#but i think i was most frustrated by how sealed off barbieland really is from the human characters

[joons]

rewriting barbie (2023) from scratch, here we go.

the movie cribs mostly from toy story 4 (toys experience midlife crises when kids aren't playing with them), but i would have built it around toy story 2's themes of legacy and mint-in-box status. the barbies in barbieland are all confined to the roles given to them by mattel. she is dr. barbie because she has the doctor outfit. she is stereotypical barbie because she doesn't do anything beyond look pretty and cute. ken is beach ken because he's got sun-bleached hair. this is how adults look at barbies. this is how a toy collector looks at barbies.

maybe this barbieland is the visual representation of america ferrera's barbie collection, a very regimented, very beautiful, very adult way of recapturing her childhood. the barbies never leave their box. the ones that don't have boxes are placed very precisely on shelves, held up by stands with spotlights on them.

sasha does not relate to this at all. she has the same critiques of barbie as a status symbol and impossible standard for women that she has in the film.

but there's another, younger character, maybe a girl that sasha - like skipper! - is babysitting. she plays with barbies the way weird barbie is played with. when she gets into gloria's barbie stash, she starts seeing them as their own people who are not defined by the outfits they wear. this barbie is a machiavellian criminal who is trying to recruit other barbies to break into a bank. this barbie is more comfortable hanging out with the kens because she is bullied by the other barbies. this barbie is a shapeshifter who turns into a barbie horse or a barbie dog as the girl replaces her with another figurine.

things immediately start going wrong for the barbies in barbieland. this isn't correct! this is weird! weird barbie laughs and tells them how they can find out what's going wrong by entering the real world.

as barbie and ken find their way into the real world, sasha discovers what the girl is doing to her mom's collection. at first, she's afraid of gloria punishing her because she knows how much this means to her mom. but as she watches, she sees a funny way of reclaiming barbie for herself and poking the whole concept of barbie in the eye, and maybe her mom is lame for not seeing this. she starts to play with the girl too. now the barbies are fomenting class consciousness and talking about how the kens are repressing them. the barbies are talking about how degrading it is that they can't be weird or ugly or mean. the barbies start understanding the patriarchy.

"the patriarchy?" the girl says. "is that like how men are always riding horses? or how men are on all the money?"

sasha blinks. "yeah, sure."

"well, i like horses," the girl says. "that sounds fun. my kens are going to go to war with the barbies now."

"no!" sasha says. "the patriarchy isn't that simple ... it's ... the kens don't KNOW they're doing it, exactly. it's because they don't consider the barbies as real people. they don't think of them as people who can BE mean or ugly or weird."

"my barbies are already mean and ugly and weird. that's how i like them. i want the kens to be mean and ugly and weird too!"

"oh, it's on," says sasha. they play-act feminist theory and counterarguments through the lens of a generational gap, where the girl's innocent imagination sometimes sees how sasha's anger can also limit the way she sees barbie. barbie and ken can truly be anything. maybe we have to hold onto that part of ourselves even as we learn more about how women are limited in the real world, because how else are we going to make those stories real?

barbie and ken find gloria, and she talks about how much she loves barbie, but how much she'd like to see herself in them again, someone who is struggling to understand her daughter. the barbies in her collection are just something she dreams of being. they are not who she is. she is old and doesn't feel very pretty or accomplished. she is just trying to get by.

barbie sees her as beautiful, despite the fact that this barbie is connected to gloria's emotions and is starting to feel less than too.

ken is becoming connected to the girl playing with gloria's ken at home. he is beginning to see that he can be more too. the world seems designed for kens in a way he's never experienced before. he has to go tell the other kens about horses and money and the godfather! ("who showed this 6-year-old girl the godfather?" sasha wonders.)

probably ken and barbie don't make it back to barbieland, but the audience sees everything that's happening there, the way it starts to become an allegory for the gender wars, a fight for meaning and nuance in a world that makes kens and barbies exactly what they're made for and nothing else. but what WERE they made for? is this really what mattel or ruth handler wanted?

as barbie, ken, gloria, sasha, and the 6-year-old girl talk it out, they realize that they are all right, in a way. we do need aspirational figures to inspire us, but sometimes we need to see ourselves too. we don't need to accept how barbies are meant to be played with as the only option. we do have to accept help from other women who have longer histories with barbie and can see how she both frustrates and inspires our conception of ourselves. we do have to see ourselves through the eyes of our inner child who's a little bit weird and doesn't accept any limitations on themselves at all. we have to learn confidence in ourselves from young women, teenage women, angry women, sad women, mom women, older women, women who want to be more or less than what they've been told they have to be.

because the movie is so discursive without grounding it in the experience of human women, women with very different approaches to femininity and barbie as a tool, it comes off as didactic and uncritical of its own point-of-view, which is actually quite limiting in how it imagines barbies liberating themselves; by being told how impossible it is to be a woman, they accept that limitation and operate through stereotypes to fight the patriarchy, pretending to be stupid and playing with kens' egos and dating around in order to pit the kens against each other. in the context of the film, there is no sense that this ... isn't what women are really like, or that we really ought to be able to imagine more for ourselves than that, regardless of how "powerful" we think the patriarchy is. but if that aspect of the film had been grounded in a child's understanding of the anger she was hearing from older women, then we could easily see the flaws in that kind of response, while understanding why some women might really do that.

develop the human characters as people with widely diverse understandings of who they are in relation to society and in relation to dolls, give them each a way of seeing themselves and their struggles in the dolls, and understand why each of them would buy a doll or at least use the dolls to understand each other better, and the whole movie is much smarter, warmer, and more human. a barbie movie that's truly for everyone.

