Barbie (2023)
The doll who upstaged Oppenheimer.
Some of the best movie posters are for movies that don’t actually exist.
One of my favorites is Barbie Meets Jason Vorhees.
If BMJV hasn’t already turned up in one of your feeds, it is worth the trouble to Google.
It looks like the best Christmas special Rankin/Bass never made
But the true brilliance in that poster is that most people miss the joke.
They think the resulting movie would be short, like Bambi vs Godzilla.
It occurs to very few that Barbie would be actually be a pretty formidable opponent for Jason.
Barbie can survive decapitation.
Now, there’s quite a lot of evidence that Jason can also survive decapitation, but it always takes him a few years to recover.
Barbie’s head snaps right back into place.
She’d win
In fact, if we were picking opponents for Barbie’s celebrity death match we’d need someone pretty hard-core.
Darkseid is no match for Barbie, neither are Unicron or Cthullu.
The only opponent that would stand a chance against Mattel’s true warrior princess1 is a mind bending nihilist. Someone like Frederick Nietzsche, who could possibly triumph by challenging Barbie to stare into the abyss.
Nietzsche was not directly referenced in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
The Wachowski’s were, and so was Stanley Kubrick and yet, it was Nietzsche, who haunted the film via subtext through this quote. “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
The abyss is everywhere in Barbie.
You can actually see it at times.
Occasionally it is seafoam green or canary yellow, but mostly it is pink.
The plot: Barbie (Margot Robbie) awakens in her dream house to live another perfect day in Barbie Land.
She knows exactly who she is and what she is meant to do.
She is a toy, created to inspire girls in the “Real World” to be doctors, writers, President of the United States or just someone who enjoys going to the beach.
Lurking everywhere in Barbie Land, but mostly on the beach, are several dolls named Ken, the one seen most frequently is played by Ryan Gosling.
Ken loves Barbie but is despondent because she doesn’t really find him interesting and he doesn’t really have much to do.
One Day, Barbie accidentally ruins a party by asking her fellow dolls if they ever think about death.
The following day she wakes with bad breath, notices that she’s developing cellulite and discovers her feet are no longer naturally designed to wear high heels.
Terrified by these deformities, Barbie seeks advice from wise hermit, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who shares disturbing news.
Barbie’s Kafkaesque transformation has been triggered because the child playing with her in the real world is unhappy.
The only way Barbie can reverse her fate is to travel to the real world and fix that girl’s real problems.
Reluctantly, Barbie climbs into her toy Corvette and drives through a portal in space/time.
She emerges in 2023 Los Angeles where she quickly learns she is not prepared for the real world.
Also, Ken stowed away in the trunk and his presence in our universe causes a butterfly effect that threatens to permanently destabilize Barbie Land, the Real World and perhaps all possible universes2.
You know, before watching it, I was actually worried that this movie might be too normal to write about.
The brilliance of Barbie is that, to a young child, the movie probably won’t seem strange.
It will be a big happy, sparkly film with cute dance sequences, pretty costumes and lots of funny jokes like Weird Barbie having a toy dog that constantly takes toy poos.
There’s lots of jokes for grown-ups too.
I liked Ken writing his name to look like the Metallica logo, Helen Mirren’s brilliantly timed narration and watching Mattel’s entire board of Directors attempting to navigate Barbie Land on a tandem bike with twelve seats.
I had a great time watching Barbie on the big screen.
Je ne me regrette rien.
(Barbie has jokes about Duolingo too)
Sorry, She-Ra
I refuse to spoil whether or not this leads to Barbie having a showdown with Jason.