who’d already seen the film, came to share how they felt about it. The idea of no spoilers is pretty funny in the context of a movie about a doll, I mean, it’s not like Barbie is going to die in a plane crash. Or is she? (she’s not).
It’s not the plot though, that women want to discuss after watching this movie, it’s their feelings. Some were unequivocal “Loved it! I cried! WTF” but some were more tentative….almost like they wanted to know if it was OK to like it? Or did that somehow mean we’d been sucked in by the marketing?
I’m going to share some observations in point form because the thought of writing a longform essay about this film is frankly too exhausting. My brain already hurts a little bit from the mental gymnastics I found myself having to perform while watching it. Not in a bad way. It was just more thinky than I expected.
Barbie is very much a Trojan horse movie but I can’t work out what the horse is. Is it a pink plastic horse with feminism inside? Or is it a feminist horse with marketing inside? I think it’s both?
The experience of preparing to see the film was as fun as the film itself and I wonder if this is how boys feel about going to see Marvel movies? It felt like an EXPERIENCE and the last time I felt like that about a film was the first Sex & The City movie (let us never speak of the sequel because we do not accept it as part of the SATC cannon). We wore pink and we felt a heady, giggly camaraderie with all the other pink women and girls heading towards the cinema. I love nothing more than feeling part of a big cultural moment like the big pink sheep that I am.
Watching the movie itself was a little bit…..hard? I just couldn’t relax into enjoying it even though I was objectively enjoying it? And I have been trying to unpack why this is. And then I remembered this headline from the satirical website The Onion which sums up my feelings perfectly:
The first thing my daughter said when the film finished was, “Greta Gerwig is a genius” and that would also be my TLDR review. It’s astonishing how she managed to thread the needle of making a commercial film that Mattel would agree to while also acknowledging all the problematic aspects of Barbie. It was instantly disarming. Ditto Margot Robbie who was the one who brought Gerwig into the project and produced the film as well as starring. I hope they both make tens of millions because Mattel certainly will and these women deserve it.
Someone give a gold Logie and all the Oscars to the Barbie marketing team. The smartest line I have ever heard in a marketing campaign is this: “If you love Barbie, this film is for you. If you hate Barbie, this film is for you.”
Genius. It gave everyone who had reservations about Barbie permission to go see the film. And they did. In enormous numbers. It also turned a kid’s toy into a cultural symbol of….feminism? I still can’t work out how they pulled this off but they did. I was listening to an interview with the head of marketing at Warner Bros. who made the film and he was saying how they did over 100 licencing deals to tie-in with the film and “we made it into more than a movie, it was a pink movement of female empowerment”. If you had told me that someone could say that about Barbie in 2023 I would have laughed but they actually somehow did it.
I cannot stop singing “I’m just Ken”. Total ear worm.
Loved loved the end line about the gynaecologist (although some people really didn’t). I was kind of hoping Barbie was going to get an abortion as a statement about Roe vs Wade but baby steps. Maybe in the sequel.
Some more Barbie reads….
The scene in Barbie that’s making grown women sob
21 thoughts I had while watching Barbie
The best Barbie outfitshttps://www.mamamia.com.au/margot-robbie-barbie-outfits/ worn by Margot Robbie
“I spent an afternoon with the Barbie cast”
18 clever easter eggs you may have missed in the Barbie movie
He’s just (not) Ken - the actors who were almost cast
LISTEN: Mamamia Outloud Barbie review