The movie is everything it’s supposed to be. Beautiful. Clean. Resonant of icon and prevailing palette (pink).
I was not in pink. I was in punk. I wore a sleeveless Blondie t-shirt. It has undergone serious alteration. The previous owner must have bled or spilled on the center LON because two huge triangles are cut out front at back and replaced with gray net panels. So the shirt reads “B L o o D I E.”
Stereotypical Barbie finds herself in the throes of an existential crisis that brings creeping mortality into her previously totally empowered world. Aghast at her sudden and very clay feet, she seeks counsel from the Weird Barbie, prototype for both cat librarian and sex crime victim. Stereo must go to Humanworld to find the troubled human girl playing her into Samsa territory and turn that frown upside down.
Off Stereo Barbie goes towards this end. Her eunuch Beach Ken (see what I did there) stows away, and makes it really difficult for Barbie to keep telling him to go back, so he stays and they rollerblade in Venice and buy cowboy outfits and Barbie is reduced to tears by the anti doll savagery of teen girls and Ken cannot believe that in a patriarchy no one will let him just try to perform surgery.
He brings word of horses and male superiority back with him to Barbie land while Execubot Will Ferrel tries to put Stereo Barbie back into a Box, but she runs for it right into anti-doll teen girl’s mother (an angsty secretary at Mattel) and discovers she’s been channeling Mom’s bad vibes all along.
The three femmes evade capture and return to Barbie world only to find Ken and Krew squatting (figuratively for sure but also I guess as close as literally imagination and doll cloacae would really permit) in the Barbie dream houses. Ken wears a literal horse mink at this stage which is the best piece of clothing I have ever seen. Everything stylistically or visually in the movie seems to be seriously rooted in really Barbie lore, so I hope that stallion fur has an IRL analog. That’s a toy outfit I can picture my dad coming across, stroking experimentally, and pocketing.
All the Barbies now live to serve the Kens, and many wear French maid outfits to prove it. Their Amazonian utopia is well and truly destroyed. Stereo Barbie joins forces with the Sad Mom and Weird Barbie and Ken’s Buddy Allan (best dressed guy in the film in primary color striped velour) and they kidnap and deprogram slave mind Barbies as fast as they can. Then they strategize.
Stereo Barbie reveals to the inner circle how bereft and helpless she feels, and always has, not being a president or doctor or surfer and I really felt that.
The Barbies distract and enmiserfy the Kens during a beachfront guitar circle. Song of choice distressingly pro domestic abuse. Barbies strategically leave their own crooner for another Ken, sowing terribly dissarray.
The Barbies take advantage of the chaos to reclaim the Presidency.
Ken cries and semi apologizes for being a schmuck. Barbie says she should have pretended she was going to fuck him more even though she wasn’t, and he seems pleased by that. Inventor of Barbie meets Stereo Barbie at the crossroads. Stereo Barbie takes the plunge. Sad Mom drives her to an appointment, which we learn is her very first gynecologist visit.
An on-point romp. Pink and punk.
I must see the film first before I read this. That should be in 18 months or so when the library has a copy to loan. (I sensed big spoilers in this one.)