8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

The Front Row

“Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as

Hell
Greta Gerwig’s giddily stylized vision of a doll coming to life makes a serious case for the art of
adapting even the most sanitized I.P.

By Richard Brody
July 21, 2023

Gerwig’s movie puts in bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Photograph
courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Save this story

t’s unfortunate that fantasy has glutted the movies and tarnished the genre’s
I name with the commercial excesses of superhero stories and C.G.I.
animation, because fantasy is a far more severe test of directorial art than

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 1/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

realism. This is, first off, because the boundless possibilities of the fantastical
both allow for and require a filmmaker’s comprehensive creativity. But, crucially,
fantasy is also a vision of reality—the subjective truth of filmmakers’ inner life,
the world as it appears in their mind’s eye. The great directors of fantasy are the
ones who make explicit the connection between their fantasy worlds and lived
reality, as Wes Anderson recently did in “Asteroid City,” and as Greta Gerwig
has done spectacularly in her new film, “Barbie.” Unlike Anderson, who has
spent his entire career on the far side of the imagination, Gerwig’s previous
features as solo director, “Lady Bird” and “Little Women”—both ardently
crafted, both modestly literal—did little to foreshadow the overwhelming
outburst of inventive energy that makes “Barbie” such a thrilling experience.
Though “Lady Bird,” Gerwig’s breakthrough feature, is a fictionalized story of
her own adolescence, her family life, and her home town, “Barbie”—yes, a
movie about a doll made under the aegis of its manufacturer, Mattel—is the far
more personal film. It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic
freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has
brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of
studio filmmaking.

The underlying subject of “Barbie” is how to play with Barbie dolls and why.
Playing with Barbies, after all, is the D.I.Y. version of adaptation, the
enactment in private of the kind of free and wild play that Gerwig (who wrote
the script with her romantic and creative partner, Noah Baumbach) enacts in
the movie. “Barbie” is about the intellectual demand and emotional urgency of
making preëxisting subjects one’s own, and it advocates for imaginative
infidelity, the radical off-label manipulation of existing intellectual property.
Moreover, it presents such acts of reinterpreting familiar subjects, as a crucial
form of self-analysis, a way to explore one’s own self-image and to confront the
prejudices and inequities built into prevailing, top-down interpretations of
them. “Barbie,” in other words, is a film of the politics of culture and, by
extension, of the need for a creative rebellion to reëstrange the familiar for the
sake of social change.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 2/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

The movie begins with one of the most ingenious parodies I’ve seen in a while,
an origin story of the Barbie doll based on the opening sequence of “2001: A
Space Odyssey.” A group of girls is stranded in a barren primordial landscape.
A voice-over narration (by Helen Mirren) explains that, since the beginning of
time, they had only baby dolls to play with, leaving them nothing to imagine
themselves as except mothers. Then came Barbie (Margot Robbie), who, with
her many varieties and guises, offered the girls (who now smash their baby dolls
to pieces) the chance to imagine themselves as astronauts, doctors, judges, even
President, and thus heralded a future of equality and opportunity. It’s in the
abyss between this promised utopia and the world as we know it, between the
merchandising of professional feminism and the endurance of patriarchal
realities, that the movie is set.

“Barbie” contains a potent paradox that is fundamental to its effervescent

delights. A single frame of the film packs such profuse and exquisite detail—of
costume and settings, gestures and diction—that it’s impossible to enumerate
the plethora of inventions and decisions that bring it to life. With its frenetic
pace and its grand-scale, wide-ranging inspirations, it plays like a live-action
cartoon, and captures the anything-is-possible spirit of classic Looney Tunes
better than any other film I’ve seen. Yet its whimsical plot is constructed with a
dramatic logic that manages to transform phantasmagorical leaps into
persuasive consequences, with the result that the details of the story seem
utterly inseparable from, and continuous with, the riotously ornamental visual
realms that it sets into motion.

