Barbie.

The first thing you should know is that I would not go see a movie about dolls unless there was a very compelling reason. I saw Chuckie when I was too young to be watching Chuckie and have had a weird fear of dolls ever since. If I’d heard about the Barbie movie without seeing or reading anything about it, I would’ve had to hard pass. I do not like dolls, and I especially do not like Barbies. Something about doll hair freaks me out. Not to mention their eyes. But anyway, I digress. I saw and read enough about the movie before it premiered to be ready (especially knowing there would be no actual dolls in attendance). Like everyone else, I came clad in pink, ready to be wowed by an ironic leaning into the terrible beauty standards that make a doll like Barbie successful. 

I thought that’s what the film would be: a nihilistic leaning in. If nothing matters, why not dress in pink and drive a pink car and wear heels and be pretty for others? Why not be hyperfeminine and unable to speak for yourself, think for yourself, live for yourself? Somehow that’s what I thought we were doing here: laughing at the horror of it by leaning all the way in. (I feel weirdly similar about how Crocs are so popular, the idea of taking something that should be ugly—rubber shoes full of holes—and hyping it so much that it’s suddenly, surprisingly, ironically hot.)

I was ready for nothing to matter, at least for the moment, but what I found was that the opposite was true. It does actually matter very much how women are expected to live in this movie. No one, the movie says pretty explicitly, should have to live like a grateful bimbo in a man’s world. Barbie addresses depression and motherhood and unmet desires, while also making jokes left and right that somehow make the whole problem of gender inequality feel not only approachable but lit up enough to wade through. It reminded me—very surprisingly—of Everything Everywhere All at Once, and one of my friends said the same thing. How could the best movie many of us have seen in a long time be comparable to a movie about a Barbie, you ask? Because both films are able to take aspects of living that are heavy and light and show you how it is in their juxtaposition that life becomes especially beautiful.

Barbie, in ways I could not have seen coming, is a feminist, smart, weird, creative film. Better than I thought it was going to be and clear in its message. Able somehow to outline and make visible gender dynamics that otherwise feel vaguely hard to describe. What especially intrigues me about Barbie’s message is the far right Christian backlash, the assertions that the film is demonic and a bad influence and needs to be boycotted. As someone who used to be immersed in that kind of environment, it makes sense that this film scares them. Where else is patriarchy as holy as it is in the church? Who needs to see this film more then than the women who are caught up in that kind of setting, the ones who think their submission to men (their husbands, Jesus, their fathers, their pastors) is their birthright, even when these men often lead them to much dimmer lives than they’d have if they led themselves? 

Barbie is a call to wake up, and not everyone will take it, but knowing the messaging, knowing the way the movie oscillates from being hilarious to stating the facts, it excites me for new reasons to see the hype for this film, to see all the people walking toward the movies dressed in pink from head to toe.

Image: Warner Bros.