Greta Gerwig is a serious filmmaker. Greta Gerwig also cannot make a serious film in the current environment of IP content creation. That has nothing to do with her merits as a director and writer, and I don’t want anyone to think that Barbie was a bad movie or that Gerwig somehow sold out by making it. The economics of filmmaking these days almost demand that directors and writers, which include her partner Noah Baumbach, with whom she co-wrote the movie, dip into the wells of creating money-printing devices for corporations wishing to further milk the profitability of their creations.
It’s rare to have a Martin Scorsese who can get studio funding for every one of his passion projects, but most of those directors who still work are from a more halcyon age of cinema where only a portion of movies in theaters were bait to sell people stuff tangentially related to the art on the screen. Even though it was, anecdotally, at least, always George Lucas’ intent to turn Star Wars into a merchandising platform, there was a time when A New Hope was the only piece of media related to the Star Wars universe when you could believably corner it as the work of an auteur venturing into science fiction. Even the original merchandising push felt tame to what it would become in the late ‘90s with the dawn of the prequels.
The premise of Barbie felt high-concept for one of these mass market vehicles. Basically, the protagonist “stereotypical” Barbie (Margot Robbie) started having an existential crisis because the woman who owned her doll in the real world, played by America Ferrara1, started sinking into her own depression because of several reasons, not the least of which was that she was pretty tired of living in a patriarchal society where a woman’s worth is judged with intense scrutiny. In fact, her central monologue is the film’s climax, and I bet that that speech was the biggest reason why infernal manbaby psychopaths like Ben Shapiro wet themselves and filmed their temper tantrums about how feminism was a cancer before hitting their vape and scarfing taquitos and Dew2.
And that defines the film’s central question. Everything Ferrara’s character said in that monologue was 100 percent true. Even today, after all the work it has taken to redistribute power and material gains across all genders but, if we must adhere to a strict binary3, to women more equitably, women in general still get the short end of many sticks, both materially and optically. The fact that conservatives of all flavors still get mad when you point this out, as if “feminism” has gotten them enough, shows that there’s still work to do.
But intersectionality means that there’s always more than one avenue of social analysis at play here, and every issue has intersectionality whether or not you know it. In fact, every derogatory -ism that infects society can be traced back to the superhighway of inequity, and that’s class. Money. Material resources. Every single bigotry, from racism to antisemitism to misogyny even down to stuff that still feels dreadfully acceptable even in liberal circles like fatphobia and discrimination against prisoners and the homeless, all of it has roots in the fact that the people who have hoarded and continue to hoard resources like they’re things that you should be greedy for and not things that are vital for the survival of our species on the whole want to keep it and not share.
Thus it follows the main critique of the movie is that no matter what feelgood message about feminism or disrupting or outright destroying the patriarchy that Barbie has, the overall MO of the film is to keep shoveling resources into the maws of Mattel and, most disgustingly, Warner Brothers. The wannabe Disney that has no patience to build a pop culture steamroller4 that the Mouse has, but their playbook has given everyone the key on how to keep sucking up money away from actors, production crews, writers, even consumers. Use of AI. Deletion of media from streaming networks that have no reason to ever delete anything. Proliferation of cheap and braindead reality programming. One could argue no amount of posturing in the movie would make up for the money Gerwig is putting in the pockets of David Zaslav and his band of vampires.
But analysis is never this simple. Nothing is perfect, and no one is ever going to achieve perfect praxis. There will be people doing it better than Gerwig, for sure, but there’s something a little charming about using a big budget IP vehicle to court subversion, no matter how slight it might seem. Maybe it’s just one girl who sees this and starts questioning her “place” in a strict community and breaks free. Maybe it’s another teenager who sees the scene at the end where Will Ferrell’s executive changes his mind on something just because it’ll make a shit-ton of money and start questioning whether he’s really on Barbie’s side. I don’t think the movie has perfect messaging by far, as seen by the plot point near the end where voting solves something. But it’s good enough that I think that, aside from entertainment value (of which this movie has tons), it’s a worthwhile use of studio funds, to gently make fun of those execs that are paying Gerwig and Baumbach and Ferrara and Kate McKinnon, and Ryan Gosling and Robbie to do it for them in some warped corporate version of findomming.
Anything that makes the Ben Shapiros and Matt Walshes of the world mad is good by me. The way the system works nowadays makes it impossible for rich assholes not to win in the short term, so chipping away from the inside might not be the worst idea. Maybe Gerwig and Baumbach are just petit bourgeoise grifters selling a dream. Maybe they just wanted a nest egg to work on their next passion project. Or maybe there’s a method. I’m not sure I care about the intent at this point. Maybe if more and more filmmakers start putting pointed messages in their films that myopic executives are too blind to see, maybe this whole “letting liberal-to-leftist prestige directors take on big budget IP films” could do some good.
As for the movie itself, it was way funnier than I thought was going to be, and the acting performances, from Robbie all the way down to John Cena in a cameo role, were all home runs. You shouldn’t have to be in the target audience to enjoy this. I certainly was not in said target audience, obviously, but it might have been the best theater experience I had since Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.
I don’t know who deserves the Best Supporting Actress nod more between her and Rhea Perlman, but in the spirit of the movie, which is about women uplifting each other, I choose not to pit them against each other and just say the Academy should nominate them both.
Reminder, gender is a work, and there are as many genders as there are numbers.
I am not handing it to Disney here. They, as a corporate entity, suck.