Barbie’s Ending Is When It Finally Transcends Corporate IP

Mothers, daughters, and spiritual connections – Barbie’s final moments are when it truly becomes a Greta Gerwig movie.

This article was originally published on July 21. We are recirculating it now timed to Barbie’s streaming debut on Max. Be sure to also read Alison Willmore’s review of the film, our profile of the woman who rescued it from development hell, and Allison P. Davis’ close-read analysis of what Greta Gerwig is trying to tell us.

For most of its runtime, Barbie is a battle of the sexes. By the end of the film, the Barbies have learned how to successfully counter the Kens’ patriarchal takeover and successfully restored the matriarchy through tactics that have existed since men went to war over Helen of Troy. They pretend to be interested in whatever their Kens love to mansplain the most — who knew Stephen Malkmus existed in Barbie Land? — and then, once each of them has a Ken on the hook, all they have to do is make eyes at a rival Ken, and bam! The Kens go to war, and are too distracted to notice the Barbies’ coup. The Barbies even agree to engage in some patronizing tokenism, promising that the Kens can have “as much power and influence in Barbie Land as women have in the real world.” Maybe someday there will even be more than one Ken on the Barbie Supreme Court!

The lesson, which comes cut with sardonic vinegar, is that everyone’s input is valid and one gender shouldn’t run everything, even in a hyper-feminine fantasy world. “Not every night has to be girls’ night,” Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” concedes. Heartened by the gesture, Ryan Gosling’s Ken admits that he didn’t really like being in charge anyway, and that his turn towards men’s rights activism was motivated by two things: His love of horses, and his insecurity about his lack of identity separate from Barbie.

Barbie reassures him that he’s more than just her boyfriend/sidekick, and he’s more than his obsession with “beach,” too. He’s just Ken, and that’s enough — a reversal of the way the movie’s marketing dismissively used the phrase “just Ken.”

But what about Barbie? Her arc in the film has evolved from shallow self-involvement — her initial motivation for leaving Barbie Land for the real world was a vain fear of flat feet and cellulite — to a full-on existential crisis. Stripped of her plastic perfection and her unflappable optimism, she doesn’t have much to build an identity with, either. All she knows is that she’s not in love with Ken, and that she can’t go back to who she was before. “I don’t think I have an ending,” she says.

Enter Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), co-founder of Mattel and the inventor of the Barbie doll. Handler died in 2002, but her ghost has been renting out an office on the 17th floor of the Mattel building ever since, as the company’s CEO (Will Ferrell) explains. Ruth is warm and wise, with a sincere belief that Barbie represents infinite possibilities for girls. She also has “a double mastectomy and tax evasion issues.”

That’s close to the truth, at least. The real Handler underwent a single mastectomy in 1970, and went on to found a company called Ruthton Corp. that manufactured realistic prosthetic breasts. She and three other former Mattel employees — Handler and her husband were forced out of the company after she was diagnosed with breast cancer — were also indicted by a federal grand jury in 1978, on charges of fraud and false reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The real accusations were more akin to a short selling scheme. (See another Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling movie, The Big Short, for more on that.) But “tax evasion” is pithier.

Ruth is the closest thing Barbie has to a mother. And unlike Handler’s daughter Barbara, who was embarrassed by her career-girl namesake, Barbie is thrilled to meet her maker. Ruth takes Barbie by the hand, and the two of them are whisked off to an infinite white void. Everyone waves goodbye, stiffly; Ken is wearing a “I am Kenough” tie-dyed pullover fleece, serene in his new sense of self.

Barbie remains anxious about her future, which is a new emotion for her. “I don’t feel like Barbie anymore,” the doll confesses, a statement about gaining subjectivity as much as it is about flat feet and cellulite. Ruth tells her that humans “only have one ending,” but Barbie already knows that; she’s been tortured by thoughts of death since her ordeal of becoming ordinary began. (As much as one can be ordinary when one looks like Margot Robbie.) “I want to be the one imagining, not the idea,” she tells Ruth.

Ruth’s subsequent revelation that Barbie had the ability to become human inside of her all along is stock stuff for an empowerment narrative. But there’s more going on underneath that sentiment. Barbie’s desire to be a subject, not an object, is a longing felt by human women whose worth in society is often measured by how aesthetically pleasing they are to men. Barbie would be more objectified in the real world than she was in Barbie Land. So why does she want to become human at all?

When Ruth tells Barbie to “close your eyes — now feel,” what appears on the screen is a rapid-fire montage of families laughing and playing together. Gerwig sourced this grainy footage from the film’s cast and crew; a young Margot Robbie appears in a few of the snippets, which came from Robbie’s personal collection of Super 8 home movies. And Barbie is overwhelmed by emotion picturing these images, which connect her to an intergenerational heritage that she couldn’t access as a fictional construct.

The essence of womanhood, and humanity, doesn’t have anything to do with careers or outfits. It’s about a spiritual connection between women of different generations, passing down their hopes and dreams for a better world for those who come after them. By taking Ruth’s hand, Barbie becomes another link in this infinite chain of mothers and children. She becomes human.

Greta Gerwig gave birth to her second child (a son, whose name hasn’t been revealed yet) four months ago, shortly before the first Barbie trailer hit the internet. Lady Bird, her semi-autobiographical debut feature, was all about the fraught relationship between a mother and a daughter. These are personal themes for Gerwig. And the moment when they culminate in images of her cast and crew — she also runs famously democratic sets — is when Barbie transcends corporate IP and becomes a Greta Gerwig film.

After Barbie’s emotional epiphany, there’s a fade to white that makes it seem, briefly, that Barbie ends with Barbie’s death. But that’s too bold of a choice even for this movie. The picture fades back in, and Barbie is riding in the backseat of Gloria’s (America Ferrera) car. She’s wearing a tan blazer and pink Birkenstock sandals, and gets out and goes into an office building for what initially looks like a job interview.

She walks up to a reception desk and gives her name as Barbara Handler, the same name as Ruth’s real-life daughter who inspired the doll. “I’m here to see my gynecologist,” she declares, happily. It’s a stinger for the ages, but the important bit is this: Now Barbie/Barbara is part of a legacy of female creation and personhood. She’s a Handler now, like Ruth.