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Spoiler alert: This post contains details about Greta Gerwig’s final scene Barbie.
Barbie Director and co-writer Greta Gerwig says she needed a “mic drop” moment to bring the movie to a close — and she’s not talking about box office success, which it got.
If you haven’t yet seen the hugely popular movie starring Margot Robbie as the world’s most famous doll and Ryan Gosling as boyfriend Ken, you’ll want to stop reading now. Seriously. This post includes the film’s final line and Gerwig’s interpretation of it.
In An interview with USA Today, Gerwig explains that the decision is a tribute to Barbie’s inventor, Ruth Handler, and a body-positive message to young women.
In the film, Barbie returns to Barbieland after moving life to Los Angeles. Still a bit lost and struggling with a personality crisis, she is visited by the ghost of Mattel co-founder Handler (played by Rhea Perlman), who tells the doll, in so many words, that the future is more important than the past. Barbie then decides to become a man, takes on the name Barbara Handler and meets a new important person in her life.
The final line of the film: “I’ve come to see my gynecologist.”
“With this film, it was important to me that everything operate on at least two levels,” says Gerwig USA Today. “I knew I wanted to end up in a mic drop joke, but I was very emotional about it. When I was a teenage girl, I was ashamed of my body as I grew up, and I was inexplicably ashamed. It felt like I had to hide everything.
“And then to see Margot as Barbie, with this big old smile on her face, happy and excited about what she’s saying, and if I can give girls that feeling of, ‘Barbie does it too’ — it’s fun and emotional. So many things like that throughout the film. It was always looking for dynamism and heart.”
