I saw the Barbie movie with my 13-year old niece. The hype, the build up, and general excitement were palpable inside the large sold-out Dolby theater. We even attended a pre-release event the week before, replete with pink play pools, sparkly palm trees, and full size Mattel doll boxes. It was clear this has the making of a singular cultural event beyond the usual average summer blockbuster fare, though that remains to be seen.

I went in with little expectations, hoping it would be good silly fun, hoping the filmmakers would spare me something singularly bad and awful, something that would leave me a few brain cells shorter, scattered inside my half-eaten overpriced tub of burned popcorn kernels. I don’t know what I expected, really. Never in a million years, did I expect what I got. I left the theater fully engulfed in a feeling I can only describe as disquietude.

“Did you like it?” My niece’s sincere question felt more like a taunt. Like, not like, seemed to me beside the point. I was at a loss of words. “I, uh, need to process it.” I literally said process. Well, so what? I was only being honest with my feelings as the film encouraged. I was, still am, baffled by such a strange, funny, flawed, exquisite, infuriating film, so much so, I forgot to ask my niece if she liked it, which she later confirmed all on her own.

“We should buy the doll.” Ugh. I pinched my eyes. Will we ever break free of this endemic consumerism, the beating financial heart of the film? Irony, irony, irony. I declined by silence. This too we shall pass over, like the pink advertisement for an exclusive $64.99 tub of Barbie popcorn inside a cheap plastic toy pink car that excites and repels simultaneously.

Bad manners aside, I really need to process the film, part of what I am attempting to do here, untangling the various roots to find the right words, my words, my own voice. Still, I suspect the whole endeavor is superfluous, that the real source of my existential unease is the simple fact that the movie was speaking to my niece alone and others like her and not to me. I was not the target demographic. Culture, old man, has left you behind.

Apparently, Barbie is a problem for millions of people. So much so, the film dedicated itself full time to addressing the elephant in the room, throwing down the gauntlet: Go meta or go home!

The Barbie Problem. I could have said a problem for millions of young girls, and perhaps women in general, but that seems far too narrow in scope. Beauty and gender roles are only one aspect of the Barbie Problem. The film was much more ambitious, touching on themes of toxic masculinity, death, war, political order, human value, etc., perhaps too ambitious for its limited subject matter. Nor can I plead ignorance in this regard. Sure, I never played with dolls or action figures but still, I should have had an inkling of the awesome representational power of a Barbie doll.

The Barbie Problem. At a certain point, you have to stop pretending, stop playing with dolls, and grow-up. The film inverts this, to great comedic effect. Barbie literally sheds her doll skin in order to become real. The film invites you to make this journey along with her. The Barbie Problem is now my problem. Something without resolution but ever hopeful, we push on. In any event, the Barbie Problem is too great to tackle in one sitting or even a lifetime. For now, I will be content to chip away at it by making a few observational remarks.

1) As we move to CGI worlds, please do not lose sight of the requirement of basic metaphysics. Show me the craziest world, but at least let me understand the rules by which it operates. If anything goes, then no one will make an emotional investment in your characters’ disintegrating moments of self-realization and growth. What is Ken’s raison d’être? Without Barbie, Ken is nothing. Barbie has the inspired creation to become something else. But that is not Ken’s fate. Ken has no future apart from Barbie. Go and be Ken is cold comfort. He can’t. It’s like asking a man without legs to go walk alone. Try as I might, I can’t imagine or even care what happens to Ken in a few years. Does anything ever really happen to Ken? That’s not a good sign. That can’t be a good sign. The eternal lives (on and off-screen) of characters matter. Ken slinking into the crowd waving goodbye. Was this poignant? Tragic? I didn’t care and I felt bad that I didn’t care. Show me at least the spark, the hint of a Ken without Barbie. The film folded the question by turning it into another product line joke. Here. Take my fur coat! Ken doesn’t need it, but Ken will love it!

2) When characters are held together in a tenuous, superficial way, and then suddenly torn apart, nothing can put them back together. Barbieland was headed for extinction, incapable of self-governance or a faith in the social contract. Why does Barbieland exist? Who does it serve? God (Mattel), or the collective fantasy of young girls? Barbies, be nicer to the unrequited, unloved Kens of the world we are told at a moment desperate to restore the semblance of teleonomy, but why? Men are the decoration. Here, women rule. When the real world is hopeless, shouldn’t we retreat further into Barbieland? Those who stay behind, are they the winners? The losers? The survivors of our collective shipwreck? Are they self-deluded? Did the de-programming lead only to a political restoration of the matriarchal Ancien Régime not an entirely new edification? These are questions raised precisely because the intersection between reality and fantasy bring about this existential rupture. Yet the film invests scant thought or time explaining it, focusing on the historical product lines of the Mattel Universe instead. Maybe others felt it was a trip down memory lane. I had an unsettling feeling Barbieland was nothing more than a beautiful garbage dump.

3) Irony is a poor man’s wit. Too often, when the whole crazy world was in danger of collapsing in on itself, threatening to become a gravitational black hole, the filmmakers resorted to a tiresome, self-referential pose. See, we are in on the joke too. Did no one find it jarring when the narrator undercut the central character’s epiphany by reminding us that Barbie was played by the actress Margot Robbie? Was is so afraid to take itself seriously at this important moment? What is lacking is the kind of artist’s love for their characters. A child can take and smash their dolls apart, not the filmmakers. What’s missing is the kind of awe, reverence, respect, and love that prevents an artist from turning against their characters lives (no matter how tragic, silly, or despicable those lives might be). I kept asking, am still asking, where is the humanism in this? It’s the difference between character development and caricature. It’s the worst form of caricature, an elevated animus to serve as a forceful critique of society, a militant objectification of the inauthentic experience of this fantastical world (and by extension our own world). Take the deprogramming speech. Such a powerful weapon should be wielded with delicate precision, not used as a bludgeon to be clearly aimed and pointed directly at the audience to beat them over the head. The characters got out of the way (literally worked into siloed corners) slipped out of the scene entirely though their bodies were forced to be present. It felt as awkward as the acting.

4. Never, under any circumstances, adjust your art in order to preemptively address or cut off potential critical lines of attack. Art is not critical/literary analysis. Blend the two and the art suffers. The corollary statement is “trust your audience.”