There's No Room For Women in a Barbie World

Between ad and art, where do the women of Barbie fit in?

By Danielle Momoh

photo: Warner Brothers

While it may not be a Barbie world, it certainly is a Barbie summer. The pink filled movie has become the event of the year, as box office numbers soar, reaching heights that seemed near impossible in a post-pandemic world. To make matters even sweeter, the film is centered on women and is helmed by former indie-film darling, Greta Gerwig. With its unprecedented success, it's easy to forget that Barbie was a huge ordeal for a filmmaker just making a leap out of the indie scene. Representing a cultural and commercial icon like Barbie is hard enough without Gerwig’s goal to write something that speaks to and speaks up for women– all while still making it a fun popcorn film and keeping a huge company like Mattel happy. Much has been said about Barbie’s relationship to feminism, with many people questioning if what is essentially a large scale Mattel ad can also effectively be a feminist film. Both the arguments for and against this notion have been discoursed to death, but something else troubles me more than the political strength of one the biggest IP movies to come out this year. Not only is feminism lost in the backdoor deal between art and ad, good work is. A nuanced portrayal of women is. When you swing for the big plastic pink fences, you're bound to miss if there is a group of men in black suits standing in your dugout.

Gerwig and the cast of Barbie on set / photo: Jaap Buitendijk

Granted, the first several minutes of Barbie are a bright pink fueled dream, filled with swishy choreography, cheeky songs, and delightful costumes. We watch Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and a whole host of Barbies and Kens come to perfect plastic life on screen. It feels glorious. And Barbie’s crumbling into existential crisis is not only gorgeously captured, but feels truly urgent. Then, we venture into the Real World. And it's not a sad little girl who’s playing with Robbie’s Barbie, it's a depressed mother. Gloria (America Ferrera) and Barbie are positioned as each other’s foils, the keys to unlocking their inner strifes, to repairing not only the rift in the Barbie space-time-continuum, but the rifts in themselves.

Then the Chevy ad plays.

As Barbie leaps into Gloria’s car and they speed off, our eyes are not directed toward the characters or their expressions during this mayhem. It's the squeaky newness of Gloria’s car. She even clunkily shows off the car’s new special feature: going 0 to 60 mph in under 4 seconds, for all your fleeing from corporate overlord needs. This moment ripped me straight out of the film and sharply reminded me that I wasn't just watching a fun movie, I was watching Mattel’s biggest ad campaign in years. And an ad campaign must have partners. Chevrolet is just as much one as Gerwig is. The problem is that all the uncomfortably obvious beauty shots of the offensively blue car sacrificed something much more important: the character of Gloria.

If the start of this important and supposedly deeply feminist film’s journey is kicked off by an ugly Chevy ad, it sets the tone for the rest of the film and for Gloria’s character not being a fully fleshed out person. Rather, Gloria becomes an ad-like stand-in for the “everyday woman.” What do we really know about Gloria? She works for Mattel, she has a daughter who loathes her, and… she drives a blue Chevy. Where is the dark personality her daughter claims is hiding underneath all of this? Instead of really digging into why her sadness was so great that it ripped a hole between two worlds, we get a car chase straight out of a cable TV ad. Attempting to cover this lack of characterization up with two admittedly sweet montages would be fine if Gloria was completely secondary to the film's arc. But, the movie attempts to position her as Barbie’s other half. As Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie explains, nothing that has occurred can happen alone—Barbie’s journey is just as much Gloria’s. But so much about Gloria feels hollow, and the film gives no time to let the audience see anything past her “I’m just like you, viewer!” veneer. Gloria ends up feeling like the “Ordinary Barbie” doll that she pitched to Mattel execs at the end of the film: uninteresting and anonymous enough to make them money. It's disappointing. And her critically praised monologue only drove that idea home for me.

Saoirse Ronan and Laura Dern as Jo and Marmee March in Little Women / photo: Sony Pictures

