Toying with itself: the Barbie movie hits the limit of self-awareness

A little before halfway through the Barbie movie, Stereotypical Barbie, the classic blonde doll as realized by ultra Hollywood blonde Margot Robbie, is struck by an uncomfortable feeling. Having left the cracked utopia of Barbieland, she’s rollerblading on the boardwalk at Venice Beach with her hopelessly neutered boyfriend Ken (a peroxide-blonde Ryan Gosling) in tow. Both are wearing garishly bright spandex get-ups complete with neon yellow kneepads – outfits anyone with social media brain will recognize from the earliest public images of these two Hollywood stars as mononymous, backstory-less toys. Filmed in public, the paparazzi shots were the first trickle of extra-textual Barbie content before the hot pink tsunami of this summer’s inescapable, seismic marketing campaign.

Anyway, the uncomfortable feeling. As it was during filming, people are looking at Barbie and Ken, these two strange creatures on the boardwalk. Barbie, accustomed to adoration and comically unversed in any vocabulary outside preternaturally sunny empowerment, notes that she feels weird. Like … conscious of something … but thinking of herself. The moment is played for laughs – what if an adult woman (of sorts) made it this far without ever experiencing self-consciousness? What if the concept of self-doubt was so foreign as to escape language? – and as part of the film’s absurd, at times strenuously winking tone.

It’s also a jab at itself – Barbie, co-written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a very self-conscious movie. Its heroine gets a crash course in her fraught cultural legacy thanks to a real-life girl (the disaffected teenager Sasha, played by Ariana Greenblatt). It casts a diverse array of Barbies (since 2016, Mattel, the company which produces the doll, has offered a range of body shapes, including “curvy”) and riffs on Barbie’s reputation as a hallmark of unrealistic, punitive beauty standards. It has a fourth wall break about Margot Robbie maybe not being the ideal messenger for body acceptance. It sets Stereotypical Barbie up as first among equals and then has a joke about “white savior Barbie”.

Moreover, it’s a movie co-produced by Mattel that takes pains to satirize Mattel. Various one-liners target its power, its keenness to convert everything into product, its profit motive, even its nascent film studio (which, on the heels of the Barbie movie, has a sinister 45 toy-based projects in development). The film’s Mattel HQ is a photo-negative of Barbieland — gray, byzantine, soulless, male. Its chief executive, played by Will Ferrell with Mugatu-esque comic commitment, is vain and foolish to the nth degree.

The result is a film that, for all its buoyancy and fun – and there is a lot of fun (give Ryan Gosling’s Kenergy an Oscar) – feels stuck in a loop of intense self-awareness. I smiled for over half the movie, yet sensed the familiar maw of what the New Yorker’s Katy Waldman termed the “reflexivity trap” – the idea, coined for a rash of intensely inward-facing literary fiction, that “professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault – that lip service equals resistance”. Such fiction is tonally at odds with Barbie, which runs warm and silly, but the movie shares a self-protective streak common to many a woman online: anticipate any potential criticism, call it out first, fold it into your image. Perceptiveness counts for something. The Barbie movie pays plenty of lip service to the baggage of Barbie: the double-edged sword of growing up with Barbie, of being Barbie; the precarious balancing act of being a girl, and then a woman. It consistently cops to and skewers the influence of Mattel and the interplay of genuine feeling and profitable commodity, while still working in product placements and, creative freedom aside, burnishing the image of Mattel, which has signed Barbie licensing deals with over 100 brands. Robbie’s Barbie dodges and outmaneuvers Mattel, she transcends Mattel, she questions Mattel. And yet, she’s still Mattel.

There’s a sense of inevitability to this self-awareness, which coats the movie almost as much as Barbie’s signature magenta lacquer. No film, particularly one directed by someone as smart as Gerwig or aimed at as much box office potential, could take on an idea as suffusive and loaded as Barbie without some acknowledgement of her paradoxical stature. To some she offers imagination, positive representation, generative play; to others, she’s the anti-feminist ideal, the original girlboss, an icon of puddle-deep feminism. She’s Peak Girl, in our culture so obsessed with girlhood and its attendant playfulness, innocence, uncritical fun. The weight of representation thrust on Barbie is both fair to her influence as a product and too much to heap on one doll. It’s perhaps too much to ask of a summer blockbuster movie co-produced by the parent company of a massively popular toy to thread this needle. It’s also a task the movie openly sets for itself. (If you love Barbie or you hate her, the trailer pitches, “this movie is for you.”)

Watching it, I felt myself sliding into the trap – the movie invites scrutiny as something deeper than a blatant nostalgia grab (and it is smarter than that) but is also better the less it digs, the less we think. To cite the very online Girlie Alignment Chart, the movie is quadrant I (girlie is good, overthink it) and is best viewed from quadrant II (being silly is fun). Do I wish auteur directors could find blockbuster footing outside the planets of franchise fare or IP? Yes. But what’s the Mattel-produced Barbie movie going to do – be something that doesn’t somehow, inherently, regardless of execution, increase brand awareness and opportunities for Barbie, the toy? (And, by extension: the aesthetic, the color, the concept, the HGTV and Malibu Airbnb Dreamhouses.) But what’s a girl to do? Human life is messy, as Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) consoles as the film’s handle on its anarchic fantasy skitters in the final act. Best not to overthink it.