I loved Barbie. It’s a beautiful love letter to being a girl and turning into a woman. There are so many specific elements and broader aspects of the film’s culture I could discuss, but one scene in particular really stood out to me. In fact, it’s a scene that almost got cut from the film.
The film’s director, Greta Gerwig, recently explained to Rolling Stone that she had to fight to keep a poignant scene in which Barbie sits on a bench next to an older woman—a sight she’d never encountered in the perpetually youthful Barbieland—and, becoming emotional, tells the woman she’s beautiful.
“I love that scene so much,” Gerwig told the outlet. “And the older woman on the bench is the costume designer Ann Roth. She’s a legend. It’s a cul-de-sac of a moment, in a way — it doesn’t lead anywhere. And in early cuts, looking at the movie, it was suggested, ‘Well, you could cut it. And actually, the story would move on just the same.’ And I said, ‘If I cut the scene, I don’t know what this movie is about.’”
She explained that the scene is the “heart” of the film and I couldn’t agree more.
Barbie doesn’t have any of our societally-ingrained stigmas about aging and we get to see her process the concept of humanity in real time without any of our typical hang-ups. (The poignancy is punctuated by the woman’s response, an emphatic “I know it!”)
Gerwig continued: “There’s the more outrageous elements in the movie that people say, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe Mattel let you do this,’ or, ‘I can’t believe Warner Bros. let you do this.’ But to me, the part that I can’t believe that is still in the movie is this little cul-de-sac that doesn’t lead anywhere — except for, it’s the heart of the movie.”
To think that studio executives wouldn’t let her keep it in because it doesn’t move the story along or because it doesn’t serve a purpose is silly because it absolutely does. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I left the cinema and have since seen people talk about the old filter that has been trending on TikTok. The trend is generally for people to act repulsed by what they see when using the filter, but I’ve noticed a shift since the movie came out, with people rethinking that reaction. The scene has had an impact that executives believed it wouldn’t.
Our society also has an obsession with men “aging like fine wine” while treating women over about 30 as being unattractive, invisible, useless—which is just ridiculous. Growing old is beautiful in and of itself, even if it’s sometimes scary. A privilege that some don’t get to do.
We don’t know much about the woman on the bench, and like Barbie, I wanted to know more. But I like to imagine she’d lived one hell of a life, and I hope I do too.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
