You’ve probably heard that Gerwig’s Barbie is pretty good. It is! It’s a collection of well-executed gags in service to a thoughtful meditation on feminism and the role of the Barbie doll in American culture the metaphysics of TTRPGs. Spoilers ahead but honestly this isn’t the sort of film where spoilers don’t spoil.
Barbie is a player character Barbie girl who lives in a published campaign setting Barbie world, which is a sort of sterile Platonic realm teleologically oriented towards killing monsters and leveling up being professionally accomplished while hanging out on the beach. But alas! Barbie starts experiencing inbleed malfunction from the IRL human playing with her the IRL human playing with her. She goes on a Hero's Journey (tedious in any story that isn't a meditation on stock stories, which this is) to encounter an almost Plotinian series of her creators: the game designer inventor of Barbie, Ruth Handler; a loveably evil and stupid toy manufacturer; a particular human who plays with a particular Barbie, Gloria. Everybody finds that the effects of their intended interventions between the real world and Barbieland are not what they intended: Ruth's carefully crafted fantasy universe enables objectification rather than empowerment in the real world; Ken "ruins" the carefully crafted world by importing IRL cultural ideas; Mattel literally cannot put Barbie "back in the box;” Gloria, a middle-aged mom plays with Barbie “wrong” by projecting middle-aged thoughts about mortality and depression onto her.
Obviously, Gerwig isn’t here to talk about TTRPGs, but she is interested in formal questions about play with toys more generally, whose Henadic procession of creators mirrors somewhat her own medium of film: writer, director but also production studio, actor. These questions occupy a relatively small portion of discourse about the film, because understandably people want to discuss gender more than they want to discuss art formalism, but while there is some examination of Barbie’s effect on the real world, very little changes there; all of the action in the film is about how the real world intrudes on Barbie and Barbieworld, ultimately to her/their enrichment and depth. (One of the best little scenes involves Barbie sitting mindfully on a park bench, overwhelmed by sonder - a kind of reality-deepening play any of us can engage in at any time.) All of the chaos and unintended bleed is good and doesn’t necessarily change the world, but does let us make toys into a vehicle for greater feeling when we’re willing to be both cringe and perverse and inject our feelings into them.
This I think this can be read as a salvo in the recent discourse around the locus of control between design and play; worries about designer “mind control” are always going to be overblown because play is always enriched by these perverse moves.
Great post. When I saw the film, I thought of stories about characters who realize they’re living in a simulation (World on a Wire, The Truman Show, The Matrix) and rebel against that structure once the world no longer makes sense to them. The RPG lens didn’t even occur to me, but it absolutely works.
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