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--:-- Host: You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves. And the world is not prepared. Oppenheimer opens in theaters today, Christopher Nolan's feverishly anticipated film about the brilliant but troubled father of the atomic bomb. Do you guys ever think about dying?
--:-- Guest 1: Yeah, no, I don't want to talk about Oppenheimer today.
--:-- Host: You can go back to your regular life, or you can know the truth about the universe. The choice is now yours. The first one.
--:-- Guest 1: Okay, ladies, let's do this. Let's do this! Flip on those heels, fall off your roof. We're having a giant blowout party with planned choreography and a bespoke song, and we're going to sleep over tonight because we're girlfriend-boyfriend. It's Today Explained, and it's the best day ever.
--:-- Host: Oh, but you've got to make your own kind of music. Sing your own special song.
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--:-- Host: Hi, Barbie. Hi, Noelle. It's Today Explained. Alex Barish is a culture writer and editor at The New Yorker. Alex, how did a Barbie movie happen?
--:-- Alex Barish: I think we're in this moment where Hollywood has a kind of risk aversion. There's a real anxiety about getting viewership, getting audiences, all of these things. And increasingly they are turning to the kind of tried and true, pre-tested material. And Barbie is, you know, one of the big intellectual properties that had remained untapped. Mattel are trying to dive into this industry, and now we have a very interesting match in this doll and Greta Gerwig.
--:-- Host: How many different trailers do you guess you've seen?
--:-- Alex Barish: Too many.
--:-- Alex Barish: Since the beginning of time, there have been dolls. But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls. Until. It is kind of deranged how many are out there. It almost seems like you'd watch the whole movie through the trailer.
--:-- Host: You're going to start getting sad and mushy and complicated. She's not dead. She's just having an existential crisis.
--:-- Alex Barish: What do you sense is the thing that everyone is so excited about?
--:-- Host: I mean, I think the talent involved, you know, Greta Gerwig doing this, Noah Baumbach doing this, Margot Robbie being Barbie, Ryan Gosling being Ken, one of many Barbies and one of many Ken's, I should say.
--:-- Alex Barish: Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie.
--:-- Alex Barish: Hi, Barbie.
--:-- Host: Oh, but you've got to make your own kind of music. Sing your own special song.
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--:-- Host: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head. Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent by paying rent through Built. They say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and so much more.
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--:-- Host: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained. and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Host: I overheard a woman at the supermarket say the strangest thing. She said there goes Barbie Poor thing She doesn't know she's a toy Created by a corporation Silly thing has never wondered where the car or the house came from.
--:-- Host: And the truth is I never thought of those things Until today. Today is the first and very last day of my life.
--:-- Shirley Lee: This movie is trying to say a lot. It's Today Explained. Shirley Lee is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
--:-- Shirley Lee: First, it is saying that Barbie is not just a product, but a worthwhile protagonist. It is trying to say that Barbie as a doll has always been the subject of debate because, well, she's supposed to represent a woman and the ideal woman at that. It is also trying to say that Barbie Land is flawed in its own way, despite how perfect it seems. And it is trying to say that Ken needs a purpose.
--:-- Host: I mean, I never had Barbies. I had like a Kmart knockoff, But I don't remember even as a girl Barbie really being for me. This notion that she's the ideal woman, for whom? This is something that the film tackles.
--:-- Shirley Lee: The history of Barbie begins with Ruth Handler, her creator in the 50s, realizing that her daughter, Barbara, you know, needed a doll that wasn't just a baby doll. I don't know if, you know, folks really know this history, but essentially, you know, little girls were just playing with baby dolls and playing the role of mother. And so Barbie was kind of created to be an alternative to that.
--:-- Host: The whole idea was that a little girl could dream dreams of growing up.
--:-- Shirley Lee: The fascinating thing about the Barbie doll is that after all these decades on the market, Barbie has never been married. And she doesn't have to be a homemaker. She, her whole message, her whole thing is that she's Barbie and she can be anything.
--:-- Host: And so she's technically for young girls to understand that they can be anything. And that may seem like a wonderful message for young girls to hear, but the film is kind of about how paralyzing that can be and how stifling it is as a message and how just it kind of ignores the fact that being a woman is more difficult than just telling yourself that, hey, everything's possible.
--:-- Shirley Lee: It's not just that the movie is unexpected. I think it's that Greta kind of pushes it in directions that I didn't think they would let us go in. And I think a big part of that was kind of acknowledging the things that people find problematic about Barbie as well as the things that people love about Barbie.
--:-- Host: Here, I'll put it this way. If I told you that you're about to see a film that is about the ridiculous expectations around womanhood, you'd probably expect like a lecture, right? You're expecting something academic, something didactic.
--:-- Shirley Lee: It's going to be someone on screen being like, boy, it's tough being a woman. Something kind of gloomy. Yes, and just grim and sobering.
--:-- Host: And instead what Greta Gerwig, the writer-director has done is she's kind of nestled that in this bright and bubbly and sunny and wild adventure about a pair of dolls and it's absurd. But because of all of that, you get to the end of the movie and you're like, well, of course it's absurd. Who would have gone into a film that is just being sold to you as it's about womanhood? And it's a little bit sad that you can't – I'm trying to think of a different word, but this is the word for it. You can't consume a movie about womanhood that takes womanhood seriously without silliness as its cover.
--:-- Shirley Lee: That's really what fuels this movie and makes it way more interesting than just, you know, a brand extension.
--:-- Host: Well, also the fact that it is a Greta Gerwig movie. How does this fit into Greta Gerwig's previous filmmaking? And how does it fit into a Gerwigian conception of feminism? or what it means to be a woman.
