A BUTCH AND A FEMME REACT TO: THE BARBIE MOVIE TRAILER

Yesterday the Barbie Movie Trailer came out and we LOVE bit of media analysis so here are Tam and Vee’s reactions. Watch the trailer here:

TAM: Okay so I have a complicated relationship with Barbie on a bunch of different levels. There’s weirdness there around gender and capitalism and the expectations placed on young kids. Barbie was advertised everywhere, toy stores had glowing pink aisles with a gigantic range of toys, and every little girl I knew had a Barbie Collection. But my mum had (well-founded) feminist misgivings and my attention was never really grabbed by a doll that couldn’t walk without bending herself freakishly in half, so she was never quite my jam. 

I think I always wanted to want Barbie, but Barbie is pretty in everything she does (She’s President while Pretty! She’s a pretty Doctor! She’s a pilot and flies airplanes, prettily!) and that’s not something I really wanted to be

VEE: I totally get having a complicated relationship with Barbie! I think there’s such a heavy cultural baggage about Barbie, especially for those of us who navigated millennial childhood with The Weight Of How To Do Feminism Appropriately bearing down on us from adults. I absolutely felt that weird psychic pressure but also, I fucking loved Barbie. I loved Barbie wholeheartedly. 

I loved her hair, I loved her little outfits, I loved her makeup, I loved the fantasy promise of Barbie in her pink cellophane box. I would browse the Barbie aisle for hours staring at Mermaid Barbie and Princess Barbie and so on - I don’t think I even gave a shit about Barbie being President or any of the other girlpower messaging. I simply lived for the aesthetic

TAM: I would ALSO browse the aisle for aaaages, because the toys were incredible! But I think I knew that if someone had actually bought me one of those fancy Barbie convertibles, I’d have been trying to use it as a mini-skateboard or a singular roller skate.

VEE: Did you actually have a Barbie?

TAM: Oh of course, because I was the Girl Child in my house so I had one (1) Barbie Doll. I think it was a birthday gift by some well-meaning family friend, along with maybe two outfits where of course the shoes were lost almost immediately. I played with her a bit, along with my other toys, but her hair matted up real quick and was impossible to style in any way that wasn’t standing straight out the back of her head, and I found getting her outfits on and off incredibly frustrating.

VEE: I loved the little outfits! I mean, you know how I am with sewing nowadays, it totally makes sense, but sewing little outfits for Barbie was absolutely the whole point of her for me. I would lust over particularly beautiful Barbies at the shop, I remember just drifting wistfully back to the Barbie aisle every time we were at the Warehouse so that I could gaze a little longer at Cinderella Magic Barbie, but because we didn’t have a lot of money for Barbie clothes I definitely had to make my own. 

I do remember getting Cultural Dress Barbie though. Apparently this was the ‘Dolls of the World’ collection, but specifically I got the Swiss or German one? I don’t know, she had a dirndl and looped braids and she was just the prettiest thing in the whole world.

TAM: Oh my god, she’s so pretty but also are we just gonna ignore how obviously you were femme4femme from a real young age?

VEE: I MEAN you’re not wrong.

But I think it was also so specifically about The Visual Appeal for me that I used to play with Barbie by setting up extremely elaborate dioramas and leaving them in situ for weeks. I remember one Mermaid Barbie situation where obviously I hadn’t been able to buy Mermaid Barbie so I had to wrap my Normal Barbie in shimmery fabric from the waist down, and then I, like, draped her with pearls and laid out more fabric for an ocean situation and perhaps put some glittery beads in her hair and then sat back, satisfied, like “ah yes, I am truly an artiste.”

TAM: In stark contrast, I got bored one day and jammed ol’ mate Barbara Millicent Roberts deep into mud down the side of the garden path, and buried her “to see what happens”. I think I was imagining a decomposition-type situation but spoiler alert, plastic is terrible for the environment precisely because that doesn’t happen. When I dug her up a few months later, the only thing that happened was that her hair was even worse. She sat on our deck for a few weeks and was eventually thrown away.

After that, the only regular Barbie play I did was at my BFF’s house. She had an actual collection, including at least two pretty Barbies, a Ken, and, as is tradition, an Ugly Barbie. Her Ugly Barbie had the usual haircut but it had ALSO lost a leg in a tragic accident (her younger brother was bored and there was a tug of war). 

VEE: Lost a leg! One of my Barbies lost her legs not in a tragic accident, but because I wanted one of those Big Skirt Doll cakes for my birthday and my dad obviously took the legs off my least favourite Barbie before shoving her down into a big cake dome. 

TAM: Was that heartbreaking? The cake sounds awesome.

