Breaking Down the Barbie (2023) Movie

Now usually we do not write about Hollywood films here at Putachi, but sometimes its good to reflect what is modern society producing all around the world and understand why we are consuming content different from the mainstream.

I want to note that there will be *Spoilers* in this review, so you have been warned! I try to review this in more chronological order according to the events of the film, but I’m lazy to recap everything, I’m just gonna hone on the points that matter. If you want more of an overview of the movie, I’m sure you can find other reviewers and recaps out there!

Deconstruction Of Family Values & Gender Roles

The Film opens with this scene about children playing with baby dolls in a desert and then suddenly the first barbie doll emerges and one of the girls destroys all her dolls as a result. In this teaser clip this scene clipped and in the actual movie she proceeds to destroy all of her dolls basically. This message portrays the abandonment of motherhood and the inspirations of becoming a mother – instead choosing the “career meme” and focusing on the materalistic depiction of female beauty (which are the core identities of barbie collections).

It needs to be understood that first barbie dolls launched back in 1959 and back then Barbies were mostly just dolls with feminine outfits and slim models (see for yourself at Barbiecollectors). But it wasn’t until 1989 when we started to see Mattel doing Barbies that were attached to some type of a Career meme like Flight Attendant or Female Cop. My point is that this movie is very inspired by 90’s era Barbie stylistically and ideologically – which also was during the time Barbie franchise was enjoying very good sales and cultural relevance as a toy, mostly due to Disney collabs and other iconic releases.

The core identity of Barbie always been somewhat of an Onlyfans girl mixed in with a female indepence through the career meme. Even when they tried the “Pregnant Barbie Midge” it was shelved extremely fast and discontinued due to feminist backslash. So barbie truly never was a good housewife or a mother at any point of its lifespan. Well lets backtrack to the movie now….

Matriarchal Dystopia known as Barbieland

The main character of the movie known as Stereotypical Barbie aka Margot Robbie is living alongside with other barbies in a place called Barbieland which is essentially dystopian land where women hold all the positions of power and real estate. Whilst the “Kens” are subjected to being homeless and hold no power in the government and their existence is only defined by their interactions with the Barbies. Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) is your stereotypical Hollywood beta simp who is constantly trying to do cool things to win Barbie over and is portrayed as incompetent and unintelligent male essentially.

Through the whole film and also in the beginning Beach Ken believes that his purpose is to be with Barbie and this is the core element that makes him whole. After the initial dance scene in the film Beach Ken asks barbie if he can stay over at Barbies house, but Barbie says its “Girls Night”, which btw is every night since this is the matriarchal utopia for them, so the idea that Ken ever could get a chance to stay over and become more than acquaintances with Barbie is not possible.

The Next Barbie realizes something is wrong and she starts to discover things are going wrong with her and then she is told by her other barbie friends to basically meet with “Weird Barbie” who sends her to a quest in the real world.

Now what needs to be understood here in general that barbieland is like “isekai” of sorts that has some parallel effect to the real world and whats happening there. This film generally doesn’t have that smart plot to begin with, its like more like general social commentary about the gender roles and matriarchy/patriarchy – because Hollywood does have a mindset that you couldn’t make a film about absolute female beauty without being “Self-aware” of it or showing any case of Feminist bimbo culture, since that doesn’t fit into their Post-Modernist lense – everything has to be political no matter how distant from politics the original toy or source material was from.

So Barbie basically jumps into a car and turns out Ken jumped in too and hid on the backseat and tries to ask if he can come next to her in the front seat of the car and Barbie once again rejects Beach Ken’s advances…

Entering to the Real world, but only taking a half of a Redpill

After some filler scenes Beach Ken and Barbie have finally entered to the real world to basically find out a human who has a link to Barbie (main reason why she is having these negative effects). Barbie believes that her toyline has caused great advancements for women in the real world and thinks she will be viewed as hero of sorts, that’s far from the truth. While as Ken realizes that real world is more like reverse of barbieland where men are “technically” running things and have actual jobs and homes instead of being some filler guys on the background.

They end up on a school and basically Ken loans couple of books  about Patriarchy and then travels back to Barbieland himself to teach men about it. While Barbie meets the Female human shes suppose to connect with, who happens to be High body count Woman whose a mother to a tiresome zoomer teenager with bunch of buzzwords to spam out. It’s always funny that her husband is also non-existant in the whole story and is absolute beta cuck, which is a good segway to talk about important point about this movie.

