For all the talk of Barbie, Ken and uh, Allan, my personal Barbie movie hero is Weird Barbie.
One of the most important parts of the Barbie brand is that Barbie can be anything: she's the President and of the Supreme Court. She's a vet and also a physicist. She's a doctor and also an astronaut, and so on until you've listed every possible job in the world. But Weird Barbie is — and I mean no offence to any of the astronauts reading — the truest representation of anyone who has ever played with and loved a doll.
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In the film, Kate McKinnon's wonderful, hilarious Weird Barbie is the freaky outcast no one wants anything to do with.
She lives in a lopsided house on the outskirts of town, wears paint-spattered outfits and smells like "basement". She's the anthesis of the perfect, Chanel-wearing dolls that dance each night away in their dream houses in the right part of town.
She's also the most human. Weird Barbie is kooky and chaotic, but also smart and funny. She says the wrong thing at the wrong time and gives off energy that tells me sometimes she wakes up at 4am because she's just remembered something embarrassing she did at 17. She has critical-thinking skills, a sense of humour and a comfortable pair of shoes.
And even if she put on the Chanel and joined in the dancing, which I bet she'd have fun doing sometimes, Weird Barbie is totally unique. Just like every one of us.
Most of us who ever played with Barbies would agree that sometimes, Barbie does represent having perfectly coiffed hair, chic outfits and the job of your dreams. Sometimes, it's fun to have your sh*t together.
But most of the time, playing with Barbie was an outlet for curiosity, creativity, and that weird desire we all seem to have as kids to just... break things.
So, we'd create couture (read: scribbled on) outfits and play hairdresser, plus maybe a few other things I wouldn't dare admit on the internet.
Weird Barbie would become whatever you were feeling at that moment, whether it be unbridled childhood joy, confusion, fury - or all three.
After a while, you might've realised that there are only so many times you can use blunt craft scissors to hack at the synthetic fibres atop a doll's head. The shiny strands of a fresh Barbie would be too exciting to ignore, and the old doll would be cast aside into a lopsided house box in the attic.
Inevitably, the cycle would repeat itself, because as much as we are conditioned to continuously strive for it, perfection is overrated.
The beauty of this is that each new Weird Barbie would differ from the last as a result of chaos, imagination and a lot of really... strange behaviour. I had a friend who literally singed her Barbie's hair, and the result certainly was Weird.
"It's imagination," McKinnon said in an interview about Weird Barbie. "It's a way of expressing your innermost desires and things that you're exploring about yourself and the world."
In Barbieland, Barbie can be anything and everything, perfectly. But Weird Barbie can be anything and everything, imperfectly, with a silly haircut and a dog that she can't stop from sh*tting on the rug.
She is a stand-in for all of us to project our thoughts, feeling and shades of grey onto, and she has been ever since our younger selves drew weird, highlighter blue tattoos on her arms. Who she is to you is deeply personal, because you made her.
On August 4, Mattel debuted its newest actual, real-world doll — the latest in an already long line of movie-inspired merchandise — to be a recreation of McKinnon's Weird Barbie in the film.
The doll version wears the same bright pink, drawn on dress and green snakeskin boots as in the movie, and has the same scribbles on her face and lovingly chopped hair. And yes, she can do the splits.
But most importantly, Weird Barbie provides an interesting canvas for imagination, curiosity and Even Weirder Barbies for a whole new generation.
Feature image: Warner Bros/Mattel.
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