I should start by saying that I have no objective way of talking about Greta Gerwig. Ever since I’ve been a young man, I’ve thought she was the bees knees. I’ve sought her out in even the absolute worst things she’s done. I’ve even sought out audiobooks she’s narrated, with middling success. I have a couple of photos of her on my phone for when I’m sad, which is probably an overshare, but I think it’s important to lead with that in case you misunderstand that you’re talking to someone who’s compromised at best. The fact that this movie exists at all is bananas. The fact that Margot Robbie in every interview she’s done in the lead up to this movie has never once failed to mention that that Gal Gadot would actually be the best Barbie actress is bananas. I should I also say that barbiecore is something that I cannot speak objectively about. Just writing that word makes me instinctive check over my shoulder to see if my parents are going to walk into the family computer room while I anxiously check on my Tumblr feed and I’m sixteen again, wiping the browser history again. So maybe you shouldn’t read what I have to say? I’m going to say it was fun. And there’s a special place in hell for you if you don’t like it, but you should know at the end of that sentence, because I’m conflict averse, I’m not going to, like, dig in if you disagree. I’m just going to politely delete your number and stop asking you to come out to drinks after work on Fridays.
Things that I thought were (spoilery) really good: the two headfakes. The first being that when we see Ken (Gosling) make the decision to go back to Barbieland after watching Barbie (Robbie) go with the Mattel employees into the unmarked black van, and we think that he’s going back to rally the troops and save her but in fact he’s going back to gain control of Barbieland (Wife insists that its obvious that’s what he’s doing, but Bestie did not confirm or deny). The second headfake is the mistaken identity of the girl playing with Barbie.
The darkness at the center of this movie’s humor cannot be unseen: the uncontrollable thoughts of death, the uncommented-upon shot of the secretary sketching Barbie crying her eyes out, the way in which Ken mimes the dismissive mannerisms of real world men upon his first meeting with patriarchy. The movie really thrives on the absurdist pastel exterior to Trojan horse some biting criticisms of masculinity and commercial feminism (what Bestie and I like to refer to as “dissociative feminism because of Tumblr reasons”). Wife says her favorite sequence is basically every scene up until Barbie’s exodus, which I think scans in the sense that it’s the most polished sequence in the movie, from the homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey to the make believe stage business gone awry to the clever and subversively sexual threats of “beaching off”–all of which is full of dark asides and dry one-liners spoken under the breath. I am personally a sucker for unexpected dance sequences, which is why I so thoroughly loved Raw more recently and then also its inevitable double feature partner Sanctuary, and this movie has more than one of those. Every night is boy’s night is the greatest line. I stand by that.
As someone who has been to the movies a lot this week ([July 26] the tyrant went to see The Secret Life of Pets today, which she loved, especially the part where Max blackmails the other dog into submission by laying waste to his own house, somehow the kid even at her age could discern that something awful was being done], and then also Mission Impossible at 8:30 last night, what Bestie would describe as 20:30, I think), I have to say it feels so strange to struggle to find a parking space after literally years of pulling into the same space. When we went to see Barbie because the grandparents were out patrolling for the two prisoners for a night, we had to trudge past a busted water main as an engine of firefighters tried to correct the problem in the back of the farthest reaches of the parking lot, and then yesterday, Friend and I commuted from our parking spot to the theater we were so far away and heard people in multiple showings of Boppenheimer come out and fill the lobby between 20:30 and the end of the movie. Today, as the monster and I were getting our tickets scanned, a family fully dressed in Barbie regalia checked in at 10:30 in the morning. I’m really glad that we went on the Friday opening. The sea of pink. The fact that besides the two friends seated next to me and the guy at the far end, our row was populated completely with women, as was every row on other side of us as far as the eye could see. It really did feel like a reverse Lighthouse as Bestie put it, reflecting the day after she’d seen it the following weekend (her first movie since The Lighthouse, in fact). Reading about theater owners who say that ticket sales have far surpassed Endgame and catapulted this movie into the stratosphere for Monday ticket sales, women directed movie sales, two movies in one opening weekend sales, just about any metric you can find, I’m finding myself in a few different places.