There isn’t a single capable man in the whole film, not a single one. Every man is either dumb as fuck, feminine or absolute crybaby with massive self-esteem issues (Exactly how feminist women prefer their men, when in reality they always dump these type of men after a while). This is major trend with every Mary sue movie format, men are not allowed to be strong or smart, but that’s not to say Stereotypical Barbie is a Mary sue character, she clearly isn’t – however if we were really honest and realistic here the Barbie should be something like out of Legally Blonde and portrayed by actually a young woman, not a 33 year old Margot Robbie shes clearly too old and not being dumb enough for this role.

Look Margot Robbie’s or Ryan Goslings acting performances aren’t the problem here, they did well given the shitshow they signed into.

Ken’s Establish Short Lived Patriarchy

I think this part of the film really proved to me that modern women are truly trash human beings. So after Ken returns to Barbieland he basically takes over and converts men to patriarchy and all the barbies with their careers become servants for the men (Stereotypical barbie and her human friends call this brainwashing, i just call it natural order…). Stereotypical Barbie and her human friend Gloria (yeah that’s the bitch she was connected to) arrive back to Barbieland and start reverse brainwashing, which leads into civil war between the Ken, whilst women go back to the parliament and vote women back to power.

Despite Stereotypical Barbie and others realizing what was it like to be homeless and have no power in their own home (living the experience what Ken’s went through) they couldn’t be humane and restore equal order and voting rights in the society, instead of continuing matriarchal society with giving like one useless government position to the kens. This was truly probably most Misandry moment of the whole movie altogether…

It can be argued that all of this coup and effort was done by Beach Ken to win Stereotypical Barbie over, imagine putting all this effort and work into improving yourself and achieving the literal male trinity, but still not good enough for this bitch? Yeah welcome to the modern standards. This is lot of ways also subversion of the Barbie franchise, because it always was Ken & Barbie, not just Barbie.. but that’s the path that movie goes through since Barbie explains to Beach Ken that he has no romantic interest on him.

This is a depiction of the modern Simp culture and all in vein basically, lets not forget that in actual real world the Barbies couldn’t have stopped the coup since the men would have just beaten shit out of them honestly. While the message is true when Barbie says that Ken has to find his own identity that is outside of this romantic angle, it still is inherently a negative storyline because desire of men like these is to build a family, while women are given all the tools in the modern society to destroy the family unit.

Its horrible how Beach Ken ultimately got fucked over in this movie after all of his effort and hard work, plainly brutal.

Meet Your Maker Barbie

Now as i kinda said before this movie has lot of nonsense and stuff that didn’t need to be there, i feel like this movie could’ve been lot shorter. But if there was a scene that very powerful it would be the moments when Barbie meets her creator Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Pearlman) and these scenes have been made into some odd philosophical monologues you would think of by reading work of Plato or Socrates perhaps.

This movie really wanted to kinda break the fourth wall and be meta as possible, which was wrong direction in my opinion, but i already explained why Barbie ended up being like this since Hollywood Elite don’t want to move away from Post-Modernist shit in general, i mean in a way this reminds me of the Chip and Dale movie from last year that sucked badly IMO.

I guess the point of these parts were to examine how does Barbie perceive her own identity, which isn’t exactly figured out even in the very end. She does end up wanting to become a human and the movie ends with her getting to her first gynecological appointment? like what the fuck was that honestly.. I mean they could have tried to throw in the “Math class is hard” meme somewhere if they wanted to be this meta about everything.

End Verdict

While i spent most of my time in this article focusing on these broad narratives i do want to say that artistically there were things that were done well like the costumes, but i think simultaneously that certain designs in Barbieland looked too modern and realistic i guess compared to a fantasy world, i wish they had leaned into that fantasy element more.

The original song by AQUA known as Barbie Girl was remixed and played at the end of the movie and was quite of a letdown version honestly, the original is absolute classic and there are great versions of it out there. I have nothing else good to say about the movies OST, which absolutely not memorable in any form. Also did this film really need to be this long? I feel like everything could’ve been easily wrapped into 90 minutes and they could have made it more of a musical i guess.

Let’s be honest here this film is Misandry and that’s fine in my book long as you are honest about it when you are marketing it. I am openly a sexist, but i don’t lie about it when push comes to shove. So my issues really stem from the factor that there isn’t a drop of honesty in Hollywood when it comes to their regressive/liberal messaging that they are spoonfeeding to their audience through their movies.

Low point of the movie was its conclusion, there could’ve been much better twists and subversion ideas explored here than the one they decided to end up going with. This is not worth the money and its not really like a “cinema” film and it isn’t romantic in any way, which makes it really something you want to torrent or watch on Netflix when it comes available, rather go watch Oppenheimer instead.