Barbie, who will turn sixty-five next year, is older than Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. She predates bra burning and feminist consciousness raising. And in Greta Gerwig’s latest blockbuster hit, Barbie, she both kind of knows it and kind of doesn’t.
The film begins with an origin story—one of many packed into its 114-minute run time. Framed as a riff on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, we hear, through voice-over, how “since the beginning of time,” little girls had dolls—“but the dolls were always and forever baby dolls.” Enter Barbie—or, more specifically, Margot Robbie dressed up as the first Barbie, looming larger than life over these little girls. Enraged, one of the girls throws her doll into the sky, where it transforms, midair, into the Barbie logo.
This breezy transmogrification—from baby dolls to Barbie doll to Mattel’s bright pink trademark—might be an allegory for what happens next. Barbie is fueled by imaginative leaps and free associations that, by design, do not bend toward coherence so much as continuously switch metaphoric gears.
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