Barbie

The genesis of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a primal scene. Girls cosset baby dolls on the twilit savanna, aping the primates from the “Dawn of Man” sequence that launched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. They rehearse maternity without enthusiasm because, Helen Mirren intones on voiceover, this is the only vision of a future they have. Her delivery is august: she parodies authority by having it, the way “Thus Spake Zarathustra” does. A plastic colossus stands in for the galvanic monolith. Barbie has liberated girls from the porcelain prison of motherhood. It is a stellar opening.

For Gerwig, this is the Dawn of Woman: not being made from Adam but breaking free from his rib cage. Her tongue appears to be planted in cheek, but male self-seriousness, exemplified by Kubrick, is the butt of the joke. It implies the patriarchal dissonance Barbie later rails against—that Gerwig wants to be held in the same regard as a male auteur like Kubrick while cutting his pedestal down to size. This must be a primal headache.

Over the course of the film, Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) journey from the girlboss paradise of Barbieland to the real world so Barbie can confront the girl who “owns” her about why her perfect doll-house life is suddenly being blemished by cellulite and meditations on mortality. But Ken, who has only ever existed in relation to Barbie, feels “seen” in the real world. Like a modern Brometheus, he smuggles the patriarchy home with him, and the Kens scupper Barbieland’s female regime because the Barbies lack the antibody to fend this foreign concept off. Meanwhile, male Mattel executives struggle, in vain, to literally put Barbie back in her box.