How does an intelligent, socially conscious woman approach writing a Barbie movie in the year 2023? Greta Gerwig approaches it in a way not unlike Charlie Kaufman adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief: by deconstructing what it means to write a Barbie movie in our current sociopolitical moment and acknowledging the multivalent, complicated, and contradictory nature of Barbie’s image throughout the 20th Century and into the present. It’s a post-ironic, postmodern exploration of feminism and patriarchal capitalism wrapped in the pink and glitters of camp maximalist extravagance that, in a comparison I never expected, works like TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME in transforming a blonde white woman from an object to a subject.