“I’ve never seen a movie that had me in tears one second and going OH MY GOD are you SERIOUS stop INSULTING US! the next,” I said on the car ride back from the Barbie movie. Before I elaborate, though, we need to do the relevant outfit check: floor-length magenta t-shirt dress, shiny pink elbow-length gloves, bracelet of magenta skulls, headband of pink silk roses, sparkly pink Docs. If I had occassion to dress up for every movie I would, and it’s been too long.
The actual “disability representation” in this movie was some condescending box-checking bullshit: got a chick in a wheelchair spinning on the dance floor CHECK, all right, they’re covered now. Yeah, fuck you on that, decision-makers. But, having established that the intentional split-second “for me” was utterly useless, let’s talk about what really made me cry, and made me laugh at the same time.
Margot Robbie’s Barbie walks on the tips of her elegant toes, the better to fit into her array of high heels. (And oh my god, her legs. In addition to being a truly gifted actress, the straight half of my bisexuality was essentially obliterated for most of her screentime). When the Real World starts seeping into Barbieland, it initially takes the form of a cold shower and burnt toast, but true disaster strikes when Barbie looks down and realizes that her feet are flat. Barbieland is defined by a population of women who are supportive of each other about all things at all times, so Barbie calls upon her dear “I love you!” friends to address this problem. When she shows them her foot, though, all that sisterhood is out the window as a diverse population of women shout OH MY GOD FLAT FEEEEEEEET!!!!!!!!! in hilariously GUTTURAL sounds of disgust, their collective elegance giving way to a level of primal revulsion heretofore impossible in Barbieland. One of the Kens, a bystander, is leaning over his balcony (invisibly) vomiting.
I’ve spent my whole life self-conscious about my feet. Growing up, my best friend was a gymnast with high ballerina arches. In high school, one of my artist friends in New Orleans was so aware of her painting-perfect feet that she actually sketched them. I could never wear glamorous shoes because I needed more support than anyone else (or so I thought; I’d later find out that everybody needs support and many women were just willing to torture their feet for aesthetic reasons.) I don’t talk about the lifelong intensity of this emotional pain because frankly it sounds stupid, but it’s always been there, and even Ian saying “you have cute long feet” in response to one of my many intimate laments about this (in my 20’s) didn’t make it go away. It has never gone away. I scabbed it over and dressed up the scab in I Am A Feminist Who Doesn’t Care About That claptrap. But I do. I always have. and no matter how hot I feel on a given day, I am always, always thinking, “But my feet. They ruin it.”
So now you know.
And I’m telling you that because the phenomenal comedic acting on the part of all those Barbies started some serious healing. For the first time, I saw how thoroughly absurd it is to treat a beautiful woman or anyone else as though any measure of their worth as a human is contained in the petite feminine elegance of their feet. I was laughing from a place of relief I’ve never experienced. I couldn’t even talk about it afterwards with my friend, even though we talked about everything. That moment, I had to wait to describe until I got back home to Ian, and I started crying the second I did.
Then, there’s the moment after, when Barbie inches toward her destination, struggling with walking. (Margot Robbie struggling with walking is a powerful sight through a lens like mine.)
“I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped this way!” she declares. She practically says this under her breath, and I honestly can’t tell if that’s because Barbie is ashamed to say so or because maybe that’s not a culturally-approved thing to say. It’s a line I wanted to stop the film and rewind back to. Did I hear that right? Did one of the most beautiful woman possible just say that no one can do heels on regular feet?
If you’ve kept up with Hot and Disabled you know I’ve been fucking around with AI filters lately and it’s been teaching me a lot about what sorts of “perfections” we’ve normalized. This is a place the Barbie movie sorta-kinda tries to go but doesn’t. It sorta-kinda goes to a lot of places it has no real authority to go into. For instance, it tries to be anticapitalist and even mock Mattel, but we all know that it’s got Mattel’s literal stamp of approval. America Ferrera plays a character whose story could cut through a whole lot of bullshit if it were actually told, but instead the movie is narrated by an entirely unexplained and unrelated Helen Mirren. Which is a tragically missed opportunity. We also only see her happy when she reminisces for a few seconds on a past boyfriend who taught her how to drive like an action hero, which rather undermines the intended message that there are many things more fulfilling to a woman than male affection/attention.
From my seat, just as Barbie’s heartrending realizations about being alive started to cut through my soul, the scene shifted abruptly to some slapstick action scene that undermined the emotional gravity of the previous shots. “It’s trying to be two different movies,” I told my friend, who agreed. Let’s explore the universally oppressive nature of the patriarchy, but not TOO seriously because we’re also HERE TO HAVE FUN. You know what ruins American Thought? Fun.
It doesn’t have to, obviously, but if there’s one trauma response we’ve normalized in the US (and there are so many!) it’s black and white thinking. So we’re either having a good time and therefore frying our brains to bits, or we’re crying. I suppose you could say that Barbie attempted to integrate these modes. But it felt less like a complex artistic choice and more like “make as powerful a statement as you can get away with while also making sure that we keep those box-office figures climbing.”
This movie could’ve been powerful throughout, and it could’ve been legitimately and thoughtfully funny throughout. But it remained determined to be silly, and when it was silly I felt insulted and bored. But there’s not a whole lot to say on that score. “The movie that this movie made me want to watch wouldn’t sell a single ticket,” I concluded later. I’m not sure if that’s literally true. I’m not sure what that story exactly is. But there’s one scene in which Margot Robbie is heart-and-soul convincing as a woman who, for the first time, is grappling with the unpredictability and emotional impact of being alive. Without one word of dialogue, there was an entire movie in about five shots. And that’s the movie I want to see.