One of the many pleasures of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is the unexpected references Gerwig managed to fit into a movie about a plastic toy. There’s everything from some of Mattel’s most famous failures—see: Earring Magic Ken and a Skipper that grows boobs—to jokes about Proust to a musical sequence in which a group of Kens led by Ryan Gosling serenade the Barbies with Matchbox 20’s late-’90s hit “Push.”
But maybe the most unexpected name to appear in the screenplay for the biggest hit of the summer is Stephen Malkmus of the band Pavement. What on earth is a Gen X indie rock hero doing being name dropped in Barbie? And why is it so damn funny?
The Malkmus moment comes fairly late into the runtime (so spoilers ahoy). Barbie (Margot Robbie) has returned to the pink feminist utopia of Barbieland after a sojourn in the Real World to find it has been taken over by Kens, thanks to a crash course in patriarchy by Lead Ken (Gosling). The Barbie Dreamhouses has been replaced with “Mojo Dojo Casa Houses” wherein the decor is saloon-slash-beer commercial. Most of the Barbies have been brainwashed by the Kens, reduced to subservient roles offering them “brewski beers.”
Barbie, along with her human allies (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt), realize they have to deprogram the other Barbies, so they develop a plan in which they get the Kens so wrapped up in mansplaining various things they have no idea what’s happening.
Most of the Kens’ subjects of interest are pretty stereotypical Dudes Love This topics. (One Ken wants to explain a sporting event. Another has strong opinions about The Godfather including a sidebar about Robert Evans and the 1970s studio system, just one of many distinct Gerwig-Baumbach script touches). But then one Ken (Ncuti Gatwa) is standing by a record player, blabbing about Malkmus with a copy of the 1992 album Slanted and Enchanted.
It’s a joke that feels at once so random and so specific that it hits you like the whiff of stale PBR emanating from that one bar in Bushwick named after a Pavement song.
Where did it come from?
Well, apparently Gerwig has been thinking about this for a while and has a bone to pick with obsessive Pavement guys. In 2017, Gerwig described the inspiration for Kyle, Timothée Chalamet’s skinny Howard Zinn-reading jerk of a boyfriend in Lady Bird, as one of those “guys who are just completely stuck on their ideas, whether music or progressive philosophy or whatever it is. Like, ‘I’m going to train you to like Pavement.’”
Gerwig has a knack for illuminating very specific slightly annoying male behaviors. Kyle is a great example of this kind of dude, but so are the roommates played by Adam Driver and Michael Zegen in Baumbach’s Frances Ha, which she co-wrote.
Driver’s character Lev wears a porkpie hat and makes Frances (Gerwig) look at photos on his phone of him in the locker room of the Knicks, a vintage Triumph he wants to buy, and him with Jay Leno, despite her clear indifference. Extremely Ken behavior. Later, after she moves in with these goofballs, she asks Zegen’s Benji if he has any tunes for her to listen to. He runs and grabs his iPod. She seemingly approves of the song and takes the headphones off, but he insists on putting them back on her, saying: “Aren’t these headphones tits?” Obsessive about a just-purchased technological toy? Obvious Ken behavior.
Barbie exists in a universe that’s far more heightened than either Lady Bird or Frances Ha, but the Malkmus joke roots the Kens’ turn toward chauvinism in actual behavior that will generate more laughs for those in the know than any Godfather callout. “Ken explaining Stephen Malkmus then playing acoustic guitar AT Barbie for 4 hours is every house party I went to in my 20s,” one Twitter user wrote.
It’s unclear how Gerwig herself actually feels about Pavement. (For what it’s worth, she said in a recent interview with UPROXX that “everything that we have, or that we reference, in the movie is only ever stuff that we love.”) But she also has clearly known too many dudes who wear their knowledge of the band like a point of pride in the same way they might brandish their copy of Howard Zinn or get really into one pair of headphones.
Malkmus says he isn’t bothered. In an email to GQ, he explained that Gerwig’s constant Pavement call-outs might be honoring her California heritage: “Maybe Greta is paying respect to her San Joaquin Valley roots (I know she grew up in Sacto) ….The Pavement band started in Stockton a mere 40 minute drive from the hospital she was born in, (assuming it wasn’t a home birth, which is probably similar distance anyway).”
On Instagram, the band posted, “We are aware of the @barbiethemovie rumors and are awaiting guidance from legal but as a rule we are pro Greta.”
And in fact it might even be a tiny boon for the band. Malkmus also tweeted: “‘Barbie boost’ couldn’t come at a better time.. pave Iceland show is bit undersold but now it’s gonna explode I’m sure.”