I don’t remember going to see Ghostbusters, but I do remember being carried screaming out of Ghostbusters.

It was the summer of 1984. I was six years old, and my parents, then 32 and 37, wanted to have a good time at the movies on a hot day. Who can blame them for selecting a movie starring their favorite Saturday Night Live alums and a host of crazy creatures, which from the Muppets to Star Wars were my childhood’s bread and butter?

Unfortunately I was not prepared for the decaying taxi-driving corpse who shows up near the film’s final act. I had been scared half to death by similar ghouls in the “Thriller” video a couple of years earlier, so I freaked out, and that was that. My parents had to bail.

And yet! In the years that followed, and thanks to a copy my dad recorded off of HBO (cue that intro!), Ghostbusters became one of my absolute favorite movies. It wasn’t simply because I learned to tolerate that taxi driver, or because I adored Slimer, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and similarly safely “spooky” revenants (all of which became available as actual toys for actual children and/or stars of the subsequent Ghostbusters children’s cartoons). It was because I felt as though, ghosts aside, Ghostbusters was a glimpse into the adult world I was otherwise prohibited from visiting.

There I was, barely into elementary school, hearing seeing college professors and symphony orchestra violinists as main characters. Jokes about mortgages and petty cash. Concepts like “the private sector” and “demilitarized zones” and “unlicensed nuclear accelerators.” Enough cigarette smoking to make Don Draper look like C. Everett Koop. The Mayor and the Cardinal, obvious knockoffs of powerful figures who’d pierced even my juvenile frame of reference, referring to each other as “Lenny” and “Mike” and thus revealing themselves as regular human beings. “I have seen shit that’ll turn you white!” Double entendres — “I am the Keymaster!” “I am the Gatekeeper!” — that I could clock while still in elementary school. (I may have been a little kid, but I knew what you did with a key if you wanted to open a gate.) Hasidim and punk rockers and other marvelous exotic adult subcultures. A beautiful ghost unzipping Dan Aykroyd’s fly to reveal his tightie whities. A stunned maid asking the strangers who just lit her cart on fire “What the hell are you doing?”  “Yes, it’s true. This man has no dick.”

I’m not here to relitigate Ghostbusters, which has somehow become one of the most controversial and divisive cultural artifacts of its time. (Except perhaps to say that I refuse to pretend it’s not hilarious because racist chuds hounded Leslie Jones off Twitter decades later. I refuse to cede them that power!) I’m simply saying that Ghostbusters was a movie that appealed to kids without being for kids. It was a movie kids could watch and enjoy as much, if not more so, because of the way it catered to adults than to how it played for kids themselves. Sure, we had the proton packs, and the library ghost, and “crossing the streams,” and all that fun stuff that didn’t seem that far removed from He-Man or G.I. Joe. But we also had Bill Murray desperately trying to fuck Sigourney Weaver before she could be used as part of a ritual to open a gateway for a Lovecraftian deity in a luxury apartment building built by an Aleister Crowley stand-in and thus ruin Ed Koch’s chances at reelection.

And we knew it. We knew that even if our parents were letting us watch this movie, we were seeing stuff meant for adult eyes and adult minds. We were having good old-fashioned childhood fun, yes. But we were getting away with something.

This pattern repeated itself over and over again throughout my childhood, which for aesthetic purposes I’d say started around Reagan’s election and ended right around the time Nevermind came out and the world entered a new cultural phase. The Goonies and its story about obnoxious loser kids saving their broke parents from a rich asshole while saving themselves from a woman who dropped her baby on his head several times. Gremlins and its conversion of Christmas cheer into a romp for hellish little goblins who blow up in microwaves and murder mean old ladies. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice and pre–Hot Topic-core Tim Burton’s sense that children want to see the weirdest men imaginable get on other people’s nerves for ninety minutes. (“Nice fucking model! <honk honk>”) Burton’s masterpiece Batman, which introduced me to the concepts of avant-garde art, photographs of war atrocities, and Kim Basinger; Batman Returns, which did the same with BDSM, Christopher Walken saying “unlimited poontang,” and Michelle Pfeiffer. Dick Tracy, which paraded my number-one pubescent crush Madonna around in translucent lingerie while men in disfiguring prosthetics and Crayola-colored trenchcoats and fedoras killed each other in cold blood. And finally the ne plus ultra of the trend: Terminator 2: Judgment Day, an ultraviolent movie about nuclear annihilation, the innate evil of the LAPD, and how hot a slightly insane Linda Hamilton is, that was 100 percent unequivocally marketed to children the age of its 10-year-old protagonist. 

