'This Barbie Is a Feminist': Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Reckons With Her Fraught Legacy - Ms. Magazine

Most moviegoers left the theater, alongside their gal pals, beaming with joy at their icon’s unexpected heroine’s journey. Some—and not, I’ll guess—were probably disappointed that director Greta Gerwig has crossed the pink plastic icon, brilliantly and subversively, over from “Barbieland” with flattened feet, thoughts of death, existential angst and cellulite … to the ‘real world.’ As the film puts it, it’s “trading the plastics of Barbieland for the plastics of Los Angeles.

The Barbies are of all different races, sizes, abilities, and in an understated but radical move, include. Once in LA, “Stereotypical Barbie” flees to the ‘mothership’ of Mattel’s headquarters and the corporation willingly allows itself to be lampooned. In one of many pointed asides Gerwig embeds into the film, Will Ferrell stumbles his way through an absurd monologue about how supportive he is of women—with the entirely male board flanking him.

After Ken embraces patriarchy and imports it back to Barbieland, converting the Kens to its gains and somehow mesmerizing the Barbies into stereotypical gender servitude, Robbie use subterfuge—as women so often must—to wake up their spellbound kin. They play off male tropes, such as a need for validation with the net goal of turning the Kens against each other.

, and her inclusion felt like a progressive move. “That kind of thing doesn’t often happen for Latinas in this industry,” Ferrera said “There are so few roles created for us, and it’s not in $100-million movies that are about cultural icons.” When Barbie is asked to “get back into the box” at Mattel headquarters—in other words, to quell the rebellion—she uses a familiar trope to escape an uncomfortable situation: telling the board she has to use the bathroom. After fleeing down the halls, she ducks into a room that seems to replicate a 1950s kitchen with an older woman offering her tea and saying she always thinks best around a kitchen table.

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