The Big Picture
With Barbie finally in theaters, we can marvel at how fantastic life in plastic really is. There are many different Barbies living in Barbieland, from Margot Robbie’s protagonist (aka Stereotypical Barbie) to a stranger version of the doll, Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie. Her existence within this realm is certainly amusing, given how perfect everything and everyone is all around her. The idea behind her is that she’s the Barbie that’s been played too roughly with, which explains things like her ability to do a split, having uneven hairstyles, and a generally more cynical view of life as a Barbie and a broader understanding of what that means.
Her damage is what makes her one of the most interesting and complex Barbies in the movie, the one that doesn’t fit with the rest. Weird Barbie has seen things the others wouldn’t believe, which explains why they disdain her, while also turning to her whenever they need advice. All this makes the character itself a rather common trope, the outsider whose differences are yet to be accepted by the whole, but there’s more to her than just that. In fact, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Barbie director Greta Gerwig opened up about the influences behind her movie, including the ones that inspired Weird Barbie.
Weird Barbie Is Inspired by This Classic YA Novel
According to Gerwig, the concept of a Weird Barbie originally derived from her own experience as a young girl in a neighborhood where a lot of girls were older than she was. That meant the toys and dolls she got to play with were often in a rough state when she got them, being mostly hand-me-downs, complete with haircuts and more flexible parts. But the character itself is based on The Giver, an award-winning sci-fi YA novel by Lois Lowry.
The novel is set in a society that seems utopic at first but is gradually revealed to be dystopic as the story progresses. Society has gotten rid of all sorts of memories and emotions, all of those being passed on to a single individual, the one they call “the Receiver of Memories.” The Elders of this society select one Receiver per generation, having them train with the Receiver from the previous one, who becomes the Giver. When the older Receiver dies, the younger one takes his place, using all his knowledge to advise society in keeping with “Sameness,” the ruling concept/ideology according to which no single person can be different from the next. All that so emotions don’t influence people and generate conflict, allowing people to live comfortable lives without any risk. In 2014, The Giver got its own movie, with Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, and even a Taylor Swift cameo (although fans are not really crazy about this adaptation)
In Barbieland, Weird Barbie would be the equivalent of the Giver/Receiver due to the fact that she’s been put through things that no other Barbie has and understands that being a Barbie may also have its downsides. The Barbies live a blissfully happy existence, while Weird Barbie is the only one who knows about their connection to their respective child and how it works, and keeps it to herself so as not to spoil the lives of others, even though they talk about her behind her back and to her face. As Gerwig puts it: “She had the knowledge that everyone else didn’t have.”
An interesting aspect of this comparison is precisely the use of colors. In The Giver, the Receiver of Memories is the only person who can see life in color, while everyone else only sees it in black in white. In Barbie, all of Barbieland has a color palette in which pastel tones are predominant, especially pink and blue, but Weird Barbie, on the other hand, wears combinations of bright colors. Even her Dreamhouse looks unique, with asymmetrical shapes and brighter or darker tones of the colors in the palette.
There Are Lots of Classics Among Weird Barbie’s Other Influences
Upon watching Barbie, one can quickly understand that many of the movie’s concepts and ideas come from other places, but what sets it apart is precisely how it puts everything in a boiling pink cauldron and cooks something special from it. Greta Gerwig has talked at length about those other influences, ranging from Golden Age classics to more recent ones, each one tackling a different aspect of her movie.
With Weird Barbie, a clear reference is, of course, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in The Matrix. There’s a pretty obvious scene in which she offers Stereotypical Barbie a choice: go back to her blissfully ignorant existence and forget about her new flat foot, or venture into the Real World to find the person who’s playing with her and making her have all the depressing thoughts she’s been having. The moment itself is reminiscent of when Morpheus offers Neon (Keanu Reeves) the same choice using red and blue pills. Barbie says she’d rather forget about it and go back to her life (which we can all relate to, let’s face it), but Weird Barbie reiterates that she has to want to go to the Real World and fix things.
All this is a testament to how skillfully Barbie adapts these tropes into its own story. What Stereotypical Barbie is going through is nothing new, but a version of the Hero’s Journey. So Weird Barbie really plays the role of the elder that puts the hero in their path, not that different from, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alex Guinness) in Star Wars but with a lot more pink. What makes her unique, though, is the fact that Barbieland really is a fantasy world, one where people live endless days of happiness and joy, instead of it being an oppressive Empire.
In that sense, The Giver really is a great reference for Weird Barbie not only because of its sci-fi nods but because it evokes even a visual difference between all the Barbies, with the color aspect of it and how her differences from the other Barbies express themselves physically, too. Lucky for us, Gerwig really knows her stuff.
