Box office smash proves Barbie long way off from retirement

The cinema was packed. There we sat, my wife and I, surrounded by teenage girls, apparently victims of the hype like us. My defence is that we were only surrendering to half the hype, as we had conscientiously avoided buying a ticket to a second film, called Oppenheimer.  

'Barbenheimer' phenomenon

As the two films were released on the same day, this overhyped sensation has become known as 'Barbenheimer'. In time people will recall with crystal clarity the day they watched two films, one about a cute plastic doll and another about a man who claimed to have become death through the invention of the atomic bomb.

In fact, some of them will still be processing this poor decision for years to come. Barbenheimer has led to dating between unmatched couples on the dubious principle that opposites attract. One shudders at the possible societal fallout from such foolhardy choices. 

A reviewer in the Guardian actually advised against watching the films in the wrong order, as the over-hyped event had served to prove the durability of sad thoughts compared to joyous ones, meaning that no one who had just watched Oppenheimer would be able to stomach the silliness of Barbie.

He concluded that it was better — both for one's sanity and for one's enjoyment — to see the silly film first and endure the grim stuff afterwards.

He seems to have been immune, though, to the redeeming pleasure of watching a dishy actor play an atomic scientist. I suspect that for some viewers, the face and demeanour of Cillian Murphy will have mitigated the impact of large-scale death and destruction. No plot is morbid and depressing enough to outweigh star appeal.

Besides, I have morbid tendencies myself, so the obvious choice for me would have been Oppenheimer. It would have been a mistake, though. As it turned out, I was lucky enough to see the Barbie trailer, which included more than enough morbidity to arouse my interest.

Barbie (played with gorgeous vacuity by Margot Robbie) has a 'girls only' party early in the film. This involves a huge shindig at her place, with lots of music and dancing.

The party is in full swing when she suddenly asks "Do you guys ever think about dying?" Immediately, there's the sound of a needle screeching across a record as the music and celebrations come to an abrupt halt.

Even in Arcadia, I am

This is always what appeals most to my morbid sensibilities – the snake in paradise, the grit in the pearl, the imperfections haunting perfection, the rain at a wedding and sunshine at a funeral, et in Arcadia ego, that sort of thing, only in this case it would be a doll inevitably outgrown by the girl who once loved it. Death in the guise of Puberty. It all sounded like something I could really get my morbid teeth into.

The director, Greta Gerwig, reinforced my expectations in an interview with the Observer. The Barbie story, she said, mimicked that of a girl's journey from childhood to adolescence. "I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash and unafraid and loud and big. And then, you know…"

Yes, we know. The end of playing with dolls marks the beginning of kissing. It seemed, momentarily, that Barbie's final word in the film would be James Joyce's ecstatic yes, but in fact, it was something rather less romantic: the word 'gynaecologist'.

Returning to puberty (though who, given a choice, would do that?), Gerwig says: "It's a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it. And you're profoundly uncomfortable, because you're going through metamorphosis, literally." Introspection begins, "but also, you're getting tall. You're getting your period. You get spots."

Gerwig describes childhood as being at peace with the world and adolescence as being suddenly not. "My experience of it was wanting to hide."

So, there we were, among the teenagers, convinced we were in for a great big serving of existential angst mediated through a plastic toy. 

However, if I'm honest, I felt let down at the end. There was not nearly enough about death. That's not to say there were no references to 'irrepressible thoughts of death' throughout, just not enough arose from them.

Maybe Gerwig is simply too cheerful. She admits she thought the film should be 'anarchic and wild and completely bananas.' If the job of writing the script had gone to Damien Hirst, say, the witty lines would have been lacking – Hirst isn't always considered a proper artist, let alone a writer – but at least it would have been properly macabre.

His most famous artwork, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", was the corpse of a shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde. Later, he encrusted a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead. Very Barbie.

I for one would have enjoyed that level of morbidity. In fact, I think I can speak for all teenage girls when I say that there should have been as much funereal black as there was nursery pink on view, for the sake of contrast. I do recall some black costumes in a dance routine, but there was nothing very mournful about it. 

Despite this near absence of sombre hues, the irrepressible thoughts of death (I won't give away why Barbie has them) do start to mess with the pink paradise of our heroine and lead, by means of all manner of weirdness, to her escape from Barbieland and encounter with the world that grownups inhabit.

The shadow of death may well be said, therefore, to precipitate the action of the movie, which in itself takes the film out of the immediate present and into the realms of metaphysics.

It ought to be noted that the director wrote the script under lockdown. She and her husband had plenty of free time to consider the plague that was ravaging the world beyond what she calls their box, killing millions.

So persistent is the motif of death in the plot that when the board of the Mattel company seek to neutralise the threat of a real live Barbie on the loose, they try to coax her (unsuccessfully) back into a box like the one every new doll arrives in. It's effectively a casket, as the Americans would say, a doll-shaped coffin.

Way back in the spring of 1959, a paediatrician whose fame has since been eclipsed published "Pink is for Girls". The book has long been out of print, but, in it, the author quoted these prescient words from a novel of that year, also now forgotten, which seems to have been perfectly in tune with those benighted times:

'In a pink room, behind pink curtains, snuggling amid pink bedclothes, lay the most beautiful girl in the county. And it was, without question, a very big county.' 

That same month, an American woman called Ruth Handler created the very first Barbie doll. Barbie's 'land' would grow to be a great deal bigger than a county and its expansion has never ceased. This week, its reach even extended to our cinemas.

Not bad for a plastic doll that ought by now to be a pensioner. Or else, let's be brutally frank, dead.