My mom, last weekend on the phone when I mentioned that I had plans to see the Barbie movie: You know, I still have an old Barbie in my hope chest.
Me: You used to let me play with some of your old Barbies.
Her: I let you play with all of them, except her. I didn't want her sitting in a mud hole in the yard with the rest of the Barbies and GI Joes.
Me: Oh, yeah. We used to make a swimming pool for them. And then you would wash them in the sink. We probably called that "going in the hot tub."
Her: Yep. They got the full experience.
I open with this story because one of my favorite parts of the lead-up to the Barbie movie has been reminiscing about Barbies, which I played with with varying degrees of regularity from the time I was three until I was about eleven. Some common things that have come up include that MANY of my friends my age also had Great Shape Barbie (my favorite), who wore a unitard and cool rainbow legwarmers (though I'm pretty sure I lost the legwarmers nearly immediately); it was pretty normal to give your Barbies other names, like Joanne and Shelley, in my case; most everyone had far fewer Kens; and we liked it when we had a Barbie that looked different in some way, like had a different hair color, which was less common in the 1980s than I imagine it is now.
One of my other favorite parts of the lead-up to the Barbie movie is that there has been a lead-up. I used to go to the movies all the time pre-pandemic; since the pandemic, I have been probably fewer than ten times, and when I fell asleep during House of Gucci whenever that came out, I remember thinking to myself, "Maybe I just don't like going to the movies anymore." It's been fun to look forward to going to the movies again. Today, when my friends and I were walking down the hall to the theater, one said, "Just follow the pink!" The theater was packed; probably 98% of the people there were women and girls, and probably 90% of those women and girls were wearing at least some pink. It's fun to have a movie feel like an event that you get your friends together for and even plan what you're going to wear.
I'm not sure if I have anything profound to say about the movie that hasn't been said already, and I won't give a full plot summary since that's also been covered elsewhere. Instead, here are just some random things I liked, in no particular order:
1) Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who is the way she is because she was played with too hard; they show a little girl cutting her hair and drawing on her face with a marker. Yes. I did not do anything like that on purpose, but inevitably, weird stuff just happened. For example, the aforementioned Great Shape Barbie that I liked so much? Well, you know how Barbies had a little ball on the top of their neck that held their head on and made it so that their heads moved? Okay, well, that ball broke off of Great Shape Barbie at some point, after which I had to just shove her head down on her neck, meaning she basically had no visible neck and was shorter than all the other Barbies. I had another one whose leg was constantly coming off and often just got played with with a missing leg. The point is: Weird Barbie was a great idea. I'm sure everyone had at least one Weird Barbie, whether they wanted one or not.
2) Where do I even start with Ryan Gosling as Ken? So, his storyline is that in Barbieland, his job is Beach (not surfer, not lifeguard, just Beach), and he spends most of his time trying to get Barbie's (Margot Robbie's) attention; Barbie seems to like him okay but doesn't take that much of an interest in him. I read an article that said that on average, girls had one Ken for every seven Barbies they owned, and that you may have had a Ken but probably didn't ask for one, which-- yeah. One of my three Kens was a hand-me-down from my mom, and my grandma gave me the other two. It's pretty funny that the movie works that dynamic in. After accompanying Barbie to the Real World, Ken learns about the patriarchy. He likes the part where people respect him just because he's a guy, but doesn't like that "you have to have all these things like 'medical degrees' and 'swimming lessons'." (I don't know if I'm getting that line right verbatim, but Gosling's delivery is SO FUNNY-- I don't think he actually does air quotes, but they are definitely there in his voice). So he goes back to Barbieland and sets up a ridiculous version of the patriarchy. At one point, all of the Kens sing "Push" by Matchbox Twenty. There's a war that devolves into a choreographed dance number. I said afterwards, "I feel like Ryan Gosling has been training his whole life to play this part." He was great.
3) Though I laughed a lot during this movie, I also got teary-eyed a couple of times. The first was during America Ferrerra's speech about all the contradictions inherent in being a woman that everyone has been quoting, and which she delivers even better than I imagined. The second is when Barbie decides she wants to be human and live in the Real World, and Barbie's creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) takes her hand. Barbie sees flashes of moments of joy from real women's lives, where women are doing things like playing with kids and graduating, but also, for example, getting a strike in bowling and being cheered on by her friends. I don't feel like I can adequately describe how or why it is so moving, but it is.
4) The movie is really well-paced. It has to cover a lot of ground, from establishing what life is like in Barbieland to Barbie and Ken's trip to the Real World to Ken messing up Barbieland with the patriarchy (which, he admits, he pretty much lost interest in once he realized that it wasn't all about horses), and so on. It moves right along; it never really drags, but also never feels rushed.
Anyway: fun summer movie. Go see it with some friends.
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