What ‘Barbie’ Knows About Real-Life Women

This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.

The Greta Gerwig–directed Barbie is like a Barbie superfan’s imagination run wild. There are elaborately choreographed dance numbers for the dolls. The dialogue pokes easygoing, knowing fun at Mattel’s products. Almost every scene—especially those in Barbie Land, the plastic world run by different life-size Barbies and their respective adoring Kens—contains inventive set pieces, cheeky references to campy cinema, and costumes of the pinkest variety.

A normal grown-up human would probably seem out of place in such a sun-soaked, glitter-drenched fantasyland, but Gloria (played by America Ferrera) is no mere tourist: She’s a woman who, as a little girl, spent hours and hours playing with Barbie (Margot Robbie). Now, as an adult, Gloria has been trying and failing to connect with her teenage daughter. In her sadness, she revisits her comfort toy, and accidentally imbues the doll with her darkest thoughts, causing Barbie to “malfunction”—her arched feet go flat, and she starts thinking about death. When Gloria meets Barbie in the flesh through a series of magical events, she becomes Barbie’s guide to understanding her capacity beyond being a plaything—as well as the surprising key to understanding the film, pulling its many ideas into focus through a showstopper of a monologue.

Gloria’s speech arrives at a moment when her role and Barbie’s have reversed. In the real world, Barbie (who’s known as “Stereotypical Barbie,” to distinguish her from the other variants) has discovered that women don’t actually run everything in existence. Her angst deepens when she returns to Barbie Land, where the Kens, after learning how human men behave, have installed their idea of a patriarchy—Kens running the government! Barbies bringing them beers! Horse paraphernalia everywhere!—leaving Barbie with no purpose but to be an ornament to her Ken (Ryan Gosling, a hoot) in her own supposed paradise. Responding to Barbie’s existential crisis, Gloria gives her a pep talk that turns, line by line, into a sharp and sympathetic dissection of the impossible expectations that come with being a woman.

Read: What’s the matter with Barbie?

“Somehow we’re always just doing it wrong,” she begins, before launching into a litany of examples. Women are expected to be thin but not too thin; to strive for leadership roles but not be too aggressive; to love being mothers but not make motherhood their only job; to acknowledge that gender inequality exists but not complain about it. “You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line,” Gloria explains. “It’s too hard; it’s too contradictory … I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so people will like us. If all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don’t even know.”

It’s a quintessentially Gerwig-ian monologue, following the frank analysis of marriage in the writer-director’s adaptation of Little Women, the nervous reconsideration of a parent-child relationship in Lady Bird, and the heartfelt evaluation of best friendship in Frances Ha (which she co-wrote with her partner, Noah Baumbach, who also co-wrote Barbie). Like those speeches, Gloria’s is a little rambling, a little self-conscious, a little indignant—and completely earnest, performed by Ferrera with just the right amount of exasperation. Much of what Gloria says might be obvious to adult women watching the film, but her unvarnished, matter-of-fact delivery is refreshing for its rawness. That the monologue ends on a resigned and rather unsatisfying note only makes it more powerful. The scene builds with each sentence, and Gloria seems poised to outline a solution worthy of a TED Talk—but none exists.

After all, there isn’t a tidy solution to making the lives of women agony-free, in either the real world or Barbie Land. The monologue lands so well because it helps show that not even the candy-coated expanse works as an ideal: The pressures Gloria talks about affect every Dreamhouse occupant, often in more superficial ways. The Barbies are horrified, for instance, at the sight of Stereotypical Barbie’s flat feet; when one of them fails to meet society’s subjective beauty standards, the rest are as quick to judge as real humans are. And as the film unfolds, it wisely takes time to observe that Barbie Land is not a bastion of equality, at least not when Kens live as powerless citizens whose only role is to be noticed by Barbies.

Read: Can Barbie really have it all?

Gloria’s somber monologue is a risky beat for a film as absurd and flamboyant as Barbie, but it’s a crucial reminder of why the movie exists at all—and why it may endure beyond the Barbenheimer memes and its almost overwhelming marketing campaign. The film grasps that Barbie—the toy, the icon—has been the subject of seemingly endless debates since her 1959 debut because, as Gloria makes clear, being a woman means being the subject of seemingly endless debates about beauty standards and gender roles. In recent years, the doll line has added a variety of skin tones and body types to modernize the brand, but the image of Barbie’s arched feet endures for a reason: Barbie must always be on her toes, walking a fine, impossible line in order to model womanhood to girls.

That idea—of products being reflections of our self-image, which is in turn affected by the products we purchase, creating a never-ending cycle—is heady, and one that will probably fly over the children seeing the film. At my screening, a little girl a few seats from me asked her mom over and over to explain what Gloria was talking about. “Whaaat?” she whispered during the monologue, before repeating the question at the end of the speech, sounding even more baffled than before. Her confusion made me laugh—and then gutted me, just a bit. Someday, I thought, she’ll get it. And maybe if she’s lucky, she’ll have someone beside her—a Barbie, a Gloria—who lets her know she’s not alone.