Barbie

Writer-director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach have absolutely pulled a fast-one with Barbie. The silver-tongued devils have somehow managing to talk toy manufacturer Mattel and the ever-mutating Warner Bros. Discovery entity into bankrolling a prickly pink piece that talks about misogyny and plastic self-determination. Conceptually, Gerwig's film has much in common with 90s tentpoles and the smaller scope comedies that supported them: Barbie has the all-star soundtrack and the expansive, physical sets of a Batman sequel; the poppy irreverence and bonhomie of a Clueless. The ever reliable Margot Robbie stars as Stereotypical Barbie, a standard issue doll who exemplifies the escapist glamour of the playset brand. She does not hold a job role specific enough to completely distract her from the creeping neurosis that come to her in the evenings though. This Barbie isn't a doctor or a president - those are the positions held by Hari Nef Barbie and Issa Rae Barbie - Robbie's role is more about a perpetual adulation. One both directed out to her peers then returned to her in kind. 

Existing outside this ultra-positive feedback loop is Ryan Gosling's Ken, an accessory cursed with enough basic cognition to be able to develop his own unhealthy desires. He covets Robbie's oblivious Barbie, desperate to possess her for reasons he cannot even begin to articulate. Gosling, slathered in product that somehow manages to evoke both the bronze glow of the beach and the pancake make-up of Paul Reubens, is the male equivalent of Robbie's Barbie in the sense that he has a faint awareness of the ineffable frequencies emanating from the real world. While Barbie journeys into our reality for reasons of self-reflection, Gosling's stowaway does so as a way to tighten his grip on a Barbie who has stepped outside her natural habitat. This green-eyed monster instantly becomes an acolyte of the toxic masculinity he witnesses, returning to his birthplace, ahead of the heroine, to scour his shire by spreading the doctrine of the mini-fridge to other dim-witted appendages. Easily the most financially successful film of the Summer, if not the whole of 2023, Barbie has achieved all this while laying bare the strange inadequacies driving men who seek unquestioned power; the demand they have for a world pressed into monotonal servility. And it doesn't even make them happy.