WYOMISSING, Pa. — “Barbie” has quickly become the highest-grossing film ever featuring an iconic doll and has inspired plenty of memes and TikTok posts. Greta Gerwig’s film has become an instant classic due to its clever jokes and great physical comedy from an all-star cast; not to mention being an insightful exploration of patriarchy and gender stereotypes that Michelle Ramsey, professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State Berks as well as expert in women’s studies and gender, discussed its influence with us as we watched it together.

The film’s visual style resembles that of a Barbie superfan’s imagination run amok. Scenes in Barbieland – the plastic world filled with life-sized dolls and their Kens – feature inventive set pieces, humorous references to campy cinema, and colorful costumes of every hue imaginable – evoking The Wizard of Oz or The Truman Show and other films where fantasy collides with reality for characters to struggle between one world or the other to determine which is actually real. It’s an eye candy treat which recalls those films in which fantasy meets reality for characters to try to determine which is real!

But these visuals only scratch the surface of this film’s complex themes. As the story progresses, we learn that Mattel CEO Will Ferrell (played by Will Farrell) has an odd fixation with Barbie whom he sees as an anathema to feminism and female empowerment. When Barbie escapes his attempts at trapping and twist-tying her in a display box in New York, feminist-critical haters call her everything from bimbo to fascist before experiencing real world issues like catcalling before realizing this world may not live up to her expectations.