Hey here’s what’s what: Barbie made me cry, several times if you must know. I was in the twin drive-in and the attendant correctly guessed my mother and I, in a long-cabin soft-top blue Jeep, were there for it. Puling during all the poignant manufactured moments, of course—but also when attempting to explain what there was to process about it, the two of us driving away too soon, I felt, from the credits.
“You can know all of it,” I hope the two-beat moment in between reads as dimly phrased thought instead of stilling belying tremble. “But it’s different when someone else says it.”
That scene where Margot Robbie is officially named as Margot Robbie by narrator Helen Mirren I found splendid. It was the maze sweep I kept waiting for throughout the remainder of the film—the fight scene funny and representatively accurate but also cotton balls in front of the sight (site?) of memory you want to return to. Actually I wanted to see that again…y’all can we rewind real quick actually?
Robbie’s accent peeps through a little as she’s crying: the gig is sort of up, if you know to search for it. The summation by America Ferrera and crew articulating the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under patriarchy—specifically tying it all together using that term, cognitive dissonance. Robbie moping because she’s “not perfect anymore”; Ferrera frustrated because Barbie is gorgeous and smart and still feels useless. Mirren voiceover: directors, Margot Robbie is not the person to cast if you want us to believe this point.
In fact I think this is right and true and wrong and perfect. The definitively stereotypical thing about Robbie’s Barbie is the figure and features, which give us a prism to think about “every” woman feeling haphazard and off. If the person with all the prophetic upsides feels down, surely it is suspicious to think myself unspectacular, moveable in all the bad ways.
Still: there is something material, capital, about the performance. It is feasible to find weeping here. (Did you catch how many lines were about regrettable appearances caused by someone playing with you too hard?) Before, I’ve asked how much of genius will always be indecipherable from women’s beauty; now, I’d wager to add how much of opportunity comes from people remembering your name and the person it looks like.
I know this isn’t the point—this is maybe the antithesis of the point—but I’ll say it anyways: Ryan Gosling in black fringe top and fur coat was very, very hot.
The thing I could cull from the hay on the way home was a good rub over the frontal-ness of Ken’s storyline. The point made is quite real because it is so fake: a man boggled by his inability to find identity outside of the gaze of a woman. Without Barbie—“It’s not Ken, it’s Barbie and Ken”—the vacuum is a listless horizon.
Easy to relate to, Ken’s dilemma: in so many words, it is the condition of un-maleness. Always our yields are tacked, additives, to the project of womanhood (banal arcane and understated though that gig may be, simple dress hanging next to old bag). But if this condition of wavering is not expressly feminine…if there’s some modicum of hope within the contest between impressive and pretty each of us balances for our worldly mates…
If Ken can feel such fright, does that make it more believable? More arguably a part of the human condition, to seek exterior approval in proffering just-so?
Billboard in California: “No one raps about small butts”.
Barbie: “I’m a man with no power, does that make me a woman?”
Before the movie I write this:
Participating in the great human tradition of not knowing what I’m doing
There’s love passion and care in the trattoria commercial, and, historically, to be found in the necking at drive ins. Whole ranges of snogs, panicky urgencies, the bad kissing of necessary moments.
After, the view I would add is exactly that which I shouldn’t pay attention to—sweatpants all around, so much plain comfort to watch this extradition of arched feet.