I'm A Ten, So I Pull In A Ken

I Saw Barbie And I Have Takes

I saw Barbie (directed by Greta Gerwig) with my friend Grace last Friday (hi @ Grace who’s probably reading this) and I thought I’d write out a quick newsletter of my takes on the movie since there are many of them floating around and I wanted to make my voice heard (as I always do).

Firstly, I really liked the movie, and I love that I was able to experience it with my good friend. I really loved the performances of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. I thought they both embodied their characters extremely well, and I appreciated all the small touches throughout the movie further emphasizing this connection. Robbie’s makeup going from very plastic and perfect at the beginning to far more natural and touchable so to speak at the end, Gosling’s portrayal of insecurity at the beginning of the movie to his brash bravado, and both of their nuances in facial expression and body language throughout the entire film stood out to me.

Also, I know it doesn’t really need to be explicitly said but the conservative outrage about the movie is SO cringe. “It encourages girls to kill babies” like okay, “Women can be more than just wives and mothers” is like kindergarten feminism so if you have an issue with that, build a bridge and get over it. At this point, Ben Shapiro’s 43-minute rage rant against Barbie and his whole schtick has to be a joke right? His wife is a DOCTOR, like she very clearly has more to offer to the world than just being a wife and mother but that stands antithetical to everything he claims to espouse. I’m not a proponent of the politics of negative polarization but the sheer annoyingness of the way conservatives are raging about the movie online makes me inclined to like it even more than I already do.

Of course, some of the gender politics in the movie were kind of haphazard but also, so are gender politics as a whole. I feel like the movie was attempting to say something about how men are also affected by ridiculous male standards set forth by the patriarchy,and toxic masculinity but it didn’t land because for one thing, I really don’t think that the Barbies ignoring the Kens at the beginning of the movie is equivalent to the Kens actively mind controlling the Barbies to do their bidding as they did when they took over Barbieland. However, while I’ve seen people on Twitter attempt to claim that’s some kind of elaborate metaphor for male-female relations in society at large, I really just think the semi awkwardness of this storyline just the consequence of the movie being an hour and 40 minutes long and not being able to say everything it wanted to. It was still very well-written and directed and especially really well acted.

Here’s some Gerwig lore for you though: Greta Gerwig is married to Noah Baumbach, who was previously married to Jennifer Jason Leigh. Gerwig and Baumbach got together when he cheated on the then-pregnant Leigh with Gerwig, and I might be speculating but I think this chain of events partly contributed to the undertone in all of Greta’s movies of like, yearning for youth so to speak. Gerwig is ~15 years younger than Baumbach and Leigh and well, an older man leaving his long-term partner for a younger ingenue is a tale as old as time. And, Gerwig reaches the age that Leigh was when Baumbach left her for Gerwig, I can sort of feel her becoming more anxious as she ages. Maybe that’s just a symptom of womanhood and perhaps I’m just projecting how I would feel, but I can’t shake the feeling that this anxiety about growing older is present in both Little Women (2019) and especially in Barbie, which is very much an entity in the Greta Gerwig extended universe of films.

I was thinking about this piece by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times titled, “The Hunger Fed by ‘Barbie’ and Taylor Swift” which is about this movie and Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, and specifically this part:

An obvious lesson from the gargantuan success of both “Barbie” and the Eras Tour is that there is a huge, underserved market for entertainment that takes the feelings of girls and women seriously.

I think this is absolutely true, but I also sort of wonder what specific feelings they’re referring to here. In retrospect, something that struck me about Barbie is that there was a notable lack of anger within it. There was despair, sadness, frustration, and women are seemingly encouraged to channel those sentiments, but I felt as if true anger was kind of relegated to a second tier, as if it’s not suitably feminine or at least some kind of pathological embarrassment. Even when Barbie herself was finding her humanity, I honestly don’t recall her being enduringly angry, not when men were harassing her or when Sasha called her a fascist or the men at Mattel attempted to force her back into her box. Instead, she seemed sad and upset and confused, which I empathize with and relate to, but as someone whose underlying emotion at all time is a simmering rage, I wish we could have seen her get mad.

However, I don’t think that Barbie is that kind of movie because well, it’s a Gerwig movie, and Greta Gerwig, like all women, struggles a lot with femininity and its relationship to anger. I mean, even in Little Women (2019), when Jo March starts a sweeping monologue with with, “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts,” she ends it with, “But I’m so lonely.” And that’s my point. Jo isn’t allowed to be furious at the world without being vulnerable in the same breath, and in that vein, Barbie herself isn’t allowed to be strong without also simultaneously being weak. Maybe that’s realistic but I wish it didn’t have to be because after all, how many male heroes are portrayed as vulnerable and fallible in this sense even while they’re also unequivocally the protagonists of their narratives? Sometimes I just wish women were allowed to be powerful without being dragged down by their own emotions, which I say as someone who’s deeply, profoundly emotional, but I guess that’s a different point for another essay.

In any case, I’ll end with a comment from Kathy Lollock from Santa Rosa, who wrote this in the comments of that NYT article and who I would absolutely go to war for.

Despite my musing on the movie that might not read as unequivocally positive, I am definitely glad Barbie exists. It’s a vehicle for women’s hopes and dreams to come out into the world, and it’s living proof that women can and do make art worth consuming and discussing, whether or not we fully agree with it. I’m looking forward to what Gerwig does next, and I hope she leaves the door wide open for other female writers and thinkers to take the directors’ chair and run with it.