Leaving the theater in tears was the last thing I expected when I walked into a Barcelona theater to watch Barbie this afternoon. It was hot, and I wanted coolness, distraction, and to see what so many are talking about. I played with my sister’s hand-me-down Barbies as a girl though have no memory of great attachment other than wanting to be Malibu Barbie for a while, with a beach house and a convertible. I thought about leaving several times during the first twenty minutes of the movie, when it all seemed too much of a commercial for Mattel and Smeg, too plastic and pink for me (and I like pink), too violent, even, with the girls smashing the baby dolls and all.
Barbie and Ken’s entrance into the real world kept me in my seat and I was waiting for something to impress me and prepared with feminist eyes. And then they filled with tears–about two-thirds of the way in–when Barbie, in the back seat behind the real-world mother and daughter, realizes she crossed the border of Barbieland for the mother instead of the daughter, that it was the mother’s sadness and longing for loving and playful reconnection with her now adolescent daughter that drew Barbie to her. The tears seemed to surprise the woman sitting next to me as she saw me wiping them, then nudged the man next to her and nodded in my direction. Anyway, those tears stayed in my throat, leaking again later while the creator/mother and daughter had a conversation about what it means to be human, the elder female reassuring, encouraging, and uplifting the younger. I ached for my mother and grandmothers, all gone now, as I watched. I ached for female solidarity across generations, for my sisters and female cousins, for my aunts and nieces, all on another continent now. Barbie is a film about motherhood, the motherhood of daughters. It’s about sisterhood, impossible without motherhood. It’s about the creative power of the presence of a strong and vulnerable mother’s voice in a story. It’s about the power of birthing humanity. It contrasts the real and the ideal. It celebrates the birth of personhood. In the end, it is about everyone being at home in the world.
This is why it felt like I am home. and Lucy, go see. This is why I walked to the sea afterward, talking to my mom in heaven, and letting myself have a good cry sitting on the rocks while looking toward France, where my son lives.
Marianne Maili 