First, Art Was Commercialised. Now It’s Just A Commercial

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is being praised for its fun, albeit somewhat one-size-fits-all, exploration of womanhood and what it means to experience a feminist awakening. Indeed, the climax of the film sees America Ferrera deliver an electrifying monologue on misogyny, a speech so empowering, it literally becomes the key to humanising the Barbies. Where is this speech delivered from? From inside Weird Barbie’s purchasable Dreamhouse, of course.  

Is it just me, or is the point of movies becoming less about the imperative to entertain and express, and more about selling you something that’s usually expensive and bad? Barbie, Tetris, The Beanie Bubble, Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, Air are all films with products at their centre. So are movies starting to feel more and more like ads, or are movies and advertising just beginning to blur into each other to the extent it’s all just one big capitalist blob?  

Case in point: The Barbie movie. Promotion of the film almost exclusively involved the creation of life-size interactive Barbie products, from Barbie’s Malibu Dream House spontaneously appearing in California (find it on Airbnb!) to $300 pairs of Barbie rollerblades to an Architectural Digest tour of the set where we’re prompted to gush over the movie Barbie’s trademark accessories. The list is simply endless. The movie might as well not have existed.

But then it did exist. (And made a billion dollars.) The film is an undeniably delightful spectacle, a feast for eyes belonging to those who froth on the practical sound-stages and, as Gerwig herself put it, “authentic artificiality” of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But, as carefully and impressively crafted as Barbie’s world is on the big-screen, the brightly coloured commercial approximations cynically undermine any political tendencies the film purports to have.

Gerwig and her co-writer and husband Noah Baumbach go to great pains to craft a script that is wittily self-aware of its hypocrisy and shortcomings. At the beginning of the film, the narrator (voiced by Dame Helen Mirren) proclaims sarcastically that, in Barbieland, “feminism has been solved”. Lampshading, a trope by which writers acknowledge a plot’s shortcoming by referencing it within the writing, is practically the Barbie movie’s bread and butter — and it gets old fast.

In arguably the film’s boldest moment of lampshading, Margot Robbie’s Barbie begins to bemoan that she’s no longer beautiful. “Note to the filmmakers,” interjects our sardonic narrator, “Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.” There is something so maniacal in this repetitive trope, as if Gerwig and Baumbach truly believe that self-depreciative gesturing at the white-centric hypocrisy of their supposedly progressive exploration of womanhood is the best anyone can do. As if feminist cinema’s best hope is a stirring speech about misogyny delivered to a cast made up of anthropomorphic merchandise.        

This is to say nothing of how this film feigns progressive energy for better branding. I can’t help but think about Barbie being promoted as progressive thanks to a cast that includes Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Ritu Arya, and Sharon Rooney — all of whom embody Barbies who aren’t the trifecta of thin, cis, and white. But when the “main” Barbie is still played by the white, blonde, blue-eyed Australian actor Margot Robbie, we’re left with a hollow feminism that conforms to normative body standards while masquerading as progress. Indeed, the majority of the other Barbies and Kens, aside from Gosling and Robbie, are ostensibly window-dressing, cameos with speaking roles who exist to serve the main (white) protagonists’ plotlines. 

All of this, of course, is in service of the film’s true goal: reinvigorating Barbie in popular culture. The film’s technical achievements aside, every outfit and location in Barbieland comes with the whimsical asterisk informing you of the fact that, yes, you can or could buy the toy approximation. Whatever feminism the movie manages is overshadowed by the giant ambition of the toy company Mattel to make Barbie cool, again. They even go so far as to make sure the only critical voice in the entire film, a young tween who is so anti-Barbie she unironically calls Barbie a fascist, loves Barbie by the end. The film is so blatant in how it wishes to weaponise the language of progressivism to sell toys, that it is the central arch of one of its characters.     

Is there a way to make a product-based, ideological movie like Barbie that doesn’t undermine itself by the need to sell that product? Films like The Social Network, Blackberry and others have attempted to tell the creation myths of their respective products while extraditing themselves from operating as free PR for those products. But perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that even films with the best intentions are still made by mega-corporations that only benefit from positive depictions of their products. These films should not be — and arguably cannot be — the true vessels for progressive thought their producers like Gerwig and Robbie want them to inspire.  

Even if it appears that a great deal of effort has gone into the plot, movies like Barbie are made bankable by our desire for nostalgia and familiarity. As if they’re made in the hopes that audiences will leave movie theatres wanting to buy a recognisable product from their past, rather than the satisfaction of having experienced a story told well. It’s even less likely that their political views will be challenged by such light, ultimately incidental progressivism that is in service of promoting a product.

Product placement is one thing, but there is something frightening about the aggressive push in mainstream film to place the commercial product at the centre of storytelling, even if the story is good or fun. The story is the product, the product is the story. Art, already commercialised, is now becoming just a commercial. Perhaps it’s dramatic to say, but is it not unsettling that the biggest film of the year is an immersive Barbie commercial? More worryingly, Mattel has promised to make their entire product catalogue into films. There may well be no end in sight.