Barbie
The film begins with the characters in Barbie Land, a fake world where Barbie and Ken live. Despite knowing about the Real World, Barbie and Ken are completely immersed in their fake world, following its expectations and drudgery. When Barbie begins to think about death, the idea is to question the meaning, purpose, or causes of something that happens in the fake world. When she enters the Real World, she learns of complications that are too complex for her fake world, like anxiety and _. When she returns to Barbie Land (fake world), she still wants things to stay the same. How can you just and must head for the Real World to learn why she has these feelings, knowing they're living in a world that feels artificial, yet take it very seriously, trying to immerse themselves in it? Since their world is so artificial, they will eventually realize they must pull out of it and try to find deeper meaning. In a world as artificial as theirs, a single event can occur that prompts them to question complex ideas beyond their world's understanding, development, or seriousness. This leads them to become hopeless since they can’t find meaning in their artificial world. They go to the real world. The ideas
Watching this film felt as though I was losing my mind. I can’t think straight through it yet I can’t just absorb the story and completely immerse myself. It feels like it’s trying to be far from reality, yet reminding me of my real-life issues.
The movie opens with the narrator highlighting the positive impact Barbie has had on women, empowering them to achieve anything they set their minds to. It tries to be very cheerful at the start.
“because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.” at the begging of the
The story begins in Barbie Land, a matriarchy where women, or Barbies, hold higher social status than men, or Kens, who are relegated to roles such as an all-women government. Bar
When Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) enter the real world, Ken learns that “men rule the world” as he sees men in government, men embracing their male gaze, and women answering to men rather than men answering to women. When Barbie meets with the president of Mattel, she asks him why men are running a toy company that makes female dolls, and he replies with an answer that says they have had women in charge, but the way he describes it feels shallow and artificial. In this scene, men are in charge of a company that makes toys that they shouldn’t have creative control ove,r and they largely exclude women from it. Ken eventually takes patriarchy back to Barbie Land, and when Barbie arrives later, she is disguised by how he’s changed it. Now the other Barbies believe patriarchy is superior to matriarchy and work as maids and housewives for the Kens. These scenes are examples of patriarchy as they display “a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.” This shows that the main theme in “Barbie” is patriarchy.
The movie highlights Ken’s flaws, including a lack of self-confidence and a need for others to acknowledge him to feel content.
This leads to the second main theme, feminism. In order to stop the Kens from running Barbie Land, one of the humans Barbie brings back from the real world gives a monologue about the women’s hardships in society, and how women can’t just relax without constantly being stressed. In another scene, a young child complains that Mattel’s Barbie promotes unrealistic beauty standards for women and that she disapproves of Barbie. Barbie responds by saying that Mattel’s Barbie allows women to imagine themselves as anything, like presidents and astronauts. This links to feminism as characters consistently advocate for women’s rights.
The main theme of “Barbie” is patriarchy. Barbie Land is a matriarchy as the women have a higher social status than the men, with jobs like an all-women government. When Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) enter the real world, Ken learns that “men rule the world” as he sees men in government, men embracing their male gaze, and women answering to men rather than men answering to women. When Barbie meets with the president of Mattel, she asks him why men are running a toy company that makes female dolls, and he replies that they have had women in charge, but the way he describes it feels shallow and artificial. In this scene, men are in charge of a company that makes toys that they shouldn’t have creative control over, and they largely exclude women from it. Ken eventually takes patriarchy back to Barbie Land, and when Barbie arrives later, she is disguised by how he’s changed it. Now the other Barbies believe patriarchy is superior to matriarchy and work as maids and housewives for the Kens. These scenes are examples of patriarchy as they display “a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.” This shows that the main theme in “Barbie” is patriarchy.
This leads to the second main theme, feminism. In order to stop the Kens from running Barbie Land, one of the humans Barbie brings back from the real world gives a monologue about the women’s hardships in society, and how women can’t just relax without constantly being stressed. In another scene, a young child complains that Mattel’s Barbie promotes unrealistic beauty standards for women and that she disapproves of Barbie. Barbie responds by saying that Mattel’s Barbie allows women to imagine themselves as anything, like presidents and astronauts. This links to feminism as characters consistently advocate for women’s rights.
The third main theme in “Barbie” is the importance of self-love. In the first scene with Ken (Ryan Gosling), the narrator says that “he [Ken] only has a good day when Barbie (Margot Robbie) looks at him.” Later in the film, Ken states that every time he tries to get Barbie’s attention, she ignores him, and that he wants her to pay more attention to him. Later, Barbie apologizes to Ken for taking him for granted and tells him that he needs to learn to be independent and self-reliant. Barbie tells Ken that he needs to find his own identity without her and without relying on her love. The movie highlights Ken’s flaws, including a lack of self-confidence and a need for others to acknowledge him to feel content. He undergoes an arc in which he initially lacks self-reliance, then acknowledges his dependency, and ultimately realizes his desire for appreciation, concluding with the understanding that to avoid dependency and achieve appreciation, he must learn to stand on his own. The entirety of Ken’s arc conveys the theme of self-love.
This production design also contributes to the theme of self-love, as Ken views Barbieland/matriarchy as his nightmare and the real world/patriarchy as his dream, whereas Barbie sees Barbieland/matriarchy as her dream and the real world/patriarchy as her nightmare. However, both realize flaws in themselves and try to build new lives in different places.
The highlight performance comes from Ryan Gosling as Ken. Compared to the other characters, Ken is a lot more physically active in the film; he’s constantly moving and reacting to the world around him. Gosling enhances the characters' activity by making lots of small gestures, such as crossing fingers when hoping to be invited to Barbie’s party, grinning when another Ken says hi to Barbie. Gosling really shines during the “I'm Just Ken” musical number. He makes hand gestures that coincide with the lyrics he is singing at the moment, like gesturing a heart for the word “love” and gesturing a punch for the words “fight for me”. He flows from gesture to gesture perfectly while not forgetting about his face. Margot Robbie gives a much more subtle performance compared to Gosling. She portrays Barbie as being a little passive-aggressive to Ken and constantly smiling. She has one weak scene where she has to speak faster, causing her to unintentionally drop Barbie’s American accent and speak in her native Australian accent. The accent drop was not intended for the scene, indicating that Robbie’s performance was not as strong as Gosling's, yet it was still very good.
Barbie has surreal production design qualities in the painted set backgrounds, and how the buildings and elements look. In his thoughts of Casablanca, Steven Speliberg defines “sets that look like sets” in his thoughts on Casablanca as:
“great theater, and there wasn’t really an attempt to create a naturalism. The searchlight from the local airport…actually looked like somebody on a scaffold with a ten-page just panning the light across the set. That artificially made it a great theatrical, slightly over-the-top production….The sets had a lot to do with suspending the audience's disbelief and allowing them to go with bigger feelings, bigger drama…bigger emotions, and the sets all contributed to that.”
This paragraph applies to Barbie because Barbie Land has a sense of artificiality in its set design. The buildings are supposed to replicate Barbie playsets, and the production design contributes to that by having that theatrical and surreal quality that Spielberg describes.
