Writing a review of the new Barbie film also gives me an excuse to share some photos from a more recent shoot I did, based on the version of the character from Toy Story 3. The outfit answers the question of whether or not I floss.
I never played with Barbie dolls – my thing was Star Wars figures and Lego sets – but there are certain aspects of playing with doll-like figures which apply no matter if you were a boy or a girl. (For the record I never played with He-Man, Action Man, GI Joe, or any of the others like that.) So there are certainly playtime things which can be mined for comedy as per the Toy Story trilogy or The Lego Movie (that fourth Toy Story film never happened; shut your mouth; just shut your goddamn mouth).
This is pretty much what I was expecting from Barbie: jokes about playing with the dolls and making fun of ‘toy logic’. I figured it’d be an easy-going mood-lifter. Having seen it now: gurl, are you serious?!
The film starts off that way, and I wondered how it was going to fill two hours with this. Surely the joke would be beaten to death within 90 minutes? Barbie-land is amazingly realised with vibrant sets and costumes and the logic of playtime and the Mattel-friendly corporate messaging of using dolls representing empowered career women to inspire girls (and there’s a Barbie played by a trans actress too!). And sometimes, when the dolls are played with a little too much, they go a bit weird (cue Kate McKinnon’s Barbie with scribbles on her face and unable to undo the splits). Joining the various Barbies are the dolls that should never have left Mattel’s drawing boards (the pregnant doll, or the one with inflating boobs), and various iterations of Ken, who in all cases is just an accessory and exists on the periphery of Barbie’s existence.
Ryan Gosling’s Ken has no particular qualifications or reasons to exist – and his love for Margot Robbie’s [stereotypical] Barbie goes unrequited. While this presumably reflects the girlhood experience of playing with the dolls, the script goes further and makes Barbie-land into a supposed inversion of our world: one sex does all the jobs and has all the agency, while the other is supposed to just sit about looking pretty and doting on the do-ers. Maybe this was truer in the time Barbie dolls were invented, but I don’t think it’s quite so clear-cut today. The film sometimes has to put in a major effort to stick to this conceit and the message it projects.
You could fairly say to me, “Twist, shut up and watch the damn film, it’s just a bit of fluff and not that deep!” but I would have to turn back and say “Oh, just you wait…”
Things go awry for Barbie when she starts having morbid thoughts and her magical toy experience goes wrong (her feet no longer fit into heels amongst other things) – it’s like she’s having a midlife crisis. The only way to figure out what’s happening is by going into the real world, and finding out what happened to the girl who plays with her. And Ken tags along for the ride.
In the real world, simple, vacuous Ken is immediately taken with all the representations of The Patriarchy: men driving oversized wankpanzers, going to the gym, doing all the manly things like construction and fighting fires, overanalysing superhero movies, belittling women in the office, and being in a boardroom full of middle-aged white men (led by Will Ferrell who was presumably the first and last choice for the role after Anchorman and The Lego Movie). Ken wants to bring some of this back to Barbie-land. (At the same time, he also encounters a woman doctor who tells him he can’t perform surgery ‘just because he’s a man’ – but this real-world character is quickly glossed over; hmmmm.)
Barbie finds that her colourful fashion sense is out of place, and girls only see her as representative of a feminine ideal they can never live up to; a figurehead of a corporation telling girls what they should be like and making money off them at the same time. Being denounced as a fascist by Sasha, a Californian middle-schooler, brings her to tears. It turns out the middle-schooler’s mother Gloria is the woman having the mid-life crisis that’s been afflicting Barbie back in her world.
By now, the film has Ken wanting to bring toxic masculinity to Barbie-land, the leaders of Mattel wanting to hide the fact that Barbie’s crossed over into the real world, and Barbie wanting to bring Sasha and Gloria to Barbie-land to inspire them.
Along the way (and via maybe one too many musical numbers), we are presented with Gloria’s midlife crisis and soapbox speech about 21st-century womanhood, Ken’s existential crisis (what is his purpose in Barbie-land? – which some middle-aged, male commenters, especially those who overanalyse superhero movies on Youtube, have taken to be a reflection of the film’s attitude towards men), and we’re also given Barbie’s existential crisis (what is she for, if she no longer inspires girls but is instead seen as an unattainable goal?).
If you’re going through your own midlife crisis this is some heavy shit to contend with. This isn’t family-friendly fare like Toy Story – in the UK it has a 12A rating and I suspect it’s not just because of the jokes about Barbie and Ken’s inability to have sex. The target audience appears to be jaded Millennial women (I was one of only two guys in my sold-out screening).
The film mashes up the toy-logic-meets-real-world comedy of Toy Story and The Lego Movie, with a script from any feminist blog (sometimes with sparkling wit, sometimes less so, and sometimes with soapbox speeches that could only come from an affluent Californian who works in Hollywood), and adds in a haunting existential crisis that mirrors the modern movie affliction of turning fun things into over-serious downers in an attempt to give them ‘meaning’. It feels like there’s about three or four competing films fighting for attention.
At my screening, when Ken sings about his crisis, Gloria does her speech, and Barbie ponders on the futility of it all, the audience fell utterly silent and the mood never recovered until the final punchline before the end credits. (That could just be an Edinburgh thing though – in Scotland we’re not really given over to whooping and hollering and clapping at the cinema…)
The knowing sense of humour and in-jokes do a lot of heavy lifting.
I saw the film’s Barbie-land as representative of girls’ experiences playing with the dolls rather than an inversion of ‘our world’ (or at least the US part of it) – using it as a metaphor can only go so far before it breaks down. I think the script took it right to the edge of what you could do with it (tonally, too). Barbie‘s purpose and targets are muddled and scattershot.
For me, the film was at its best in Barbie-land, where it managed to capture in live action the sort of charm found with Barbie and Ken in Toy Story 3.
Barbie is the best new film I’ve seen this year so far (but that’s not saying much), and certainly the most entertaining thing Ryan Gosling’s ever been in – but I wonder if it was trying to achieve too much in its two-hour run time?
The jokes are funny, but if you’re caught in the wrong mood you’ll spend the rest of the evening drinking red wine alone in a darkened room wondering if you’ve ever really known who the fuck you are.
(You can ignore the angry, male, right-wing, conservative reviews of this film, by the way. Which is true for any film. As long as they have Tom Cruise to look at they’ll be fine.)
The film’s making a ton of money, which suggests that original, stand-alone stories, and films aimed at female audiences are the way to go. Instead, it would appear the lesson Mattel’s taken is to try to turn all of their toys into separate film franchises. This is why modern film studios can’t have nice things.
Enough about Barbie’s existential mid-life crisis! Let me tell you about mine instead! (Just kidding. That would take too long.)
The photos I’ve chucked in with this review were taken at Portobello Beach next to Edinburgh, and were a chance to test out some slightly-too-small, Barbie-inspired, shiny Lycra, and some definitely-too-small, body-shaping underwear. I’m in my mid-40s and starting to feel like I’m getting old for this shit. On the up-side, I lost any sense of public embarrassment years ago.
I’ve got a few more girly road trips left in me, but I’m running out of new costume ideas and photoshoots to try out. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve pretty much achieved all the things I’d hoped to try out wayyy back when I started – hell, I’ve done more than I ever hoped I would!
Unlike Barbie, I don’t think I need to resolve my midlife crisis by becoming “a real woman”; like Ken, being Twist from time to time is “Kenough” for me…
Miss Twist speaks her brains 
