12/17/23
Newsletter #531
The Crack of Dawn
I actually watched all of Barbie (2023) last night. Why? It’s the biggest moneymaker of the year. Not only did they do an excellent job marketing the film, but people actually had to tell their friends, “You’ve got to see this movie, it’s good.” A couple of people told me (albeit, with trepidation) that it was good, followed by the inarguable rationale, “Well, I liked it.” Two people added, “And I like that whole thing about paternalism.”
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that was quite that desperate to have a story, a plot, or God forbid, a point, yet couldn’t find any of them. The movies has at least a half dozen main plots that each ties up in some unsatisfactory fashion, then it moves on to the next plot. It’s as though they set out to blow up the guns of Navarone, but then remember that they forgot to blow up the bridge on the river Kwai, then realize that they really need to land a jet in the Hudson River, but first they need to invent the atom bomb, then maybe have a musical number. Why not? It’s not like they have one main plot, then several subplots supporting the main plot; they just keep changing the entire plot and Barbie’s goal. Is she Pinocchio, a doll that wants to be a real person? No. She doesn’t want to go to the real world, she prefers to stay in Barbieland.
However, Barbie (portrayed by the lovely Margot Robbie, clearly doing the best she can with the very little she’s given) mistakenly says the word “death,” and therefore now has to leave Barbieland (where all females are unimaginatively named Barbie), go to the real world and find the grown Latina woman who used to play with her as a child twenty years ago? What? Why? What possible good is that going to do her? Barbie doesn’t want to leave Barbieland, and I don’t blame her. Yet they haven’t managed to motivate her to do anything.
Other than checking ethnicities off on the now required “inclusion list,” what does this Latina woman and her mouthy daughter have to do with Barbie saying death? Is this Latina woman about to die? Is Barbie prescient? No. And though a bit shocking, why shouldn’t Barbie say death? But Ken (played by the utterly game Ryan Gosling), where all males are painfully named Ken (except Allan) is in unrequited love with Barbie – which for a half a minute, seemed like a good idea, but it’s not pursued – so he stows away in Barbie’s pink Corvette with her to the real world. They arrive in the real world, and we immediately see a big TV showing President Bill Clinton and Sylvester Stallone as a ripped Rocky, in Rocky IV. As Barbie and Ken cross a parking lot, a crew of workmen holler dirty, sexist things at Barbie, which they wouldn’t do now, so I assumed they were playing the “real world” as the late 1980s or early 1990s, but no, the cars are all 2023. So, there is no real world.
I’m of the correct age to have some understanding of Barbie dolls, although I certainly never played with them. I did have a G.I. Joe and a James Bond action figure. I can’t even imagine my elder sister playing with dolls, let alone Barbie, but my younger sister probably did, although she certainly wasn’t an enthusiast. But as I watched the movie’s end credits, they showed many of the other dolls in the Barbie line, and they have other names than Barbie and Ken. Why were all the girls named Barbie and the boys called Ken? There was like Skipper and Jasmine and quite a few others. I don’t even get this movie on a toy level. Did any of the filmmakers even give a shit about the toy Barbie?
The Mattel Toy Company actually produced the movie and Warner Brothers released it. Therefore, it has to be a representation of what Mattel is thinking, and they’ve cast themselves as the ostensible bad guys, led by the perennially unfunny Will Farrell. The Mattel executives have to get the toys back into the box. That’s one of the plots. Oh, and it begins with Helen Mirren narrating for some reason, but the narration just stops. It only comes back once in the middle of the movie. Barbie is giving a speech about how being pretty isn’t the point, it’s a false goal, and Helen Mirren vocally reappears and says something like, “Margot Robbie is too pretty to give this speech,” and she is. So why is she? It’s not funny.
Is it supposed to be ironic? No, it can’t be, we’re in the post-Ironic world. Then it must be what poses as a joke. So, what is Barbie saying? And for that matter, what is Helen Mirren saying?
While Barbie is gone, Ken turns Barbieland into Kenland, where all the Kens (what happened to Skipper?) dress like cowboys and love horses. Except that girls love horses, boys love guns.
I believe that a good story is always leading to its unpredictable, yet inevitable conclusion. SPOILER ALERT. The movie ends with Barbie going to the gynecologist. I took this as an admission that she now understood that she had a vagina. It was presented as sort of a twist ending. So, is that what they set off to do at the beginning of the film? It began with a “comic,” though not funny, parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with grim little girls smashing old baby dolls with Barbies. They seem to be saying that little girls were liberated from the dreariness of pretending to be mothers tending their baby dolls, to the bliss of pretending to be a glamorous fashion model with an unending wardrobe, and a line of hunky boyfriends. Now, instead of the horrid drudgery of caring for an infant, with its unending needs, women could now just desire more and more stuff.
But the little girls didn’t lift Barbie’s skirt exposing her lack of genitalia. Nor did they express any confusion that Barbie didn’t have a vagina. Nor did they question the idea that such a pretty girl should not have one. However, if first they had noticed in the beginning, questioning Mattel’s veracity in making that decision, I would have understood the ending.
In conclusion, as with any big, expensive Hollywood movie, it looks good. It is technically proficient. The actors are good, and sincere. Greta Gerwig did a perfectly adequate job directing, and nothing more. She and Noah Baumbach, her screenwriting partner, truly haven’t got a single clue what they’re doing. But beyond having no technical skills, they have no conviction or sincerity, either.
But I watched the whole movie right through the end credits.
There you have it.