--:-- Shirley Lee: I love the term Gerwigian. TM. Yeah, adding it into the official film lexicon. I mean, first of all, it's very much about the cultural touchstones that are formative to girls. That is something you can also say about Little Women, right? It's a novel that Greta Gerwig herself has talked about reading as a child and kind of being this important marker of what she understood to be sisterhood and womanhood. And Barbie is very much another touchstone.
--:-- Host: As a toy, she has represented what a woman should be for young girls.
--:-- Shirley Lee: And I think a lot of what Greta Gerwig has done in her project so far as a writer-director have been about reconciling how she, how girls learn to be women. That probably sounds kind of lofty and serious, but think about it, right? Like Lady Bird is very much about her own childhood and her coming of age and exploring how Lady Bird comes to accept herself and realize that she is already the best version of herself that she can be.
--:-- Host: What if this is the best version? That's the thrust of little women, that each of these March sisters are learning from each other and from their experiences to become the women they are.
--:-- Shirley Lee: You know I just feel like women they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts And they got ambition and they got talent as well as just beauty And they're so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for I'm so sick of it. But I'm so lonely.
--:-- Host: And Greta makes that very clear by, you know, chopping up the book and collapsing the timelines. which is why her adaptation of the novel, and I think it's like the seventh film adaptation of the novel, feels so fresh. You get this reconsideration of certain characters you hadn't thought about as deeply before.
--:-- Shirley Lee: And in this, in Barbie, she's reconsidering Barbie. She's taking a character that we, you know, whether you played with Barbies or not, I did play with Barbies as a kid. I wanted to. Yeah, well, there you go. You must have had some opinion of Barbie. You must have either wanted a Barbie or you want to be seen a certain way when you were playing with Barbies. And maybe as you grew up, you wanted to hide those Barbies. I know I did.
--:-- Host: And I think she's the kind of filmmaker who really just takes that and picks at it and kind of asks you, well, why did you want to look away from Barbie? But why did you also want to look at Barbie? Why did you want to play with Barbie? Why is Barbie such a cultural flashpoint?
--:-- Shirley Lee: And I think those are the themes that she's very preoccupied with in her work. And that goes back to her performances in mumblecore films, you know, that Frances Ha is very much about being a 20-something woman trying to figure out what she should be doing in her life and, you know, where she stands with her best friend.
--:-- Host: Tell me the story of us. Again? All right, Frances. We are going to take over the world. You'll be this awesomely bitchy publishing mogul. And you'll be this famous modern dancer, and I'll publish a really expensive book about you. The D-bags we make fun of will put on their coffee tables.
--:-- Shirley Lee: And I think something that really ties her films together is that she just takes girlhood and womanhood and that experience extremely seriously. And they come through in these beautiful monologues that I think in any other writer, director's hands might come off, again, didactic or preachy. But they sound so natural because she's had all this experience as a performer.
--:-- Host: And Barbie is no different. And there's a pivotal monologue that's delivered that kind of follows in the footsteps of Amy's monologue in Little Women, Lady Bird's at the end of Lady Bird, et cetera, et cetera.
--:-- Shirley Lee: And you wrote about it. You wrote about the monologue. The monologue does not come from Barbara. It comes from the human character, Gloria, played by America Ferreira. We don't want to do spoilers, but give me a sense of why you, you know, the Atlantic Magazine says, surely I can write about anything you want. And you say, I'm going to write about Gloria's monologue. What's up there?
--:-- Shirley Lee: Well, I think the first thing that really just hooked me was the idea that this was coming from a human woman when this entire film is so populated by Barbies and Ken's and jokes about Barbies and Ken's loving jokes. And then also characters who are employees at Mattel who are absurd and, you know, they're led by Will Ferrell. And then the speech goes to the one human woman. And it's a great speech that's longer than the other monologues I've mentioned. But I think what's fascinating about it is that it says a lot of things I think women know. It's so straightforward and it is somewhat sobering, but it works because the rest of the film has been so bubbly and wild and, you know, just magical that when this comes, it doesn't feel preachy. It just feels like, well, this is fact.
--:-- Host: Being a woman is about figuring out how to deal with these contradictions. That when you're a girl, maybe you do believe Barbie's whole message about being anything. But as you grow up, you start to realize that the value that women have in society is lower than maybe you were taught.
--:-- Shirley Lee: And it just feels very Greta Gerwig. And it's what kind of grounds the film from being this brand exercise, making you buy more Barbies. I don't think it actually encourages you to buy Barbie. It encourages you to think about Barbie.
--:-- Host: Is it good? Is it a good movie?
--:-- Shirley Lee: I think it's good. Look, I'll tell you this. The closer I got to my screening, the more anxious I became just because, I mean, you and I both know we've been bombarded. We have been bombarded. oh my god stop with the and as women yeah yeah it's just like inevitably i've gotten more and more worried about it but i think the reason why it's good is that all of these things i've been saying about how new how like nuanced it is it just engages with that and i i think it's good because the performances are good it's having so much fun it is an absolute blast while at the same time understanding that it's an unusual film and that, you know, it can't just be a movie that's selling Barbie. And I don't think it is that.
--:-- Host: But I will say this. Look, as an adult human woman, I think it's good.
--:-- Shirley Lee: Shirley Lee is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine Hari Mwagdi, this Barbie is a producer Matthew Collette, this Barbie is an editor Laura Bullard, this Barbie is a fact checker Michael Raphael, this Barbie is an engineer I'm Noelle King, I'm an adult human woman And this is Today Explained
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--:-- Host: Yelling out, we ain't selling out We got money, but we ain't lending out We got bars, but we ain't bailing out And that pink Ferrari, we pillin' out
--:-- Host: I told Tay, bring the Bob Dylan out