The driving conceit is that Barbie comes to life and enters the real world, but
Gerwig grounds that transformation ingeniously by giving Barbie a prior life of
her own as a doll. The Barbie played by Robbie, who’s called Stereotypical
Barbie, lives in Barbieland along with all the other Barbies who have been put
on the market, whether Astronaut Barbie or Doctor Barbie or President Barbie,
as well as Barbies of a wide range of ethnicities and body types, all named
Barbie, all residing in doll houses, all calling to one another every bright and
sunny morning, “Hi, Barbie!,” and offering identical side-to-side hand-wave

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 3/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

greetings. Stereotypical Barbie drinks imaginary milk poured from a carton to a

cup, eats a plastic waffle that pops from a toaster as a perfectly shaped dollop of
butter lands atop it, and—because, as the narrator explains, Barbies can be
carried and placed anywhere—glides from her balcony through the air to
behind the wheel of her pink fifties-style Corvette convertible.

Stereotypical Barbie has a stereotypical suitor, the hunky blond Ken (Ryan
Gosling)—one of many in Barbieland—who courts her with a droll sexual
ignorance to match hers. There’s a strong gay subtext to the movie’s well-
coiffured and accessorized Kens; in one scene, Ken and another Ken (Simu
Liu) get into a dispute and threaten each other to “beach you off.” (A nerdy
friend of the Kens, called Allan, played by Michael Cera, is the only non-
himbo around.) The narrator makes the distinction—one that proves to be of
great narrative significance—that for Barbie every day is a good day, whereas
for Ken a day is good only when Barbie looks at him. Ken takes awkward pains
to get Barbie to look, but she’s content in her Barbie-centric world. In lieu of a
date, she invites him to a girls’-night bash at her house—the best party ever,
but then, they all are—complete with a whirlwind-spectacular dance sequence.
In the middle of the festivities, though, Barbie embarrassingly blurts out her
own sudden premonition of death.

Something troubling is disturbing the pristine perfection of Barbie’s permalife

in Barbieland, and she consults the closest thing to a troubled outcast in her
midst, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), to find out what’s going on. Weird
Barbie has a punk haircut, a malformed body, and something like face tattoos—
the result, it is said, of a human who played with her “too hard.” To get to the
source of her disturbance, Barbie will have to make passage to the human world
and find her own owner, whose play has perhaps left an emotional mark just as
Weird Barbie’s has left a physical one. Travelling between Barbieland and the
human world involves transit via, among other Mattel-certified vehicles,
Barbie’s convertible, a space rocket, a tandem bicycle, and a Volkswagen camper
van. Ken stows away on Barbie’s journey, and the duo eventually lands on the

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 4/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

beach in—where else?—Los Angeles, another land of artifices, where Barbie

quickly has her illusions burst.

In L.A., Barbie encounters such human-world phenomena as catcalling, old

age, anxiety, and the social dynamics of real-life girls, most notably a young
high-school intellectual named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who calls Barbie a
“bimbo,” a menace to feminism, even a “Fascist.” Barbie finds her way into
Mattel headquarters, where the C.E.O. (Will Ferrell) wants to trap and twist-
tie her in a display box. Instead, Barbie escapes, but, while she’s on the run, Ken
—who’s read up in the school library about patriarchy—heads to Barbieland
and exports the notion there. When Barbie returns home, she finds it
transformed into a manosphere, full of Kens slaking grudges against Barbies
and Barbies content with subservience to Kens, and she has to plot to restore it
to its ostensible original form as a feminist paradise. Spoiler alert: the Ken-
centric patriarchy that Barbie finds at home is both appalling and hilarious,
with lots of horses (“man extenders,” Ken calls them) and ardent guitar playing
“at” Barbie, especially of the Matchbox Twenty song “Push,” which the Kens
have adopted as a male anthem.

The trait that enables Barbie to fight to take back Barbieland is the very
weirdness that she’d sought to cure. It’s the “hard” play of a human owner—the
use of Barbie as an avatar of a real person’s emotional crises—that gives
Stereotypical Barbie the perspective to see what’s wrong with Barbieland, the
wiles to take action to reclaim it for herself and the other Barbies, and the
open-mindedness to see that she herself is in need of personal change. The
uninhibited expression of Barbie’s human has taught Barbie, above all, the
concept of freedom; and it’s no spoiler to note that the concept, here, meshes
with an existentialist tradition that links such freedom to the inevitability of
death. (In a magnificent meta-touch, Barbie has an encounter with the creator
of Barbie, Ruth Handler, who, in real life, died in 2002; here, she’s played by
Rhea Perlman.)

