Barbie is a feminist film: A peek into Greta Gerwig’s pitch for the Everywoman

A still from 'Barbie', which released in theatres on July 21.

In the big Barbenheimer face-off, Greta Gerwig has dropped the F-bomb — and no one saw it coming. Barbie, the American multi-hyphenate’s latest directorial, is a complete blast from start to finish and feminist to its very core. It is, as expected, a bright pink, plastic fantasia where women (real or imitation) are at the forefront in a campy, Barbie world.

Those who have followed Gerwig’s filmography might have anticipated a bait-and-switch — not just the 120-minute-long advertisement other cynics expected, given the film was sponsored by the toymaker Mattel. But even the most sceptical viewer will have to admit: Barbie is a feminist coup d’etat for the ages.

Director Greta Gerwig with Barbie star Margot Robbie.

If you haven’t watched it yet, here’s a very brief summary: One day, “stereotypical” Barbie (Margot Robbie) wakes up on the proverbial wrong side of her bed in Barbieland. Her heels are touching the ground. She is beginning to wonder about death. Her thighs are showing signs of — the horror — cellulite.

When she heads into the real world, along with her forever-two-steps-behind Ken (an outstanding Ryan Gosling), to find her human player, she realises that nothing is as she thought it would be. Barbie didn’t, as she has been led to believe, fix gender equality. Unlike Barbieland, here men leer, lure and lead. She returns disheartened; while a delighted (and red-pilled) Ken begins to upend Barbieland into the monster truck-infested, brewski-laced Kendom.

What follows are some bizarre, funny adventures, in a riveting, self-aware story that is buoyed by stunning performances. There is detailed art and production design and a tight script featuring many meta jokes and wisdom about how gender plays out in reality and fantasy. Barbie takes a crazy premise — which is also very much of its time with its multiple worlds and time-space continuums and parallel realities — to deliver a candy-coloured redux on some Big Issues™, such as feminism and patriarchy.

And yet, the feminist message at the heart of Barbie isn’t just a Beyonce-style “who run the world” clarion call to power and global domination. In the third act of the film, America Ferrera, who plays Gloria, an employee of Mattel, delivers a powerful monologue that, upon reflection, reveals itself to be the heart of this wild, campy film.

Gloria talks about the time-honoured, unrealistic and very contradictory expectations of women and how they’re supposed to behave — for example, how a woman is expected to love being a mother, but to also not talk about her children all the time. Amazed that Barbie, the archetype of American beauty for decades, is made to feel like she no longer is beautiful — and thus, no longer is — makes Gloria wonder. “You’re either brainwashed or you’re weird and ugly. There is no in-between,” goes one pithy observation.

In its passion and accuracy, Gloria’s monologue is the spiritual successor of the “Cool Girl” monologue from David Fincher’s 2014 film Gone Girl. “Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer…jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot,” rants Amy (Rosamund Pike) as she drives up to her next victim.

It’s also reminiscent of Laura Dern’s little speech in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, 2019 (who has co-written Barbie): “People don’t accept a mother who drinks too much wine and yells at her child and calls him an asshole. I get it. I do it too. We can accept an imperfect Dad. Let’s face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago. Before that fathers were expected to be silent and absent and unreliable and selfish …But people absolutely don't accept those same failings in mothers.”

These are angry diatribes from angry, resigned, resentful and often helpless women; distillations of a broader admission that things have not changed as much for women as they should have, as they had been promised, after three waves of the feminist movement. If equality and self-determination are the two cornerstones of the movement, then we sit in a strange place where nothing has panned out in quite the way it should have.

It is the dismay at realising that women and girls continue to be strung up between others’ ideas of right and wrong; everything, from their bodily autonomy to workplace existence to empowerment, subject to the opinions of a male-dominated society, relatives and corporations. Whether it is women as mothers, women as power-suited executives: The pressures of both tradition and progress can lead women to the same place, where the real self eludes. To borrow from Joy Wang of Everything, Everywhere All At Once, “Right is a small box invented by people who are afraid. And I know what it feels like to be trapped inside that box.”

Read a certain way, Barbie puts forth this argument for self-determination in a slightly different way. Gloria and the Barbies at one point wonder: Whatever happened to being just good enough? Is the experience of empowered womanhood also a box titled ‘Girlboss’, where to be feminist must mean to outlive previously held expectations of women?

It's a subtle refrain, shades of which register on Gerwig's previous two directorials as well: Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019). The former, the eponymous Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) is a high-school senior restless to get out of the small town because she believes she is destined for something bigger and better. A difficult relationship with her mother and a general pessimism regarding her prospects notwithstanding, Lady Bird’s sense of self is a manifestation of that end-of-the-20th-century message of hope and empowerment for women everywhere: You can become whatever you want.

Gerwig’s adaptation of the Louisa M Alcott classic Little Women, itself a work of soft feminism, depicts the lives of the March sisters as they turn to adulthood. At the beginning of the 20th century, in a war-ridden landscape, four girls are encouraged by their libertarian parents to pursue their dreams, make something of their abundant talents to rise out of destitution. Jo and Amy, particularly, present templates of what self-determination looks like in their respective literary and artistic pursuits. But it is deeper than that: Little Women demonstrates the different paths that these women take to self-actualisation, without judgement, and also emphasises the cost of living with your choices.

Like Lady Bird and Little Women, Barbie is also in a sense the coming-of-age story of a woman (doll) who realises the weight of expectation upon her and tries to go against the grain to realise her true self. In its sneak attack on the patriarchy, it doesn’t neglect Ken either: Indeed, while Ken is sort of a portrait of a ridiculous incel, but he is also shown as a victim, not a progenitor of the system.

In a recent interview, Gerwig opened up about the feminist message of Barbie. “It most certainly is a feminist film,” said Gerwig. “But it’s feminist in a way that includes everyone; it’s a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ version of it.” “I think some people hear the word ‘feminist’ and think that means it doesn't mean men…And I’m like, anyone who believes that men and women should be equal is feminist,” Margot Robbie added.

“If you look at ‘Barbie Land’ from the beginning…the Barbies are on top and the Kens are kinda disregarded…that’s not equal. So, whatever the opposite of misogynist is actually what Barbie is,” Robbie continued. “Toward the end when they balance things out..then it might be feminist.”

Gerwig added a personal observation, from watching her friends’ daughters: “Little girls playing dress-up where they put on everything — the tutu and the tiara and the boa, and the gloves, and the bag and the cowboy boots and they have sparkles…so many ideas — and then there’s this moment when they just…start wanting to disappear.”

Maybe, Barbie and all these other films seem to suggest, feminism can begin when women can see who they are; when being good enough isn’t a failing; and staying visible doesn’t have to be an uphill battle. Barbie the film may not be perfect, but it does resonate with women around the world — by mining the irony of Barbie, a symbol of that very same impossibly high ideal of a woman and the boxiness of her existence, finally feeling like all the real-world she’s meant to represent.

From “I am woman, hear me roar”, to just “I am woman”; from Barbie freaking out about cellulite until she meets a wrinkled old lady who is beautiful and knows it, from Kendom to “I am Kenough” — the film does poignancy smartly. At its heart is one question. At the very end of the film, Gloria asks her Mattel CEO boss (Will Ferrell in his element): Why can't we make place for an ordinary Barbie in a world of overachieving, impossibly beautiful Barbies?