Great Gerwig usually has no problem holding several complex women in her narrative, weaving all of them into each other while maintaining rich and specific inner lives for each of them. The famous Little Women (2019) monologue is most known for Saoirse Ronan's masterful delivery of “Women!” But the most important part of that beautifully crafted scene is how she ends it. Jo tearfully admits, “I'm so lonely,” and it ends on her. On her vulnerabilities as a flesh and blood person who has realized too late how much she needs other people. In being so specific to the journey we follow throughout the film, her monologue becomes about so much more than just her as a character, but how lonely being a woman artist can feel. Gloria’s monologue has none of that. It is the same tirade any woman on planet earth could preach, so broad and wide a net in the aim to catch everyone, it missed me entirely. It's not just because of my personal aversion to instagram-infographic-esque pop feminism which the speech, to a painful point, is. It's that it says nothing about Gloria herself, about her life, her wants, or her needs. The scene is meant to be an outburst from her, an unstoppable flow of words she has been keeping locked up inside her since she came to Barbieland, since the rift between her and her daughter grew. Since she became aware of what it means to be a woman in a world that hates you. It's where her aforementioned weird personality should blaze forward… but that's not what happens. America Ferrera gallantly recites the tenets of feminism 101 and that's it. It loses the opportunity to connect Gloria firmly to the story, to remind us that she is not hollow, that no woman is. Just like the Chevy ad, what is meant to be the start of truly discovering what it means to be a woman ends up being a reminder that there is nothing much behind the pink corporate feminism that Mattel is peddling.

Barbie is an idea of a woman shaped into a plastic doll. She looks like no-one, is both the president and an astronaut, your best friend and your ultimate goal. She’s everything because that's what she's marketed as, but at the same time she's nothing but another item in a landfill. So perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that a movie based on her is chock full of ideas with little substance. But the film urges us to take its ideas to heart. I even think that some of the ideas that Greta Gerwig bandied about in just under two hours are valuable and haven’t been considered this openly in a mainstream film, perhaps ever. But a film is not ideas alone. Jo’s monologue works so much because her messy life is so carefully explored throughout Little Women. So when she says that she’s sick of the boxes women are put in, we believe her. Because that's who she is, someone who is endlessly rebelling against the world, wielding her quill like a weapon and wearing her stolen Laurie waistcoats like armor. At the end of it all she is just a girl. A girl who is lonely. Who misses her sister, who loves her mother, who wants to be loved. Who is tired of slogging through this world alone. As Barbie emphasizes, ideas live forever, women don't. There's a rawness to this admission, so powerful that it brings out the human in Barbie. I just wish I saw it in Barbie’s human women. It's all well and good to talk about feminism, but without exploring the actual women it's about, Gerwig’s attempts come off as disingenuous.

America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt as Gloria and Sasha / photo: Warner Brothers

Like filmmaking, feminism isn't just about ideas. It isn't just about believing men and women are equal. We have to bring those ideas and base statements to life, past the page. Gloria is a woman and women don't talk in slogans. When women talk about the patriarchy it’s messy, it's about our specific experiences and goals and hopes and dreams that are stifled by a world that hates to take them seriously. And as we speak about their oppression other things spill out: the way we see ourselves, our work, our families. Gloria and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) have a tense relationship, but we never see why it is so fraught. We barely even see them speak to one another, and so when they reconcile at the end, it doesn't mean anything. They embrace because that's what people do at the end of movies, not because they came to an understanding of each other. If Sasha was afforded more than a couple of lines, we could have explored what role the patriarchy can play in making a young girl build up resentment towards their mother. This is all pushed aside to highlight platitudes more similar to what I saw on my 2015 Tumblr feed than anything that could move me in a packed theater.

As a summer blockbuster, Barbie clearly works. And despite my gripes, I had an excellent time seeing it. Its beautiful set pieces and zany dance numbers filled me with a delight I haven't felt in a theater in a long time. Margot Robbie gives a flawless performance and Ryan Gosling is at a very possible career best. But this Barbie loves thinking about film. And the more I see the positively rancid discourse and ideas this movie has prodded into the light, the more I see its imperfections. And it doesn't help that criticizing the film is being seen as an attack on Gerwig’s personal character. Of course some Barbie’s critiques will be misogynistic in nature–the patriarchy is alive and unfortunately well. But feminism isn't refusing to critically engage with the art that women make. Wanting to protect the art you love is a beautiful impulse, but “protecting” it from valid critique from other women is not. The most poignant section of Barbie comes when we see footage of actual women, of the people that Barbie is meant to be for. We see them growing up, scoring strikes at bowling, hugging their mothers, smiling with friends, crying with each other, winking at the camera with barely restrained joy. These are the complicated women that are missing from the rest of the film. These are women that cannot be represented by one flat side character and fobbed off by lines that companies regurgitate on their social media during Women’s history month. In the efforts to humanize the concept of Barbie and, if we're being honest, send those dolls flying off the shelves, Gerwig conceptualizes women. For a director known for her nuanced portrayals of girlhood and womanhood, it's disappointing to see how much of her delicate touch is lost in Barbie. Her efforts are diverted to trying to rebrand a company as feminist and ‘in on the joke,’ and Gloria is left with a one-note monologue and a clunky car commercial. And no matter how much I love pink and a good musical number, I can't ignore that.