Somehow I was the target demographic for all of these blockbusters, despite the fact that if I’d addressed many of their images and themes to my folks in the form of direct questions I’d have been as summarily dismissed as I was when I first asked if Santa Claus was real. I had discovered a societally sanctioned way to see things I wasn’t supposed to see, hear things I wasn’t supposed to hear, think things I wasn’t supposed to think, feel things I wasn’t supposed to feel. I’d cracked the code. I’d beaten the game. I’d gotten to stay up past my metaphorical bedtime. 

That’s not a phrase I throw around lightly. Watching Sam Malone make preposterous passes at Diane Chambers or Rebecca Howe was one thing; I knew it was just 9:07 P.M. and my dad had his favorite show on and I happened to be watching on my way upstairs to dreamland. But these movies were for me, for us, for kids, even when the material in them wasn’t. Whether because they had faith in our intelligence or blithe unconcern for our moral fiber was immaterial. They were giving us something we needed without knowing how bad we needed it: a taste of the adult, in the form of “Hey, kids! The movies!”

Barbie is a return to this grand tradition. Directed by Greta Gerwig from a script by herself and her frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, it’s a throwback to the kid-appealing adult blockbusters of yore.

On opening day I saw herds of little girls in branded-logo pink attire led by their parents into a big dark room, where they sat back and watched a 2001 parody straight out of History of the World Part I. I heard them laugh, probably less heartily than they would have if their well-meaning moms and dads weren’t there, at the idea that Barbie had made the world safe for feminism; at various Kens threatening to “beach [each other] off”; as Barbie Herself asked if anyone ever thought about dying. I heard the laughter about Ken’s sexless crotch bulge, about the use of the words “penis” and “vagina” in public. I saw kids get introduced, if they hadn’t been familiar already, to the concepts of (off the top of my head here) patriarchy, cellulite, objectification, Sylvester Stallone, the Supreme Court, “inescapable thoughts of death,” the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League, guys who like to talk about The Godfather (guilty as charged), the vocal stylings of Rob Thomas, the aesthetics of the Wachowski Sisters and the Coen Brothers, Sam Malone’s friend Rhea Perlman, a Black woman president saying the word “motherfucker” while being bleeped out by a corporate logo, male dominance of female-oriented consumerism, calling normative gender roles “fascist” (similar to calling a spade a spade), the societal impetus for women to do and be both everything and nothing at the same time, and the need for even the most idealistic representations of cisgendered femininity to visit the gynecologist to check on their aforementioned vaginas. (It’s true that the film advocates nothing particularly radical for addressing all of this — politically its limitations are that of all liberalism, which in Adolph Reed Jr.’ s memorable formulation involves “bearing witness to suffering” rather than amassing and exerting political power to eliminate it — but if we all got to that point on our own, so can the kids watching this thing.)

In short, I saw a Woke RETVRN, a gender-inverted journey back in time to a world where grade-school kids got to watch a Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Player get a blowjob from a ghost who looks like Darryl Hannah. I saw a theater full of kids, virtually all of them girls, getting away with something.

Does it hurt that Gerwig’s production is such a throwback to the visual values of many of the bygone films mentioned above? Absolutely not! In addition to its most obvious visual touchstones, your 2001s and Speed Racers and what have you, it is if nothing else a celebration of what can be done with meticulously conceived and constructed costumes and sets. Barbie has a lot in common with the Sunday-funnies world of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, or the every-era-all-at-once retrofuturism of Burton and Anton Furst’s Gotham City. Margot Robbie’s performance as Barbie owes quite a bit to Paul Reubens’s fish-out-of-water naïveté, while Ryan Gosling’s as Ken evokes Bill Murray’s game-show-host sleaze factor as Peter Venkman. If you’re a viewer of a certain age, all of this will feel pleasantly, cheekily familiar.

But if you’re a view of a different age, a younger age, none of that will matter. What will matter is the sense that Gerwig, Baumbach, Robbie, Gosling and company are telling you something about the way the world works that you’re not meant to hear, even if it’s your excited mom or your grin-and-bear-it dad who took you to hear them tell it. It goes beyond the way parents will squirm as the Kens threaten to beach each other off, or the awkward conversations that will be had about that final line of dialogue. Barbie’s hard-candy truths about the way the world works for women and men are getting beamed directly to a demographic that hasn’t been catered to in this specifically subversive way in many a long year. 

I’m not here to adjudicate whether its approach to feminism or consumerism is successful or sufficient. I’m not here to say anything about this movie other than this: Are kids gonna quietly treasure the Promethean fire their parents brought them to the multiplex to touch, inadvertently or otherwise? I think the answer is the same as Barbie’s, and Yoko Ono’s: “Yes.”

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the films being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.