'This Barbie Is a Feminist': Greta Gerwig's Barbie Reckons With Her Fraught Legacy

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‘This Barbie Is a Feminist’: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Reckons With Her Fraught Legacy
7/25/2023 by Elline Lipkin
In Barbie, Greta Gerwig pushes a message of feminist disruption into the mainstream. It’s a huge start.


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Margot Robbie, Alexandra Shipp, Michael Cera, Ariana Greenblatt and America Ferrera in a scene from Barbie. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Note: Spoilers to follow.

She’s everywhere. Billboards, bus stop posters, fro yo tie-ins, Crocs, an Airbnb in Malibu, a shower of pink sparkles on Google starting last week. The release of Barbie has come with a PR budget (and blitz) of proportions even more outsized than the original doll’s body (which would have prevented a human equivalent from standing upright). Yet pre-film, it’s fair to say that Barbie—doll and icon—was already everywhere, through her omnipresence in American doll culture and entrenchment in the consciousness (and likely deeper hold in the subconscious) of just about every girl and woman in America over the past 60 years. There is no shortage of excitement, criticism, love, fury and a range of in-between emotions about the doll who—while famously childless—has spawned numerous sub-industries both celebrating and deconstructing her.

This past weekend’s Barbie-stravanganza brought out moviegoers in droves, often wearing bright pink and flashing jubilant smiles in the photo booths strategically placed in theatre lobbies across America. It beat out Oppenheimer box office sales handily and: “also scored the best domestic debut of all time for a title directed by a woman, surpassing 2019’s ‘Captain Marvel’ ($153 million),” according to the LA Times. Most moviegoers left the theater, alongside their gal pals, beaming with joy at their icon’s unexpected heroine’s journey. Some—and not just conservatives, I’ll guess—were probably disappointed that director Greta Gerwig has crossed the pink plastic icon, brilliantly and subversively, over from “Barbieland” (through a hole in the ‘space-time continuum’) with flattened feet, thoughts of death, existential angst and (gasp) cellulite … to the ‘real world.’ As the film puts it, it’s “trading the plastics of Barbieland for the plastics of Los Angeles.”

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The Barbies are of all different races, sizes, abilities, and in an understated but radical move, include trans actor Hari Nef. Once in LA, “Stereotypical Barbie” (Margot Robbie) flees to the ‘mothership’ of Mattel’s headquarters and the corporation willingly allows itself to be lampooned. In one of many pointed asides Gerwig embeds into the film, Will Ferrell (as CEO) stumbles his way through an absurd monologue about how supportive he is of women—with the entirely male board flanking him. Then, when asked how representation now works, an exec comes out with the line that they just know how to “hide” inequity better. The tensions within the film emerge from having Robbie grapple directly with the cultural conversations that Barbie has sparked for years. Gerwig allows these dichotomies to play out in a meta-reversal as Barbie, outside of the female-sphere of Barbieland, recognizes her legacy is the inverse of what she thought.

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Issa Rae in Barbie. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
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In the film’s final scene, Robbie—symbolically wearing pink Birkenstocks on her now flat feet—is psyching herself up to get out of a car, accompanied by Ferrera, Greenblatt and husband/father Ryan Piers Williams, (Ferrera’s real life spouse) whose presence I took to be a show of male support. It is finally revealed is that she’s going to an appointment with “her gynecologist.” It seemed a curious ending until I realized what it symbolized—that Barbie in the real world has an actual vagina (spoofed earlier in the film that she and Ken are absent of genitalia) and moves from a place of representing sexuality to needing reproductive care. The ending seems a return to what actual women need: to be in charge of their own bodies. While I’m sure the film was finished before more recent reproductive rights developments—the implication of Barbie showing up to this very real type of appointment is not lost. Gerwig pushes her message of disruption as far as she can for a mainstream movie—one that millions are going to see out of connection to the touchstone that is Barbie. She is reckoning with her legacy and literally rewriting the script through active questioning and engagement with a legacy—plus great costumes and some fun song and dance scenes. It’s a huge start.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/07/25/barbie-feminist-women-history/