“There was a lot of crying in that film.” This was the first thing my friend said to me when we left the cinema after seeing Barbie. And she was right. Greta Gerwig’s film is, on the surface, a work of endlessly giddy fun – an effervescent, colourful tapestry of joyous girl power and knowing self-referential jibes. But beneath this glittering, Pantone pink surface, there is an unmistakable darkness.
In Gerwig’s film, depression and mental ill health are presented as being simply part and parcel of being a ‘real’ woman. We are, she seems to say, all a bit depressed.
The film follows Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie. Her life in Barbie Land takes a turn when the girl (or, in this case, woman – it is America Ferrera’s Gloria) playing with her develops complex feelings that seep into Barbie’s own psyche, giving her irrepressible thoughts of death, messy hair and – gasp – flat feet. Barbie travels to the Real World. There, she meets Real Women, discovers Real Problems and has a few Real Feelings. She develops a new kind of awareness – “I feel conscious, the thing I am conscious of is myself?” She experiences anxiety – “fear with no specific object” (these, it seems, develop very quickly once you enter the Real World). When she returns to Barbie Land to find that Ken (Ryan Gosling) has taken over the former female paradise and turned her Dream House into a stallion-themed Mojo Dojo Casa House, she sinks to the floor and rolls onto her stomach, giving up.
Cut to an ad for Depression Barbie. “She wears sweatpants all day and night,” chirps the child’s voiceover. “She spent seven hours today on Instagram looking at her estranged best friend’s engagement photos while eating a family sized pack of Starburst and now her jaw is killing her! And now she’s going to watch the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice for the seventh time, until she falls asleep! Anxiety, panic attacks and OCD are sold separately.”
I, for one, let out a screech when Colin Firth’s face appeared on the screen – why yes, Greta, I have watched the BBC’s six-part Pride and Prejudice miniseries dozens of times and return to it whenever I feel low, how did you know? And, if the packed cinema where I saw Barbie is any indication, I am not alone. This pretend ad, though painfully, minutely specific, was, apparently, one of the most relatable moments of the film. The entire audience was roaring at these jokes more than any of the others. Evidently, they saw something —or someone — they recognised.