Far from being a feature-length commercial for Barbie, Gerwig’s movie puts in
bright critical light the trouble with Barbie’s pure, blank perfection. Instead of
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 5/9
8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

projecting their own imperfections or thoughts onto the doll, girls have been
socialized to strive for an impossible doll-like perfection in their own lives.
Barbie can be anything in Barbieland—a doctor, a President, an astronaut—but
only because Barbieland is a frictionless Brigadoon. There’s no Fox News in
Barbieland, no political demagogy, no religion, no culture. Any girl who plays
with Barbie and imagines that she can do anything will discover, eventually,
that she’s been the victim of a noxious fantasy. Playing weird with Barbie
means ascribing the tangled terms of one’s own environment to Barbieland,
one’s own conflicts to Barbie. It means turning Barbie human—into a character
whom a child can use to give voice to an inner life, in the second person, when
her first person feels stifled or repressed.

“Ordinary”: pay attention to the arrival, in “Barbie,” of that word, which

reverberates like a tuning fork through the entire story, conveying longing for
the day when a woman’s life doesn’t demand heroic struggle against societal
limitations and contradictory demands. (The movie features a fervent
monologue on the subject, built of familiar talking points that are energized by
the fast and furious indignation of the speaker, Sasha’s mother, a Mattel
employee played by America Ferrera.) The idea inflects Gerwig’s aesthetic, too,
in a way that’s made clear, again, in the contrast between her filmmaking and
that of Wes Anderson, the current cinema’s preëminent stylist. Anderson’s films
borrow copiously from pop culture without making films of pop culture; his
rigorous visual compositions set the action at a contemplative distance that
keeps one eye on history and the other on the future. Gerwig, by contrast, is out
to conquer the moment, and her visual compositions reflect this immediacy.
Her images (with cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto) offer, in effect, a mighty
sense of style without a corresponding sense of form: they teem and overflow,
because they’re meant not to be limited to the screen but to burst out and fill
the theatre and take their place in the world at large. She doesn’t borrow pop
culture ironically; she embraces it passionately and directly, in order to
transform it, and thereby to transform viewers’ relationship to it and to render
that relationship active, critical, non-nostalgic. Her art of reinterpreting
society’s looming, shiny cultural objects, in the interest of progress, dramatizes

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 6/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

the connection between playing in a child’s doll house and on the big screens of
the world. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

The killer who got into Harvard.

A thief who stole only silver.

The light of the world’s first nuclear bomb.

How Steve Martin learned what’s funny.

Growing up as the son of the Cowardly Lion.

Amelia Earhart’s last flight.

Fiction by Milan Kundera: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999. He writes about movies in
his blog, The Front Row. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life
of Jean-Luc Godard.”

More: Barbie Movies Greta Gerwig Mattel Intellectual Property

Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond.
Paid subscribers also receive book picks.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 7/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

E-mail address

E-mail address

Sign up

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is
protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Read More

The Weekend Essay

Why Barbie Must Be Punished

Mothers, daughters, and an icon’s existential crisis.
By Leslie Jamison

Cultural Comment

The Barbie Movie That Was Barred from Theatres

Todd Haynes’s “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” exists in diametrical,
generational opposition to Greta Gerwig’s box-office-topping “Barbie.”
By Jessica Winter

Cultural Comment

Decoding Barbie’s Radical Pose

The “Barbie” movie glides over the history of dolls as powerful cultural objects.
By Alexandra Lange

Postscript

Paul Reubens’s Preposterous Grace

Just as “Barbie” today appears to have reawakened a love of moviegoing, “Pee-
wee’s Playhouse” was a reminder in its day that TV could be worth watching.
By Bruce Handy

Cookies Settings

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 8/9

8/22/23, 9:08 AM “Barbie” Is Brilliant, Beautiful, and Fun as Hell | The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/barbie-is-brilliant-beautiful-and-fun-as-hell#:~:text=Greta Gerwig's giddily stylized vision,even the… 9/9