“Barbie” — the billion-dollar blockbuster that has fashion and interior designers thinking pink and movie theaters seeing green (as in dollars) — is a rather deceptive movie. It starts out as a kind of beach blanket battle-of-the-sexes rom-com that quickly builds into a poignant dramedy of what it means not to be a woman or a man but human.
It belongs to that genre of storytelling — “Pinocchio,” “Wings of Desire,” “City of Angels,” “The Bishop’s Wife” — in which the toy, angel, alien, robot wants to be human, wants to be real in the way a human being is. This is, of course, a human conceit about the desirability of humanity. I mean, if you were a toy or a machine could you “think” such a thought? And if you were an angel — higher in the hierarchy of being — or an alien that could travel lightyears to reach Earth, would you want to be a lower life form? It would be like a person aspiring to be a tree.
The point of these films isn’t to consider toys, aliens, robots or angels. It’s to use these to reflect on the human condition. The Stereotypical Barbie in Barbie Land (a terrific Margot Robbie) is perfectly happy in her perfectly pink plastic environment, as is Beach Ken (the versatile Ryan Gosling) and all the other iterations of Barbie and Ken. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s a place where you never age, never get sick and never have to do any real work. Yes, every day is the same, but since you never do anything but have fun and look good, who cares?
It turns out someone cares very much (America Ferrera as the put-upon working mom in real world of Los Angeles, where she has a job at Mattel) and that someone starts messing with Stereotypical Barbie’s psyche — yes, she does have one — and that leads her and Beach Ken to Los Angeles, an inversion of Barbie Land, where females ruled. Soon, the Barbies are battling patriarchy and Mattel executives (led by the reliably funny Will Ferrell) to return Barbie Land, temporarily overrun by Ken man caves and colors other than pink, to a magenta matriarchy.
This, while amusing, is not what the movie is ultimately about — and it’s not what feminism is ultimately about either. To me, feminism is humanism. It’s wanting to be equal to men, not subjugating them.
It turns out, Barbie doesn’t want Ken to be her appendage. She wants him to forgive her for treating him like an appendage and to find himself, just as she wants to move on and find herself.
What she wants is to be real, to be human — with all the possibilities of growing old and the inevitability of dying as she discovers when she encounters an elderly woman at a bus stop (shades of “Forrest Gump”) and Barbie doll creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman).
The film’s ending struck me as odd until I realized it couldn’t be anything else. To be human — to be a woman in particular — is to have a body that will grow, become sexual (if she so chooses), reproduce (if she so chooses), age (if she is lucky) and die.
To choose that , to live in the face of death — as Barbie does, as we humans do every day: There’s something poignant, noble and even heroic in that.