It Is Literally Impossible To Be A Movie

Editor’s note: About once a year, I watch a film.

I’m going to write a review of the Barbie Movie in 2024, which is a whole different year from 2023, and nobody can stop me.

The thing that is good about the Barbie Movie is that the main character in the movie is the movie itself. And, importantly, this has nothing to do with the one-off where it breaks the fourth wall. I don’t mean that the film is meta or talks about itself or is thinly veiled commentary on the industry. I mean that the central question that compels the viewer to keep watching is, how will the movie resolve its setup in a way that rustles the culture’s jimmies only the exact right amount? The intricate financial and sociopolitical plot armor is enough to almost fully determine the plot itself. It’s like watching an elegant detective story.

The internal premise: Stereotypical Barbie lives in her dreamhouse in Barbieland with all the other Barbies. Barbieland is also peopled by an simping underclass of jolly himbo Kens. But then one day, Barbie wakes up and mementos she will mori. So she and her Ken rollerblade to the real world, i.e. Los Angeles, to find the source of the problem. But the Mattel executives go after them, trying to put Barbie literally back in her box, so Barbie and Ken flee back to Barbieland, except now Ken is inspired by the Los Angeles patriarchy, so he recreates it in Barbieland and stages a peaceful populist uprising by taking Ken-trol of all major government positions.

The external premise: At the peak of fourth-wave feminism, in 2014, Mattel and Sony agree to produce a Barbie movie together. They write a script, discard it, write another script. At the peak of mainstream adoption of fourth-wave feminism, over the time period starting with Trump’s election in 2016 and ending with the various Women’s Marches, Amy Schumer (really!) is onboarded, agrees to play the lead, rewrites the whole script, and by the spring of 2017 leaves, citing creative differences. As the movement makes its last stand with MeToo before crumbling into a controversial cancel culture, somebody somewhere is calling up Anne Hathaway for a deal that never materializes. Finally, as Covid hits and this round of feminism gives way to a new race- and transgender-centric flavor of identity politics, the script is finally written for the last time in 2020 and ‘21 by two people whose names are Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach and who can only imagine, as they watch Amy Schumer disappear into a pit of quicksand, what American culture might look like by the time the finished product is released in 2023.

Okay, so now how do you play this, as the movie? How do you successfully work out the implications of both premises at once?

---

Before I tell you, we have some breaking news coming in, which is that the funniest thing about the Barbie Movie as character in the Barbie Movie has just happened, which is that the Academy, in either a twist of genius self-awareness or genius cluelessness, nominated Bleach Blonde Ryan Gosling As Ken for an Oscar but not Margot Barbie. If Margot were to get an Oscar as Barbie, it would be for being really good at smiling in a particular way, which is humorous and ironic because one of the first things on the list of things you’re not supposed to do to a girlboss is tell her to smile. But most mortals cannot smile with as much information content as Margot Barbie does. This is a masterclass in pointed smiling. However, as an industry association of ten thousand people, the Academy does not have the ability to smile or to really appreciate rictal excellence.

They did, however, nominate America Ferrera, the only woman nominated for her acting performance in fact, which is funny, because she played the only straight man (no, not that kind of straight man!) in Barbie or The Barbie Movie or whatever they titled it. The Washington Post, in reporting this fact, describes the film as “a piece of feminist art intended to show women shaking off the yoke of patriarchy.” Tag, the Washington Post is now a character in the Barbie Movie, too!

Polled on their way out of the theater, zero percent of audience members were able to recall the name of America Ferrera’s character. In our hearts her name is America Ferrera’s Character and her contribution to the movie is to deliver the pull-quote monologue. This monologue is the result of Greta Gerwig, the director of the movie, asking Ferrera to please recite the Gone Girl cool girl monologue from memory as best she could. That’s not true, but it might as well be. The monologue is also basically a worse version of Belinda’s monologue from the second season of Fleabag, except for the stuff about menopause, a bodily function I believe they are saving to introduce to Barbieland in the sequel. Anyway, I think if you are an actor named America you should get pointed roles in lots of movies and get to make lots of speeches about the Way Things Are.

---

Here is Ferrera’s speech as I remember it:

It is literally impossible to be a movie. You have an all-star cast, and such a large budget, and it kills me that the large budget still has to be attached to some lumbering franchise. Like, we have to always make some kind of Statement, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.

You have to be woke, but not too woke. And you can never affiliate yourself in as many words with a particular political group, in case it gets coopted or goes sour. You have to say you want to be diverse and inclusive, but also you can’t be unfunny. You have to have barrels of cash, but you can't kowtow too obviously to Mattel in the script. You have to poke fun at men, but you can't be so mean they won’t watch it. You have to quash the Ken uprising, but you can't do it, like, violently. You're supposed to be pro-woman but also self-aware about the excesses and unfulfilled promises of a movement on the downswing.

You have to be a blockbuster but also the definitive film treatment of several different waves of feminism, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of hey we’re the Philippine government’s movie censors and your crayon-drawn map of the world that appears briefly in one shot is not allowed to include the PRC’s party line on the locations of sovereign boundaries in the South China Sea! You're not supposed to make people mad enough that they’ll turn on you, but you do need to make some of them mad enough that they’ll write lots of op-eds and give you free publicity and turn you into the Current Thing.

But always stand out and always provide a fresh, authentic perspective. But maybe angle for some Oscars. But people feel kind of weird about the Academy right now so don’t be too obvious about it.

