PicoBlog

“Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.”

Ruth Handler, Barbie

I took myself to the movies.

The babies were in bed and there was an 8:30 showing of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie at our local multiplex. Parents have to get creative like this. I went tonight, Chris will go later in the week, and we’ll just have to wait to discuss until then.

When I arrived at the theatre, I immediately knew I had made a mistake - I didn’t wear pink. Here on a Tuesday night, groups of women had descended upon the cinema in a multigenerational display of shameless enthusiasm. I saw the 50+ crowd ordering popcorn, the teens in un-ironic pink short skirts piling into the photobooth, mothers with their college-age daughters, and a surprising amount of children 10 and under dressed in long, bright dresses and feather boas, the adults helplessly following behind them like a royal entourage, trying to keep them from tripping over their fashion accessories.

So there I sat in my inappropriate orange tee-shirt, waiting for… for what? I wasn’t quite sure.

I’ll come out and say first and foremost, I am a Greta Gerwig fan. Anyone who knows me knows my love affair with Little Women and in particular Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation. I cried watching Lady Bird and was touched by Gerwig’s earnest performance in Frances Ha.

I’ll admit when I heard her next project after Little Women was going to be about Barbie, I was confused. Barbie? The doll? Why? But I had faith in Gerwig’s vision, so I was going into the film with an open and optimistic attitude.

Gerwig makes sincere, aesthetically beautiful movies that revolve around a few key themes, in particular, female relationships (mothers/daughters/sisters), art (the tension between creation/creator, how art creates/sustains meaning), and growing up (the simultaneous sadness of leaving childhood behind and the joy in discovering the depth of adult life).

Barbie excels in addressing all of these themes.

I’ve been a bit surprised reading reviews of Barbie - they all seem to think it tried to do too much or they get hung up on the Mattel brand and its involvement in the production. Some writers don’t quite know how to talk about Barbie - is she a feminist or not? Can someone that blonde and perfect even be a feminist? And I don’t even know what to say about the strange conservative backlash that claims the movie is “man hating woke propaganda.”

The truth is for all the back and forth, it’s not hard to figure out what this movie is all about. Gerwig tells us quite explicitly.

It’s about Love.

There is a very moving scene early on in the film when Barbie has made her initial foray into The Real World. It’s been a startling experience. The construction crews aren’t “you go girl!” girl bosses, but cat-calling misogynists. Her fabulous neon outfit isn’t admired on the boardwalk, but laughed at and mocked. What she thought was a billboard for the Supreme Court is actually an advertisement for Miss Universe. The Real World is messy and pretty mean.

She sits at a bus stop and closes her eyes, trying hard to imagine the little girl she is meant to find, the one who has been playing with her and somehow injecting her with all her sadness and confusion, causing this rift in the Barbie-Real World space time continuum. A flurry of images comes to mind, half forgotten memories of childhood play between a mother and a child that eventually gives way to the tenseness of teen angst and rejection.

Coming to, Barbie looks next to her. There is an old woman. Barbie looks at her with such an open, raw expression, the old woman is startled. “You’re so beautiful,” Barbie says with tears in her eyes. “I know it,” the old woman says back playfully. They smile at each other.

There was something in that open hearted stare, in that incredible generosity, played with such sincere naivety by Margot Robbie, that is disarming. Imagine having someone really look at you, ‘warts and all’ as Cromwell would say, and tell you,

“You’re beautiful. You matter. You’re enough.”

In Barbie, Gerwig’s writing reaches out across the screen to say just that to each and every viewer. Or so she hopes.

This moment, to me, captured the entire heart of the film.

When I read that Gerwig’s closest family friends growing up were Jewish and that she had visceral memories of celebrating Shabbat dinners with them, I understood on an even deeper level what she was trying to say. She could still remember the profundity of the father’s prayers, sung in Hebrew -

May God bless you and protect you. May God show you favor and be gracious to you. May God show you kindness and grant you peace. Every Friday the family’s father would rest his hand on Gerwig’s head, just as he did on his own children’s, and bless her too.

“I remember feeling the sense of, ‘Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever you did or you didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,’” Gerwig told me. “‘You are a child of God. I put my hand over you, and I bless you as a child of God at this table. And that’s your value.’ I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough.” She imagines people going to the temple of the movies to see “Barbie” on a hot summer day, sitting in the air-conditioned dark, feeling transported, laughing, maybe crying, and then coming out into the bright heat. “I want people to feel like I did at Shabbat dinner,” she said. “I want them to get blessed.”

