Having been team ‘Oppenheimer’ for quite a long while, I finally broke down and watched ‘Barbie’ at the movies. You know what? I’m really glad I did.
If you’re a woman, and you watched Barbie the movie but didn’t cry (or at the very least, tear up) at America Ferrera’s monologue, check your pulse. The speech, which comes right towards the end of a film about a childhood doll that is really about women’s empowerment — or rather what should be women’s power in the first place, is one of those blow-it-out-of-the-ballpark cinematic moments. I cried, I’ll admit it, as I also started to tear up at Ferrera’s screen daughter Ariana Greenblatt’s throwaway line “didn’t you know everyone hates women — men hate women and other women hate women.” I paraphrase it of course, as I didn’t have my recording device turned on during the film. I am a woman, therefore I am imperfect and not afraid to admit it.
Why perhaps the speech resonated so deeply with me, is because I used to play with Barbies as a young girl, but also due to an exchange I had in my early twenties. I was living in NYC with my very cool mom then, and we had a repairman over to install some double windows. We lived in Alphabet City, right on Avenue B and the noise from the club across the street kept us up at night. Double windows seemed a solution. I was already quite handy then, could replace the toilet plumbing on my own, and fix this and that around the apartment. So, when the the handyman came over with the windows and hadn’t brought all his tools (because as a man coming over to do a job, why would you?) I lent him some of mine.
At the end of the job, later that day, I noticed that he’d packed up to leave, and along with his stuff, had taken my tools. “Hey, I’m missing my adjustable wrench and the hammer I lent you,” I said, probably not in a soft, friendly voice. Again, I am a woman not a saint. “Well, aren’t you the little know-it-all?!” He replied, then adding, going for the jugular metaphorically speaking, “you’ll never find a husband with that attitude.” It hurt me then, because more than anything, I wanted love at that age. Actually, make that at any age. But he was right, I didn’t find a husband, and maybe the handyman with sticky fingers had pointed out the reason why — I wasn’t willing to let go of what was rightfully mine for the sake of relating to others. More specifically, men.
Today I recognize the obvious symptoms of the “wrong and strong” syndrome, which said handyman possessed. He felt caught in his con, his obvious theft of my very good tools, and instead of saying, “oh sorry, I packed them by mistake,” as another woman would probably have done, he lashed out at me instead. He wanted my tools, if I choose them as a metaphor for something deeper like men wanting what women have for themselves, and once he couldn’t have them, he became mean and spiteful.
Barbie the movie is very much about what men want, and women have. Because in the film, the roles are reversed and Ken (played by Ryan Gosling to absolute perfection) cannot exist without Barbie’s approval.
Even though the film is supposed to be about the Mattel doll most of us played with as young girls, it’s really the story of Ferrera’s character Gloria and the love she feels for her daughter Sasha — which in the latter’s preteen years has gotten sidetracked by her own needs to find her voice. Sasha has thrown out most of her Barbies but Gloria manages to save one, stereotypical Barbie, who is of course in Barbie Land, played by the beautiful Margot Robbie. She dumps on the doll all her insecurities and sadness and causes Barbie to go on a journey into the real world.
The film starts with an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s famous “dawn of man” opening from 2001: A Space Odyssey: “Since the beginning of time,” unseen narrator Helen Mirren utters in the film’s first line, “since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls.”
While the story of the film really belongs to Gloria, the history of Barbie is pure cultural genius. Greta Gerwig and real-life hubby Noah Baumbach have penned a screenplay that mixes knowledge with power and transcends the confines of a “girls’ movie.” We can all find some wisdom to walk away with in Barbie and therein lies its genius.
Gerwig's Barbie has surpassed $800 million at the box office, potentially becoming the second film this year to reach $1 billion globally. That’s no peanuts, for a film directed by a woman to boot!
There are pop culture references, like the presence of Ann Roth, the legendary costumer, at the bus stop where Barbie interacts with the older woman and tells her she’s beautiful; great costumes by Oscar-winning designer Jacqueline Durran, including a stunning Chanel head to toe custom pink ensemble worn by Robbie and the infamous faux fur coat which becomes Ryan Gosling’s sort of superhero cape in his newly found patriarchal empowerment; cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, DoP of such masters’ films as Iñárritu’s Amores Perros and Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Music by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, with some great popular songs thrown in (see below). And the list of goodies goes on and on.
Perhaps the only thing missing in Barbie is a cameo by Ms. Barbie herself, Ruth Handler. The late American businesswoman created Barbie the doll in 1959 as a means for little girls to envision their future adult selves, instead of simply play-acting as mothers using baby dolls. But having the ghost of Ruth Handler, played by the magnificent Rhea Perlman in the film, seems just as brilliant a casting coup and manages to wrap this perfectly-feminist-because-it’s-not-about-in-your-face-emancipation masterpiece into pink satin bows that will live in my heart and soul for years to come.
Oh and BTW, the film probably won’t get released in some MENA countries, and troubles are already brewing, as the final word is —SPOILER ALERT: “Gynecologist”. You heard it here first people.
All images courtesy of Warner Bros.