"Barbie", a fantasy comedy directed by Greta Gerwig, is based on a series of toys produced by Mattel, marking the first live-action film adaptation of this intellectual property. The story unfolds as a sombre fairy tale: the looming fear of aging and mortality disrupts the idyllic life in "Barbie Paradise." In a quest to uncover the root cause of this distress, Barbie ventures into the real world accompanied by her boyfriend Ken.
At the moment when the hot sun reaches Barbie’s head, the glory of enlightenment sprinkles on the surprised young children. Gerwig laid the comic tone of the story succinctly and lightly, suggesting to the audience that this is not a serious epic, but a deconstruction game with postmodernism.
Mother-Daughter Relationship
Mother-daughter relationship is a theme frequently narrated by Gerwig. In her first film "Lady Bird", she reveals her basic understanding of mother-daughter relationship: mutual attachment but mutual attack, which directly affects girls’ self-growth. In "Barbie", Gerwig still pays her attention to the mother-daughter relationship and depicted two couples of mother and daughter in the film: Sasha and her mother Gloria, Barbie and her founder Ruth Handler. They constitute an ethical narrative context about mother-daughter relationship, in which the core problem is to deal with the "symbiotic fantasy". "Symbiotic fantasy" refers to the extreme interdependence between mother and daughter, who imagine that they are inseparable, and this relationship will lead to the suppressed desire. The way mother feeds her daughter is doomed to bring about "symbiotic fantasy" between them, and becoming adults means giving up and sublimating "symbiotic fantasy". Gerwig seems to be obsessed with telling mother-daughter relationship out of her private experience and instinctive impulse. In her stories, women’s growth is always deeply entangled with their mothers.
Gerwig, having become a mother before filming "Barbie" , seemingly drew from her own maternal experiences. This perspective influenced her portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter in the film. She shifted her focus from the daughter in these relationships to the mother. Gloria, employed at Mattel, struggles with the disconnect from her daughter and the pressure of not measuring up to the idealized image of a perfect woman like Barbie. In her distress, she turns to Barbie as an outlet, unwittingly causing chaos in the world of Barbies.
Gerwig answered the question of Barbie’s existential angst by presenting Ruth Handler, the mother of Barbie. At the end of the film, she takes Barbie into a white space with blurred light and shadow, just like returning to the womb. Gerwig has stepped over the stage of worries about the entanglement between mother and daughter in the film “Lady Bird,” showing her open-minded attitude. She used a set of unrelated shot-reserve shots, alluding to the individual independence of mother and daughter. Present as a director, Gerweig is witnessing the reconciliation between mother and daughter in an original atmosphere with philosophical and even religious colours.
Film Imitation and Deconstruction
Film imitation serves to revive and reinterpret classic films. In Barbie, numerous scenes pay homage to those found in classic cinema, creating an open dialogue with history and intertextuality with cinematic classics. These imitations can generally be categorized into two approaches: tribute and deviation. Each method plays a distinct role in the narrative. In "Barbie," the objects of tribute imitation primarily include musical films like "Singin' in the Rain" and “Grease.” These two movies are the most frequently imitated in the film. They serve as significant milestones in the history of Hollywood musicals and are iconic examples of heterosexual narrative structures.
Deviation imitation mainly aims at the male-dominated narrative in film history. In the film, thedirector deconstructs the classic scenes with the attitude of banter, and then rewrites its meaning from the perspective of women. At the beginning and end of "Barbie", the scenes about human enlightenment in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "The Matrix" are imitated respectively. The former is the birth moment of tools inspired by the black stone from outer space, while the latter is the awakening of Neo. These grand narratives about the origin and essence of human beings are the expansion of men’s experience in observing the world, while Gerweig applies them to women's self-awareness, corresponding to the birth and butterfly change of Barbie/women. The solidified and heavy Shinhwa is pried open and freshwomen's experience is injected. At the end of the film, the conversation between Barbie and Ruth before their separation obviously imitated the movie the Truman Show. In the Truman Show, reality TV director Christopher talks with Truman who is about to go to the real world as a creator. He tries to retain him on the condition of love, but Truman refuses. Gerweig used non-confrontational thinking to transform the relationship between control and being controlled in the story. Ruth, the "creator/mother", decisively cut off the umbilical cord and returned her autonomy to Barbie, the "creator/daughter". Indeed, Gerwig embodies the essence of a "shadow writer." With her rich repository of textual imagery, she consistently dissects and restructures classic texts. She dismantles the reverence for the so-called "prototype," fashioning a diffuse and multidimensional space for the generation of meaning.
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