-”Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Dream Job”, New York Times

While Gerwig may want every woman to feel beautiful and valued, many women have felt less than appreciated by “Barbie” as a brand. The dolls were too perfect, too thin, too busty. This wasn’t a doll to help women appreciate being women, this was a doll that told little girls that their adult selves would never live up to the impossible standards a toy company had created. Barbie was defeatist and cruel in all her unchanging plasticity. It wasn’t until plunging sales in 2015 that Mattel was forced to overhaul the brand for the 21st century. Now there are curvy Barbies and wheelchair bound Barbies and Barbies of every nationality. There are Barbies in every possible career and ‘aspirational’ Barbies featuring everyone from executives to fashion designers to scientists to Olympians.

Gerwig attempts to address this muddled history subtly through humor (Will Ferrell as the tone deaf male CEO of Mattel, for instance) and often explicitly, as when teenage Sasha blames most of modern sexism and capitalist greed on what she views as a ‘fascist’ doll.

Gerwig is a Barbie apologist, as most reviewers have noted. Yes, she loves Barbie. How could you not feel bad for Barbie when her identity as a feminist savior is destroyed by the self-assured protestations of a teenage girl? (Teenagers can be so mean - and with so little remorse!) Look into those big doe eyes and tell me you aren’t starting to love Barbie too. You may even start to wonder what all this controversy has been all about. Look, Barbie’s just a doll trying to tell little girls they can be whoever they want. If we misunderstood, perhaps the fault is with us.

But of course it’s more complicated than that.

Barbie’s journey into the real world is prompted by some very un-sparkly un-fun realities: thoughts of death, overwhelming sadness, anxiety. These emotions don’t quite fit into the shiny, happy-go-lucky, girl-boss world she inhabits. The women (almost all of whom are also named Barbie - Adventure Barbie, President Barbie, etc. with the exception of some awkward discontinued dolls, like Midge, Barbie’s pregnant friend) are radically supportive. It’s like being in a girls only Zumba class with a disco ball and everyone shouting ‘you go girl!’ on a loop. There isn’t room here for things like mortality or self-awareness.

So when Barbie’s feet go flat and she develops some cellulite, you know something is wrong. In keeping with the theory that Greta Gerwig’s films are often coming-of-age stories, she apparently told Margot Robbie that the moment she realizes her feet have gone flat would be like suddenly getting your period during adolescence. There is this question of, what is happening, is it what I think is happening? There is also shame, confusion, and not knowing what to do. And worst of all, does anyone know? Can everyone tell?

Growing up is hard. It’s hard for both boys and girls, but for girls, the realities of womanhood can be startling. It cannot be understated how strange and upsetting it can be to leave the world of girlhood behind. One moment you’re climbing trees and playing tag, the next you’re confronting a confusing world of monthly hormonal fluctuations, a world of blood and pain and the development of body parts that require whole new sets of clothing that you have to go pick out on embarrassing outings with your mother.

This reminds me of a prescient Joan Didion essay on the Women’s Movement when she critiqued modern feminism’s denial of the bodily realities of womanhood -

“All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it - that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death - could now be declared invalid, unnecesssary, one never felt it at all.”

Becoming a woman and being a woman is difficult. For Barbie, who is plastic and not faced with these bodily realities, this ‘a-ha’ moment, this departure from girlhood bliss, is the realization of mortality - if not for her, for others. Her feet go flat and in a that’s just true line, says "I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped like this.”

The world isn’t made for women, we’re reminded, in sometimes heavy-handed ways. Whereas Barbie discovers a nightmarish upside down reality in The Real World, Ken discovers “The Patriarchy,” an abstraction he mostly associates with John Wayne and people respecting him enough to ask for the time.

Ken probably deserves his own essay and this review is already long enough, but what I want to address here is the fact that I think Greta Gerwig is critical of “the Patriarchy” but that she is much more critical of Abstractions that deny people their real world complexity. The Patriarchy, at least how we understand it and use it as a cultural touchstone, is toxic to women, but also to men. Ken doesn’t want to rule over Barbie or have her bring him beers by the pool endlessly. He acts out these farces of masculinity much in the same way that Barbie herself has been acting out farces of femininity.