[fannishcodex]

#obviously there are many ways this film could have been approached #but i think i was most frustrated by how sealed off barbieland really is from the human characters #give humans the opportunity to shape that world as barbieland shapes theirs #and a lot of my issues would be largely fixed 

rewriting barbie (2023) from scratch, here we go.

the movie cribs mostly from toy story 4 (toys experience midlife crises when kids aren't playing with them), but i would have built it around toy story 2's themes of legacy and mint-in-box status. the barbies in barbieland are all confined to the roles given to them by mattel. she is dr. barbie because she has the doctor outfit. she is stereotypical barbie because she doesn't do anything beyond look pretty and cute. ken is beach ken because he's got sun-bleached hair. this is how adults look at barbies. this is how a toy collector looks at barbies.

maybe this barbieland is the visual representation of america ferrera's barbie collection, a very regimented, very beautiful, very adult way of recapturing her childhood. the barbies never leave their box. the ones that don't have boxes are placed very precisely on shelves, held up by stands with spotlights on them.

sasha does not relate to this at all. she has the same critiques of barbie as a status symbol and impossible standard for women that she has in the film.

but there's another, younger character, maybe a girl that sasha - like skipper! - is babysitting. she plays with barbies the way weird barbie is played with. when she gets into gloria's barbie stash, she starts seeing them as their own people who are not defined by the outfits they wear. this barbie is a machiavellian criminal who is trying to recruit other barbies to break into a bank. this barbie is more comfortable hanging out with the kens because she is bullied by the other barbies. this barbie is a shapeshifter who turns into a barbie horse or a barbie dog as the girl replaces her with another figurine.

things immediately start going wrong for the barbies in barbieland. this isn't correct! this is weird! weird barbie laughs and tells them how they can find out what's going wrong by entering the real world.

as barbie and ken find their way into the real world, sasha discovers what the girl is doing to her mom's collection. at first, she's afraid of gloria punishing her because she knows how much this means to her mom. but as she watches, she sees a funny way of reclaiming barbie for herself and poking the whole concept of barbie in the eye, and maybe her mom is lame for not seeing this. she starts to play with the girl too. now the barbies are fomenting class consciousness and talking about how the kens are repressing them. the barbies are talking about how degrading it is that they can't be weird or ugly or mean. the barbies start understanding the patriarchy.

"the patriarchy?" the girl says. "is that like how men are always riding horses? or how men are on all the money?"

sasha blinks. "yeah, sure."

"well, i like horses," the girl says. "that sounds fun. my kens are going to go to war with the barbies now."

"no!" sasha says. "the patriarchy isn't that simple ... it's ... the kens don't KNOW they're doing it, exactly. it's because they don't consider the barbies as real people. they don't think of them as people who can BE mean or ugly or weird."

"my barbies are already mean and ugly and weird. that's how i like them. i want the kens to be mean and ugly and weird too!"

"oh, it's on," says sasha. they play-act feminist theory and counterarguments through the lens of a generational gap, where the girl's innocent imagination sometimes sees how sasha's anger can also limit the way she sees barbie. barbie and ken can truly be anything. maybe we have to hold onto that part of ourselves even as we learn more about how women are limited in the real world, because how else are we going to make those stories real?

barbie and ken find gloria, and she talks about how much she loves barbie, but how much she'd like to see herself in them again, someone who is struggling to understand her daughter. the barbies in her collection are just something she dreams of being. they are not who she is. she is old and doesn't feel very pretty or accomplished. she is just trying to get by.

barbie sees her as beautiful, despite the fact that this barbie is connected to gloria's emotions and is starting to feel less than too.

ken is becoming connected to the girl playing with gloria's ken at home. he is beginning to see that he can be more too. the world seems designed for kens in a way he's never experienced before. he has to go tell the other kens about horses and money and the godfather! ("who showed this 6-year-old girl the godfather?" sasha wonders.)

probably ken and barbie don't make it back to barbieland, but the audience sees everything that's happening there, the way it starts to become an allegory for the gender wars, a fight for meaning and nuance in a world that makes kens and barbies exactly what they're made for and nothing else. but what WERE they made for? is this really what mattel or ruth handler wanted?

as barbie, ken, gloria, sasha, and the 6-year-old girl talk it out, they realize that they are all right, in a way. we do need aspirational figures to inspire us, but sometimes we need to see ourselves too. we don't need to accept how barbies are meant to be played with as the only option. we do have to accept help from other women who have longer histories with barbie and can see how she both frustrates and inspires our conception of ourselves. we do have to see ourselves through the eyes of our inner child who's a little bit weird and doesn't accept any limitations on themselves at all. we have to learn confidence in ourselves from young women, teenage women, angry women, sad women, mom women, older women, women who want to be more or less than what they've been told they have to be.

because the movie is so discursive without grounding it in the experience of human women, women with very different approaches to femininity and barbie as a tool, it comes off as didactic and uncritical of its own point-of-view, which is actually quite limiting in how it imagines barbies liberating themselves; by being told how impossible it is to be a woman, they accept that limitation and operate through stereotypes to fight the patriarchy, pretending to be stupid and playing with kens' egos and dating around in order to pit the kens against each other. in the context of the film, there is no sense that this ... isn't what women are really like, or that we really ought to be able to imagine more for ourselves than that, regardless of how "powerful" we think the patriarchy is. but if that aspect of the film had been grounded in a child's understanding of the anger she was hearing from older women, then we could easily see the flaws in that kind of response, while understanding why some women might really do that.

develop the human characters as people with widely diverse understandings of who they are in relation to society and in relation to dolls, give them each a way of seeing themselves and their struggles in the dolls, and understand why each of them would buy a doll or at least use the dolls to understand each other better, and the whole movie is much smarter, warmer, and more human. a barbie movie that's truly for everyone.