You have to never get maudlin, never get too serious about existential depression, not repeat “vagina” enough times to jeopardize that PG-13 rating. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and apparently nobody will give your star a Best Actress nod! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also Despite Championing Feminism, Margot Robbie’s Outrageous ‘Barbie’ Salary Disparity With Ryan Gosling Leaves Fans Stunned, according to something called Fandom Wire dot com, where you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to learn that the salary disparity is zero which is maybe a problem because Barbie had to say more lines than Ken.

I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other movie tie itself into knots so that it can slouch its way over the finish line. And if all of that is also true for a Greta friggin Gerwig movie, then I don't even know.

---

Nevertheless our hero, the Barbie Movie, persists, and pulls fun from the jaws of tedium with a canny maneuver. It channels the nostalgia not toward second-wave feminism, i.e. the time Barbies were invented, or third-wave feminism, i.e. the time of Barbie’s last hurrah, but toward fourth-wave feminism, which was an era Stereotypical Barbie was not even a participant in, having been supplanted by girlbosses for good.

It solves DEI by going Ring Of Diverse Children From Nineties Math Textbook, positing a believably ironic post-race utopia where there is approximately one Barbie and one Ken from each protected class and, except for Gosling and Robbie, they pair up with no ethnic affinity whatsoever.

(spoiler ↓)

It solves the uprising and the whole “men” business by having the the Kens realize, after the Barbies take back the government, that they preferred being responsibility-free himbos after all. (This is actually a looming cultural motif, I think, which otherwise hasn’t really hit theaters yet.)

It solves the Mattel matter by somehow negotiating clearance to directly criticize Mattel, and then goes on to neutralize them into silly villains, a hapless band of henchmen in black led by primo sillyhead Will Ferrell (he’s an angry elf!).

And it generates an outlet for everybody’s political feelings about feminism by throwing viewers a bone in the form of the more ideologically-minded non-doll humans in the movie, tossing the Washington Post a honeypot to go lick up. After America Ferrera says her thing, the viewing experience bifurcates into one mode for culture writers who spend the rest of the runtime scribbling down recollections from the big speech, and one mode for people who say “so true bestie” and go back to watching the nonhuman dolls, who get juicier stage directions and are having more fun.

Once all these dragons are slain, Greta Gerwig is still responsible for generating some watchable goings-on, which she succeeds in partly because she is the Aaron Sorkin of women, and partly because she is insane. In the first place, she accepted the scriptwriting job completely in character, by agreeing to do it on the condition that her partner, whom she calls her partner instead of her then-boyfriend-now-husband, Noah Baumbach, get to work with her. “Get to” might be an odd way for her to have spun it, because she initially came home and went “honey guess what I signed us up for,” and Noah Baumbach said “thank you for thinking of me babe but also what the fuck,” but then Greta Gerwig showed him a few pages she’d written about Barbie and mortality, and whatever deranged phantasmagoria was in there caused him to 180 and go all in. Possibly his mention of these pages refers to her film treatment, which, she tells Vogue, was an abstract poem inspired by the Apostles' Creed. Gerwig is influenced also by Paradise Lost, Planet of the Apes, Shakespeare, animism, anarchy, and Lisa Frank. In an interview she utters the phrase “the ontology of Barbie,” and indeed, she has fun (including lots of physical comedy) with the idea of what distinguishes a doll from a human. She does not write the phrase “wage gap” into the movie anywhere that I can recall. There is a Proust Easter egg. She defends her involvement with a Lumbering Franchise Movie by saying, hey, The Merry Wives of Windsor was fan service too (the Finding Dory of Henry IV). She kicked the filming off by assembling all the female cast members for a sleepover.

The result of all this is a Barbie movie that’s way sillier than the Barbie Movie franchise, which is not really any sillier than the regular Mattel Barbie franchise, either in Mattel’s original or rocket-scientist instantiations. (Each of the diverse actors appears in a handful of fluff pieces on “what it meant for me, a _____ woman, to play a Barbie in the Barbie Movie”, in a reverent tone that didn’t become less reverent when the movie actually got released and we learned what its tone was.) But the film itself takes you seriously, treating you as a person who can be goofy about serious things (which in a deeper sense are cosmically goofy, like mortality), unlike its cultural-media-brand footprint, which patronizes you into a person who must be serious about goofy things.

Man, I’m glad somebody made an enjoyable movie. They should do that more! Instead of being marched drearily from foofy airhead to Hillary Rodham Clinton, we are offered the archetype of the shimbo – the self-aware female himbo. The patron saint of Santa Monica. An abstract icon of nondoing, noncraving, who can watch a dumb movie by a smart person that used up its supplier’s entire pandemic-constrained reserve of pink paint and feel neither obliged to do diScoUrSe about it nor self-conscious about doing diScoUrSe about it. Margot Robbie’s Barbie is not a shimbo, really – you can tell she relishes the confrontation with existentialism despite herself – but the buyer of the pink paint is.

Any little girl born in America can aspire to become the president someday. But probably none of those promising young ladies will grow up to become Gerwig’s actual heroine, a nonhuman entity in the category of “major motion picture.” What can you do? Might as well go to the beach.

outro: Barbie Tingz by Nicki Minaj… no, Black Barbies… no, Barbie Dreams… no, I think Hot Problems by Double Take