VEE: I was quite mad about it! He did not ask whether it was okay to use even my least favourite Barbie like that! But the cake itself was absolutely incredible, he covered the skirt in these big swathes of pink frilly icing and little silver cachou gems in the middle of each icing-bow. And Cake Barbie was holding a smaller tiered cake in her arms, because this was a real father-daughter femme life going on and my dad is nothing if not committed to the vibe.

TAM: Did your Legless Cake Barbie become your Ugly Barbie and therefore the villain in your diorama? 

VEE: She absolutely did. I don’t know if your Barbies were the same, but there was a period of Barbie manufacture where the rubber on their legs would slowly perish and peel off? So she also became Horrible Accident Barbie who got bandaged up in an extremely ableist way and treated with pity and disdain. 

TAM: LEPROSY BARBIE??? Omg I’m dying.

VEE: What happened to your BFF’s Ugly Barbie?

TAM: The leg was replaced by sellotaping a butter knife to Ugly Barbie’s hip, which immediately made her an excellent villain in all our soap opera style games. She’d steal Ken away and use him as bait to catch the Pretty Barbies, who would then fall victim to her terrible Leg Knife in some sort of freakish and vaguely psychosexual situation. Those games always involved far more violence and sex than our parents ever realised which, anecdotally, seems to be almost universal amongst anyone who has ever played with Barbie. 

VEE: SO FUCKED UP, genuinely. While I loved Barbie for the aesthetic, I absolutely also loved Barbie for the intense psychosexual scissoring. Which, I have to say, occurred so much more as Barbie-on-Barbie action than with Ken involved, at least in my household.

TAM: Firstly, everyone I knew who had more than one Ken also made the Kens gay, which is pretty much canon tbh [read about Earring Magic Ken aka Cock Ring Ken here] and secondly, the trailer was so spot on with the almost-but-not-quite sexual tension, right? I’m specifically referring to this moment:

KEN: I thought I might stay over tonight

BARBIE: Why?

KEN: ‘Cause we’re girlfriend and boyfriend.

BARBIE: To do what?

[crickets chirping]

KEN: I’m actually not sure.

This immediately brought me right back to being seven, eight, nine years old and playing with my friend’s Barbies. We knew that Being Boyfriend And Girlfriend was a big deal and, eventually, we even knew that something called sex existed but we had no fucking clue what that meant. 

VEE: Right! 

Also, the trailer definitely implies that Barbies and Kens have doll-accurate anatomy, right? When they enter the real world, do you think their junk pops out all at once, or is it more of a magical girl transformation sequence but with a penis instead of Sailor Moon pigtails?

TAM: I’m really hoping for some kind of moment in the script dealing with this.

VEE: I’m reminded of the time Hozier got asked about a lyric in a song “the sweet shock when Adam first came” and he was like, well I just think it would be quite a surprise the first time, you know? I hope we get something like that but with Ken’s First Boner.

TAM: Are you gonna be All Barbie All The Time until this film comes out?

VEE: I already have a handmade Barbie handbag! I have Malibu Barbie fabric ready to make myself a bowling shirt! I am just… the visual vibe of it is everything. Margot Robbie’s hair! Margot Robbie’s face! MARGOT ROBBIE!

TAM: You’re being really gay again, not that I blame you.

VEE: I am being SO GAY, but also Barbie is gay! This movie is reinventing the colour pink. We thought Valentino did that and like yes they did but this movie is doing it again. That hot pink flared pants & vest combo! Whatever the glimpse of sparkly disco scene was! I want to live in that aesthetic entirely. 

TAM: There’s actual Barbie fashion though, right? That you’re already obsessed with?

VEE: I am! I am. Balmain’s Barbie collaboration is personally designed to taunt me because I can’t afford a twelve hundred dollar hot pink denim jacket. Or a handbag that LOOKS LIKE A BARBIE BOX.

TAM: You could craft one? Go spend $50 on a Barbie Inna Box and reinforce it.

VEE: Honestly, I might. You know I love a craft activity. But on a deeper level, what I love about that Balmain collection, and what I love about this film so far, is how much they understand camp and campness. Hollywood fails at camp so often because they’re afraid of committing to the bit, but you absolutely cannot accuse Greta Gerwig of not committing when this trailer includes the TIPTOE BARBIE FEET. It is perfect. She gets it.

TAM: As soon as I saw the shot of her walking in the mules, I was like “omg are they gonna do the foot?” AND THEN THEY DID THE FOOT! It was so perfect. 

I think before the teaser trailers, I was worried that this movie would be, essentially, a live-action version of those terrible saccharine animated Barbie movies on Disney+ but I have learned my lesson! I should never have worried! I can trust Greta Gerwig with my life! She’s not gonna fuck this up.