Ken’s favorite song is Matchbox Twenty’s Push. We initially only hear the chorus - “I wanna push you around, I will, I will.” And this fits with our conception of Ken as a male brute looking to get violent with Barbie. But later, when he serenades her on the beach in a dopey display of masculine wooing, we hear the beginning of the song - “I don’t know if I’ve ever been good enough… I don’t know if I’ve ever been really loved by a hand that’s touched me.” Suddenly his anger seems a bit more complicated.

Men are people too. When Barbie rejects him, when she says “every night is girl’s night” and doesn’t even wonder where he sleeps at night, she is being just as cruel as the men in the Real World who demean and disregard women. The solution isn’t “smash the patriarchy!” but self actualization and empowerment, for both men and women.

“Ken, you have to figure out who you are without me,” Barbie says.

So as Ken starts to accept that he can be more than an accessory doll, Barbie has to find out who she is. Her ending, of course, is now all wrapped up in the life of the little girl who was playing with her - a little girl who is now a grown woman with a distant teenage daughter and a lot of sad, messy feelings - a Mattel executive named Gloria, played by America Fererra.

In a true ‘consciousness raising’ moment, Gloria (nod perhaps to Gloria Steinem era feminism?) articulates the contradictory nature of being a woman -

“You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”

Gloria’s speech is an important touchstone for the film because it articulates the difficult realities and standards of 21st century womanhood - beautiful and smart, accomplished and self-effacing, emotional but not too emotional. It’s not enough to be ‘good enough’ anymore. You have to be great. If you’re going to be anything, for goodness sakes, be the President! Little girls should be preparing for careers in STEM and takeovers of Fortune 500 companies. Motherhood and family and an ‘ordinary’ life in an ‘ordinary’ career don’t fit the girl-boss style of feminism. And it’s hard. Women can’t have it all, but no one will say it out loud - so when Gloria does (and by an actress with a name like ‘America’ how can you not feel she’s speaking for us all?) - it feels like a collective sigh.

Yes, this, thank you for finally saying it!

What women want is that moment at the bus stop when Barbie looks another woman in the eyes and sees how beautiful she is - not for anything she’s done or accomplished, not for her looks or her clothes, but just for the simple fact of being here in the world, existing, perfectly created just as she is.

As the mother of two small daughters who I see so wildly and bravely exploring with such abandon and confidence, it hurts me to think of them encountering the cruel realities of the world. I don’t want my daughters’ personalities quashed by limiting or harmful ideals surrounding their bodies or their words. I want them to feel unapologetically, boldly, sincerely themselves.

That is the dream of Barbieland. And for all it’s plastic, all its hyper saturated comedy, there is something beautiful in that initial sequence, where women all love each other and support each other and build each other up. A world where you sing-scream to the Indigo Girls and never worry what you’re wearing is too revealing or that your words are too inconvenient or too loud. A world where you don’t apologize when the award is handed to you, but accept it - I worked hard. I earned this.

Barbieland is a fantasy and Barbie ultimately chooses the messiness of the Real World, pink Birkenstocks and all. She chooses Life (and ultimately Death) for the depth of Feeling a real, embodied life promises. She chooses it for Joy and Grief and Love. In the discussion with her God-Creator-Mother, Ruth, she asks permission to become human, but is gently given a pretty perfect lesson in the theology of Free Will -

“You don't need my permission. I can't control you any more than I could control my own daughter.”

It’s hard to leave girlhood behind, but the promises of Womanhood are exciting too. And when Gloria shares her idea for “Ordinary Barbie” - a Barbie that’s a Mom (or not) and is just doing her best and wants to love the people around her and live a good life - we can all nod along. We know that woman, maybe we are that woman - just trying our best, cheering on all those other ‘ordinary’ people in our lives, just doing this radical, profound, terrifying thing - Living.

For Gerwig, becoming a human means becoming an artist. Whether you are creating a doll or creating a life, you are engaged in a work of art.

“I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.”

Barbie is a feast. There are musical dance numbers and sharp jokes and strange, dreamlike sequences involving a faux war of the Kens on a plastic beach. There is silliness and campiness and so much pink. There is also generosity, kindness, and a real celebration and affirmation of what it means to be a woman in the world. Here it’s nearly 3AM and I’m writing about this movie, so just take my word, it’s good.

And Greta Gerwig, thank you, I felt loved. I felt blessed.

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