A little before halfway through the Barbie movie, Stereotypical Barbie, the classic blonde doll as realized by ultra Hollywood blonde Margot Robbie, is struck by an uncomfortable feeling. Having left the cracked utopia of Barbieland, she’s rollerblading on the boardwalk at Venice Beach with her hopelessly neutered boyfriend Ken (a peroxide-blonde Ryan Gosling) in tow. Both are wearing garishly bright spandex get-ups complete with neon yellow kneepads – outfits anyone with social media brain will recognize from the earliest public images of these two Hollywood stars as mononymous, backstory-less toys. Filmed in public, the paparazzi shots were the first trickle of extra-textual Barbie content before the hot pink tsunami of this summer’s inescapable, seismic marketing campaign.
Anyway, the uncomfortable feeling. As it was during filming, people are looking at Barbie and Ken, these two strange creatures on the boardwalk. Barbie, accustomed to adoration and comically unversed in any vocabulary outside preternaturally sunny empowerment, notes that she feels weird. Like … conscious of something … but thinking of herself. The moment is played for laughs – what if an adult woman (of sorts) made it this far without ever experiencing self-consciousness? What if the concept of self-doubt was so foreign as to escape language? – and as part of the film’s absurd, at times strenuously winking tone.
