I Watched the Barbie Movie and I Didn’t Hate...All of It

Warning: Major Spoilers. Also, this post is really long.

I am not ashamed to say that I loved my Barbie dolls as a kid. My Barbies were sharp. They were going places. I spent hours changing their shoes and clothes and imagining their lives of glamour and excitement. The pinnacle of my childhood was when I got the Barbie Dream House with a swimming pool. (Or maybe that was my friend. I honestly can’t remember, I just know I got to play with it.) At any rate, I am 100% Barbie positive. Even so, for a number of reasons, I was not eager to sit through the Barbie movie, so I missed the big cultural moment last summer and all of the fun pink outfits everyone was wearing to the theater. After all this time, I finally broke down last week and watched it on Prime.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hate it. Even more surprisingly, there were parts of it that I found delightfully original, funny, and highly entertaining. Unfortunately, the good was marred by an annoying rash of overbearing and completely unnecessary rah-rah feminism that felt tacked-on and totally inorganic, and that I frankly found embarrassing as a woman. The movie could have delivered its essentially pro-woman message effectively without hammering us over the head with obviously agenda-driven lines and Gloria’s Big Speech at the end, which, by the way, I hated. (I will explain why a little further into this review.)

But let’s start with the good:

The opening scene was a brilliant and hilarious spoof of the 2001: A Space Odyssey opening. Instead of the gorilla discovering a weapon, little girls who are somewhat listlessly playing with baby dolls encounter the original Barbie in all of her black-and-white bathing-suited glory, leading to a frenzy of doll-smashing and immediate worship of their new goddess. It was funny, imaginative and clever, and a great nod to one of the best movie opening scenes of all time.

The sets! Oh be still my heart, the sets. They were incredible. So gloriously pink! So aggressively plastic. So shiny and fantastical and fun. I adored the sets and I thought they more than did justice to the original Dream Houses.

Margie Robbie’s performance was brilliant. She made Barbie utterly charming, sweet, and irresistibly likable, even in her worst moments.

I thought Ryan Gosling was good as Ken. He brought a lot of humanity to the role. But can we talk about how Michael Cera low-key stole the entire movie as Alan, the ill-fated and short-lived Matel doll designed to be Ken’s buddy? The movie is worth watching for his performance alone.

Barbie has a great character arc. She starts out as a doll who adores her charmed life and her perfect looks, and doesn’t want the slightest change or disruption to her beautiful world. After losing everything (and getting cellulite!), she comes to grow emotionally and find her worth beyond outward appearances of perfection. In the end, she decides to become human, with all of the ugliness, complication, pain and uncertainty that entails.

So, at its core, the movie has a beautiful and wholesome message. It also has moments of great wit and charm and many clever little jokes and some hilarious sight gags. But…

I hated the patriarchy babble. I hated the confused, whip-lashy back-and-forth between a certain brand of “you-go-girl” feminism and “us women are all beaten down and just trying to get through the day and look cute in our tops.” And most of all, as previously noted, I detested Gloria’s Big Speech. (If you didn’t see the movie, you can find the speech online.) Essentially, it’s a long screed about How Hard it is to Be a Woman, which was entirely centered around the specific experience of a certain class of women, to whom which I never belonged, and will never belong.

It is not, as the speech asserts, “impossible to be a woman” because of societal expectations and blah, blah, blah. This obsession with perfectionism and pleasing everyone is a very niche, specific issue relating to a particular class of women who I cannot relate to. Poor and blue collar women (who have always worked, long before feminism told women they had to) do not have the luxury of concerning themselves with what other people think, obsessing over their image, or trying to meet societal expectations on that esoteric level. They are fixated on survival, and that does not allow them the free time and mind-space to curate a life that centers around how others perceive them, or the time to worry about pleasing everyone.

All through college, which I now believe was ill-advised for me, I worked two to three jobs at a time, frying chicken at a gas station until midnight, mopping floors, and serving coffee at a sober bar, to name just a few of the many low-paying gigs I had. Being poor makes you tough. I had to bite back at harassers myself because there was no HR to rescue me from them. It never occurred to me that I had to go through life appeasing anyone or caring about what someone thought of my choices. These are luxury problems that are born of women who have a level of entitlement that I will never relate to. Even if ever did, I’m old now and I just don’t care anymore. Also, men have their own set of daunting and contradictory expectations to deal with, and that’s never acknowledged. Life is hard for man and woman alike, folks. No one’s getting out of that fact.

I will just add one final note while we are on the socio-political—a lot of the conservative criticisms I read are the about the Barbies having a totally female-dominated society that shuts out men. That’s not exactly fair. This is the Barbie’s world, built, made and sustained by them. The Barbies one hundred percent had the right to reclaim their territory and decide how much of it they were going share with the Kens, who rightly or wrongly were just sort of there, and didn’t actively contribute anything to the building of the world. This was the Barbie’s territory, and although I think it was a badly executed plot point, they had the right to defend themselves against a hostile takeover.

Overall, Barbie doll fan or not, I certainly think the movie is worth watching. You just have to cringe through the preachy stuff. The scene where Barbie decides to become human is heartfelt and uplifting, and the overall message is very positive. And if nothing else, you get to watch Alan beat up a bunch of construction workers. Who knew he had an MMA fighter in him all of this time?

-Kristen McHenry