Skip to main content

REVIEW: Barbie

    While Hollywood has never truly been unencumbered by the demands of capitalist processes, the modern filmscape is perhaps in an unprecedented age of opportunities for vertical integration. Enter: Warner Bros.' Barbie, another film which sells itself on its cutting edge subversion but is ultimately designed to soothe the masses into a state of blameless consumerism. 

    To be clear, Barbie is hardly unique in this regard. This is the same basic affliction that arises in movies like Pokemon: Detective Pikachu and The Lego Movie. Yet the dissonance in Barbie is somehow larger because the movie isn't just selling "Barbie" as a valid Christmas gift, but as the battlefield on which feminism itself is being fought.

    The conceit of this movie is the amusing hypothetical of what Barbie would think if she stepped out of her dreamhouse to live within the market to which she is sold, to see what the people who play with Barbie dolls (or used to) actually think of Barbie. Add to that some take-home notes for dismantling the patriarchy, and you have Barbie (2023). These are not unworthy ambitions, but the movie never escapes the capitalist overtones of this game, even as it calls them out in the text itself, nor does it seem to want to.

    Take, for example, the movie's calculus level lamp-shading. One moment of crisis has Barbie lamenting how she no longer feels pretty, opening the door for America Ferrera's character to assure her worth is not defined by whether she is "pretty." It is here that Helen Mirren, narrator, interjects a note to the filmmakers that Margot Robbie is the wrong actress to make this point. And with that wry observation, the walls of Jericho tumble, and I'm certain that we can now look forward to female performers of all varieties suddenly stepping into roles previously reserved for only the likes of Margot Robbie. Thank you, Helen Mirren ... 

    Barbie thinks itself edgy or insightful into the state of 21st century Americana because it calls out the contradictions in how women are expected to exist in the modern ecosystem. I would list them all here, but if you're interested in this conversation (or if you've seen at least two episodes of Brooklyn 99 or New Girl), I guarantee you already know them by heart. If this film is the first time a viewer is confronted with the idea that a board room full of men designing products for girls is a little skewed, good on them for catching on. But despite the narrative framing of such insights as revelatory, these talking points have been integrated into the dialogue for a while now.

    This isn't to say that there was no thought or originality put into the filmmaking itself. Barbieland catches an aesthetic that feels diametrically different from modern Hollywood CGI blockbusters. You'd have to go all the way back to the soundstage musicals of MGM to catch anything approximate. Meanwhile, Margot Robbie is effervescence personified. Still, the film's very real strengths consistently run into its own insular mechanics: Barbie wants to assure consumers Barbie is more than a token of capitalism, but that runs against the design of the mode of popular film. The film can't help but default to the takeaway that there's room for you--yes, you!--in the toy aisle. 
 
    I won't say that there is no place for this film's entry-level feminism. I also won't take away from all the barbie fans who are thrilled that this movie helps them reclaim their favorite doll as a valid mode of expression--and there is indeed something special to behold as our plastic heroine gets to experience all sorts of complex contradictions of the human experience--but I also will not give this movie more credit than it deserves, or indeed more than it aspires for. 

                --The Professor



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

  So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this.  I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines.       The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.”  Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

  In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom.  Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century          With the development of the inter...

The Paradox of The Graduate

     If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces.       But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like  The Graduate .      I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since.      But what's int...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it.       Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.    So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

REVIEW: The Long Walk

I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk . Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society. willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins. Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone.  But the movie has a system error t...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.”    Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

REVIEW: ONWARD

     The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with.       Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles.       This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to gui...

REVIEW: ELIO

    Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.      There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.      The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?      But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

          Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving.  From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality?       This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

REVIEW: Concrete Cowboy

"Concrete Cowboy" has Stranger Things alum Caleb McLaughlin saddle up with Idris Elba in a father-and-son tale set against the backdrop of urbanization. McLaughin stars in the film as "Cole," a troubled teen whose escapades into trouble have him teetering on the edge of a life of aimless ruin. In an act of desperation, Cole's mother drops him off in Philadelphia at the apartment of his father (played by Elba) whom he hasn't seen in years. It's a drastic change of scene for Cole, but there's a chance for him to make something of himself here. If he can avoid the toxic influence of Smush, a local kid with dubious ties to local gang activity.  The premise sounds intriguing enough, but the finished product is so textureless that even after actually watching the film, you somehow don't feel you've learned anything more about it. The movie relies a lot on the audience bringing their own preconceptions to the table. Opening with a shot of Cole looki...