A typical day in Barbie Land begins with a toaster waffle and a glass of milk-held briefly to the mouth, doll-style, rather than actually consumed-a cheerful greeting of the neighbor Barbies glimpsed from the vantage point of one’s wall-free house, and then a trip to the pink-sanded beach. All the women-with the exception of the discontinued pregnant doll Midge-are named Barbie, from the fanciful realm’s president (Issa Rae), to its resident physicist (Emma Mackey), doctor (Hari Nef), and author (Alexandra Shipp). Are audiences meant to cheer on the empowered girlboss exploits of the live-action embodiment of a now 64-year-old fashion doll? Or, on the contrary, should we be critiquing the male gaze–driven industrial economy that made generations of little girls believe that the highest achievement of adult womanhood was an anatomically impossible waist-hip ratio? And what about those of us who grew up Barbie-indifferent-say, women who never owned the toys as children (perhaps because, as in my household, our second-wave-feminist mothers saw them as tacky and retrograde) but who willingly played with them at friends’ houses, marveling over their high heel–ready arched feet, nipple-free breasts, and mysteriously featureless crotches?Īfter a cold open that riffs on the “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a towering, swimsuited Barbie replacing Kubrick’s black megalith, Gerwig plonks us straight into the unsettling utopia of Barbie Land, a realm where life-size incarnations of the dolls live in a state of matriarchal harmony. The tag line, like the rest of the film’s inescapable (and, even haters must concede, brilliantly executed) advance marketing campaign, toes the line between sincerity and camp. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” promises (or threatens) the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you.
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