My first thought I have is how did this weird little movie get so much attention (quickly followed by, I am so excited to have Gerwig taking a crack at Magician’s Nephew please please)? This indie darling-turned-director who produced some of my very favorite movies about high school and the angst of growing older suddenly is producing a billion dollar franchise and everyone else is into that? But at the same time, there’s no surprise here. The stars of this film are at the height of their power and the marketing campaign right at the tail end of the summer when everyone has time to burn seems like the perfect alignment of events.
My second thought is nervousness about the movie’s ascension from cult status to Event of the Year. Personally, I love a spontaneous event. Going on opening weekend felt like accidentally getting struck by lightning. What were the chances? Did I buy a lottery ticket all that week? Yes, but I never expected to find myself in the midst of a cultural phenomenon at a Barbie movie. I like sitting among a bunch of people who don’t look like me, who all look like each other and thinking I am a part of something that is not for me and that is very exciting. To witness community. To watch the collective inhale and exhale. To listen to a woman shout at the end of one of the cognitive dissonance monologues, “Sounds right to me” and have everyone laugh. And yet I always feel protective of those kinds of movies too, not as a nervy empath, but as someone who’s really tired of having killjoys yuck everyone else’s yum, which is why Wife’s grouchy self-radicalized friend who “read a synopsis” and “did the research” on YT without seeing the movie is not someone whose opinion I’m going to seek out for this one.
My third thought is hope that this expels the idea of the zero-sum nature of movie-watching and movie releases. I read about how this phenomenon of double features from tonally different universes, or at least the public’s twee interest in celebrating such a pairing, happens basically once every decade, and so in some ways I think this is an especially unusual and important moment in which to pause and appreciate the weirdness of what has happened.
As someone who absolutely cannot handle and does not understand in any way the allure of the double feature, I really do feel for those who want to play favorites on Boppenheimer or really any match up. I think especially during the last couple of years when theaters have been closed and your only options were hoping you made it home before California-enforced curfew after going to the legally nebulous drive-in movies, the idea of being able to sit in your car with a friend or a partner and suffer through ET so that you can watch Jurassic Park, or that one October when I went to see a horror double feature and discovered Little Monsters after learning that I did not, in fact, like Edgar Wright’s World’s End (I don’t know if that was exactly the right pairing I saw!). I think, actually, I forced everyone to watch that movie with me at home the next evening because I liked it so much. I remember my first double feature in a proper drive-in was when I was twenty-one and I had just graduated from college. I was working in the Bay Area that summer so that I could be close to my significant other, who absolutely loved drive-ins. We went to see Pixar’s Brave and then one of the Marvel movies (can’t remember which one), and I still remember us nodding off in the middle of the second one (so young, so full of bluster).
There is nothing that will kill your enjoyment of a movie more than sitting through an entirely different movie for hours first, as anyone who has tried to double or triple up on Cinequest film festival movies can tell you. The only proper way to do it is to have an accomplice, to plot out the illicit sandwiches and snacks you’re going to procure, and to break your decades-long sanctions on caffeine around hour four. Because double features are, and this is important, stunts. They require your understanding that you aren’t actually there to enjoy watching six hours of anything anymore. You’re there to provoke others with how little you value your time. It’s the same reason that Wife and I went to see all the Marvel movies in the lead up to the Age of Ultron as one of our first couple-y things together. Not because she hadn’t seen most of them before. Not because I would enjoy taking off from two days of work and class in order to do it, but because it’s important that you know if you can disappear for approximately 36 hours without anyone reporting you missing to the police.
I hope some day that my monsters and I will spend our summers going to thematic double features. I hope they know the acute and ineffable joy of being emotionally pulled apart in two different directions, of forcing two things into conversation together that never asked for such a dialogue. I hope that I don’t have to wait another ten or fifteen years to take them to that opening weekend, because as much as I hate double features, they are pure magic.
