Film Fatale: Now I Am Become Barbie, Destroyer of Patriarchy
The Barbie movie is the world's best advert. It says to the audience, of all ages, come to the cinema. It ticks off everything a box office movie wants to achieve: Sprinkling relatable social commentary amongst silliness, just enough to puncture through the Mattel protective layer but not enough to cause any actual havoc (although it did piss off Ben Shapiro and the like, but at this point that’s a given). A film like this is made for one-liner Letterboxd reviews, it’s made for sneaking in tins of pink G&T in the cinema; it’s made to make people feel good.
Barbie could stand alone on its incredible set design. Gerwig’s choice to eschew CGI and have her set entirely comprised of physical props, stages and scenes, the tangible nature created a depth that a green screen could never. The hand painted backdrops gave the film an otherworldy quality, something like The Truman Show and The Red Shoes.
Just like when Hollywood said farewell to genuinely interesting female leads somewhere not long after the Golden Age - they also began to say farewell to one of the most important essences of filmmaking and world building - the set. Gerwig brought both back, and this is the perfect movie to it with. It would be strange to use heaps of CGI for a film about Barbie, a doll that brings childhood imagination into a tactile object. Something I love is showing 2001: A Space Odyssey to people for the first time and repeating in their ear: “They made all of this! All of it! And it’s why it looks so incredible. They had no other hoice.” You can’t achieve the same feeling of depth and immersion with digital effects.
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Oppenheimer also skipped on the CGI when creating their atomic blast scene, using instead a forced perspective technique. This, however, doesn’t let Christopher Nolan into the trustworthy and kind filmmaker club, as he left out the majority of VFX artists in the film's credits. A filmmaker crime that is infinitely worse than producing a picture using only CGI, especially as we consider the recent and ongoing Hollywood strikes.
The Barbenheimer experience was undoubtedly cringe: As more and more companies and brands created memes of Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy in black and pink, the less it was funny. But, it was so beautiful seeing every screening being sold out. My boyfriend, Conor, was cornered by Manchester Evening News for a TikTok, asking Barbie or Oppenhiemer? Conor replied with both. He wasn’t going to bring any negativity to this overwhelmingly positive day. Barbie making $200 million and Oppenheimer making $100 in the first 5 days is a huge win for the cinema business - I guess it’s okay to partake in marketing strategies if it means you’re having fun and helping to keep cinemas open. Since multiple films’ release dates were pushed back during the pandemic, notably the recent James Bond film in 2020 - there was a time where the future of cinemas looked dire. In the EU and the UK, cinema ticket sales for 2022 were 34.5% below the 2017-2019 average, estimating loss of 338.9 million tickets.
Seeing the floods of black and pink in my local Vue was silly, camp and fun. There’s many ways you could intellectualise these films, particually in relation to eachother: nihilism, the teenage girl experience, whatever. But I think with this phenomenon, the most relevance is what happened outside the screening.
“Barbie, Ken and Oppenheimer are examples of how far audiences have been tried and tested in their real lives, for us to now turn to a 12A Barbie movie and the creator of the atomic bomb in order to feel closer to each other, and engage in media that is longer than 30 seconds.”
Barbie made its way into the hearts of the average media consuming early 20s male via Ryan Gosling's impeccable performance. Ken was quite meta, making ‘literally me’ a main plot point with the man himself. Barbie did this too, with the Depression Barbie montage and constant references to having an existential crisis. The film made itself highly meme-able, and the amount of free marketing this gave Barbie is impressive. Although they still spent $150million on marketing, which was a few million more than the budget for the film itself.
Gosling built his career on playing uber cool, masculine and troubled men in films such as The Place Beyond the Pines, Drive, Only God Forgives, and of course Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049: the casting team couldn’t have chosen a better Ken for the job. Sitting beside my boyfriend and my best male friend who both obsessively rewatch Dune and have dressed up as the driver from Drive at least once - it worked. The pointing and cackling as Gosling wore a leather jacket and played out the stereotypical dude lifestyle added a new demographic of Greta Gerwig fans and hopefully a newfound trust for women directed comedies. After the disastrous car crash of the all female Ghostbusters film and Amy Schumer adjacent comedy, Gerwig shows the boys that women can be funny, and they’re best friends with your cinematic hero.
Greta Gerwig describes her intentions for the film to be “something anarchic and wild and completely bananas”. Barbie isn’t a radical film, but when viewers are so used to seeing Matt Damon, “He’s behind me, isn't he?” dialogue and Marvel action sequences, it can feel radical to even suggest something grazing against the current norm in the mainstream, commercial sphere.
From first glance the film seemed like it could so easily be another Buzzfeed classic, fodder for the millennial wank bank, Margot Robbie is slaying! We did it Joe! kind of film. The hype scared me. What if this isn’t Gerwig’s masterpiece, what if she throws Frances Ha, Lady Bird and her mumblecore legacy out the window for a cheque. Luckily, thankfully, she didn’t do that. Gerwig dug her heels in the ground and made a historical impact for future women being handed the trust in making box office hits. It’s easy to say that this isn’t important, that Barbie is another example of Hollywood being a leech with using representation and neolib comedy for their own commercial gain, but even if Barbie doesn't cut it for people - Frances Ha and Lady Bird will. Gerwig has the ability to have girl-centric films given a wider appeal, Little Women being a great example. I don’t think anyone else could bring every demographic into the cinema at once. Not even Christopher Nolan.
As Slavoj Žižek writes in his essay for The New Statesman Barbie can’t handle the truth:
“The doll couple are forced to confront the fact that there isn’t just a brutal reality beyond Barbie Land, but that utopia is part of that brutal reality: without fantasies like Barbie Land, individuals would simply not be able to endure the real world.”
Barbie, Ken and Oppenheimer are examples of how far audiences have been tried and tested in their real lives, for us to now turn to a 12A Barbie movie and the creator of the atomic bomb in order to feel closer to each other, and engage in media that is longer than 30 seconds. Unapologetic nostalgia through Barbie and extreme anxiety and western guilt through Oppenheimer has successfully allowed the film industry to live for a little longer.
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum
