(If you love Barbie or you hate her, the trailer pitches, “this movie is for you.”) It’s also a task the movie openly sets for itself. It’s perhaps too much to ask of a summer blockbuster movie co-produced by the parent company of a massively popular toy to thread this needle. The weight of representation thrust on Barbie is both fair to her influence as a product and too much to heap on one doll. She’s Peak Girl, in our culture so obsessed with girlhood and its attendant playfulness, innocence, uncritical fun. To some she offers imagination, positive representation, generative play to others, she’s the anti-feminist ideal, the original girlboss, an icon of puddle-deep feminism. No film, particularly one directed by someone as smart as Gerwig or aimed at as much box office potential, could take on an idea as suffusive and loaded as Barbie without some acknowledgement of her paradoxical stature. There’s a sense of inevitability to this self-awareness, which coats the movie almost as much as Barbie’s signature magenta lacquer. Robbie’s Barbie dodges and outmaneuvers Mattel, she transcends Mattel, she questions Mattel. It consistently cops to and skewers the influence of Mattel and the interplay of genuine feeling and profitable commodity, while still working in product placements and, creative freedom aside, burnishing the image of Mattel, which has signed Barbie licensing deals with over 100 brands. The Barbie movie pays plenty of lip service to the baggage of Barbie: the double-edged sword of growing up with Barbie, of being Barbie the precarious balancing act of being a girl, and then a woman. Such fiction is tonally at odds with Barbie, which runs warm and silly, but the movie shares a self-protective streak common to many a woman online: anticipate any potential criticism, call it out first, fold it into your image. I smiled for over half the movie, yet sensed the familiar maw of what the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman termed the “ reflexivity trap” – the idea, coined for a rash of intensely inward-facing literary fiction, that “professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault – that lip service equals resistance”. The result is a film that, for all its buoyancy and fun – and there is a lot of fun (give Ryan Gosling’s Kenergy an Oscar) – feels stuck in a loop of intense self-awareness. Its chief executive, played by Will Ferrell with Mugatu-esque comic commitment, is vain and foolish to the nth degree. The film’s Mattel HQ is a photo-negative of Barbieland - gray, byzantine, soulless, male. Various one-liners target its power, its keenness to convert everything into product, its profit motive, even its nascent film studio (which, on the heels of the Barbie movie, has a sinister 45 toy-based projects in development). Moreover, it’s a movie co-produced by Mattel that takes pains to satirize Mattel. It sets Stereotypical Barbie up as first among equals and then has a joke about “white savior Barbie”. It has a fourth wall break about Margot Robbie maybe not being the ideal messenger for body acceptance. It casts a diverse array of Barbies (since 2016, Mattel, the company which produces the doll, has offered a range of body shapes, including “curvy”) and riffs on Barbie’s reputation as a hallmark of unrealistic, punitive beauty standards. Its heroine gets a crash course in her fraught cultural legacy thanks to a real-life girl (the disaffected teenager Sasha, played by Ariana Greenblatt). It’s also a jab at itself – Barbie, co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a very self-conscious movie. The moment is played for laughs – what if an adult woman (of sorts) made it this far without ever experiencing self-consciousness? What if the concept of self-doubt was so foreign as to escape language? – and as part of the film’s absurd, at times strenuously winking tone. Like … conscious of something … but thinking of herself. Barbie, accustomed to adoration and comically unversed in any vocabulary outside preternaturally sunny empowerment, notes that she feels weird. As it was during filming, people are looking at Barbie and Ken, these two strange creatures on the boardwalk.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |