Abstract
The long-awaited Barbie movie appeared in the summer of 2023. A vast Mattel public relations and advertising campaign led up to the moment that Barbie’s pink, sparkly, bubbly, plastic, blockbuster, bubblegum of light hit the biggest screens in the country. Sick of dreary Covid quarantines, the devastations of climate change, wars, and political strife, we, masses of children and ex-children, festively dressed in pink—male, female, LGBTQ—herded to see the iconic doll, gloriously animated by Margo Robbie. In side-by-side movie houses, a nuclear bomb was exploding every four hours in Oppenheimer, opening into the greatest real-life horror the human world has ever known. This mega-movie confluence cannot be exactly coincidental.
On one big screen, a doll, originally created by a woman (the ghost on the seventeenth floor of Mattel headquarters), is featured also as a mega-corporation, managed and financed by a band of males with a tradition of male CEOs since 1959. Barbie, happy in her pink cocoon, faces an unbidden existential crisis, with intrusive thoughts about death and symptomatic fallen arches, that leads her through the “break in the curtain” between Barbieland and the Real World. Ultimately, she becomes a human being. On the other big screen, humans are prepared to be indiscriminately annihilated, an effort organized by another band of males, scientists working at the behest of a largely male government. One might be tempted to contemplate the dialectic between mostly male fantasies of the heady powers involved in both the creation of life and its utter destruction. This summer we thus immersed ourselves in life and death on the silver screen, after a long helpless sojourn with a threat of a plague that we, in the movie houses, survived, but that had wiped out more than seven million lives worldwide. We Americans took a break in the summer of 2023, for participatory sublimation, processing these same forces of life and death. On offer were artistic and scientific experiments at mastery and agency, reverberating with the echoes of gender wars, as we desperately tried to wrest back some sense of control over our humanity.
I risk being a wet blanket in darkening this glorious Barbie. Most enjoyed the escapism and felt very entertained. I did too. There was much of substance to appreciate—the witty, streetwise, clipped script, letting us laugh and wink with the self-awareness of irony; the “woke” sense of the dilemma of presenting a movie about a “doll-woman” at all, given the slippery state of feminism in this era; the clever cross-references to movies from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Clueless to The Matrix; the scintillation of these movie makers with associative background references, like the movie house playing The Wizard of Oz when Barbie drives her pink sports car over the pink brick road into Santa Monica; the magnificent costumes by Oscar winners, and the wondrous bath of visual color. I grant all that, and I was dazzled with its technical and acting elegance, the music, and the marketing brilliance.
But the wearisomeness is in the reiterated, tired old argument that women’s real lives are boring, with little of interest, impossible emotional demands (as in the speech of Gloria, the mother) and burdensome kids. And that bright, manic, simpleminded Barbie should learn this painful human lesson, and thus be disillusioned, “real,” and full of sorrow—like the rest of us women. Apparently—sadly—many women were moved by Gloria’s portrayal. Barbie’s developmental trajectory is rare. She is trying to grow into an adult from an adultomorphized individual with the mind of a latency tween, weighted with the addenda of overwhelming breasts and a none-too-sharp intellect (in spite of references to Nietzsche and Proust!). She becomes a teen in this movie—more mentally reflective, timidly considering a beginning relationship with reliable old playmate Ken, the beach boy.
Barbie’s body is the ultimate in female body distortion (Balsam 2012). I have noted how common is this startling presentation of females, by, for example, looking at the medical profession’s images and representations since the Greeks, to Freud’s portrait of females in psychoanalysis. This insight also demonstrates how the representation of the body in psychoanalysis ignores pregnancy and birthing as common and central in female life.
So here we are, yet again, with Barbie’s distorted body, a representation accepted and colluded with by a vast majority in many societies, and the fact that big money is to be made from this distortion. It’s not fair of me to push realism in doll play, but if Barbie’s body were “real,” she apparently would walk on all fours, as her head is too heavy for her long reedy neck, and her legs are too thin and weak to hold her! (Golgowski 2013). Ken’s doll body, predictably, by phallocentric lights, is made much more realistically—in spite of no genitals for either, of course.
There are progressive ideas here. There are many Barbies—even a President Black Barbie—and professionally, in fact, she has 250 choices. The movie is a big change from the original 1959 offering of the doll as a blonde, white, busty, flirty glamor girl. There is a chorus of contemporary fat and thin Barbies, of many skin colors and ethnicities. But consider also the lines: “Let’s not show Midge, actually. She was discontinued by Mattel because a pregnant doll is just too weird.” Helen Mirren’s voice-over gives a woke wink to the plastic set of ideals. “Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved. At least that’s what the Barbies think. After all, they’re living in Barbieland.”
Economic motives are ever present in Barbie. In 2014, when sales were flagging, Mattel used an old-fashioned Barbie, just like 2023’s “Stereotypical Barbie” in her original 1950s black-and-white-striped one-piece bathing suit, on the cover of Sports Illustrated (Popken 2014). She took her place alongside Christie Brinkley and other supermodels that year. There have been periods when Mattel’s roughly 1.6 billion dollar worldwide sales of this most-recognized-doll-in-the-world have fallen. Barbie’s iconic shape shifts were a response to failing sales. Other attempts to sustain popularity had floated about the making a Barbie movie. One early version potentially starred the bodily substantial, smart, and droll Amy Schumer. That fizzled. Flurries to become a screen presence were to catch up with the rival toy company Hasbro. Covid in 2020, though, drove children indoors with their families for long, solitary periods. An interest in sitting once more in the corner, playing with a Barbie, also may have peaked. It was a brilliant marketing strategy on Mattel’s part, by 2023, with the abatement of the pandemic, to invite us to sit in a crowded movie house to view the Barbie movie.
Now to the tedious phallocentric world that is inadvertently supported throughout by Barbie. In the Real World, she encounters Sasha, the girl who originally bought her, and she thinks overplayed her, like Weird Barbie, causing her distress. Sasha is modeled on the Bratz Mattel doll who had actually threatened Barbie sales. She informs Barbie, “You represent everything wrong with our culture. Sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals. . . . You set the feminist movement back fifty years. You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.”
“No,” cries poor Barbie to this flood of social criticism. “I’m supposed to help you and make you happy and powerful.” “Oh, I am powerful,” says Sasha, as Barbie pitifully sobs to herself. Barbie is in an abject place, mocked by the angry girls who blame her for their struggles, and in an innocent abused position of not having sufficient awareness to know she was at all offensive. Her bubble of self-esteem, based on popularity in an all-female defensive cocoon, is easily punctured. There was clearly something missing for her mental health in that world.
Now look at the corporate men for comparison, as they try to placate Barbie, to get her “back in the box.” She wanted to meet Mattel’s female CEO. This male speech is the very opposite of pathetic: “We had a woman CEO in the nineties. And there was another one . . . at some other time. So that’s . . . That’s two right there. Women are the freaking foundation of this very long phallic building. We have gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo. Every single one of these men love women. I’m the son of a mother. I’m . . . I’m the nephew of a woman aunt. Some of my best friends are Jewish. What I’m trying to say is . . . Get in the box, you Jezebel!”
Ken, the doll, may be a bit confused over whether a tough phallic guy is really a horse or a man after his thrill with real-life patriarchy, but in Barbie’s absence he and the Kens begin to rule the Dreamhouse, in their renamed “Mojo Dojo Casa House,” served by eager Barbie maidens: “They ate up the phallocentric shit,” Ken explains. (Another reassurance to us that misogyny is alive and well and not going any place soon!) Barbie, the heroine, does not even stop to wonder why her sisters respond like this, which might have meant social progress within the script. Instead, as she claws back her own possessions, she demonstrates and replicates all the denigrating criticism that has been lobbed over the years at powerless women. She does nothing directly. She secretly leads a plot with other girls to deprogram their Barbie sisters and psychologically undermine the Kens. The advice of Sasha’s mom, Gloria, is straight out of Helene Deutsch in the 1940s, about how an angry woman operates to remain looking “feminine” to support the male ego (Balsam 2022). Here are snippets of the advice: “You have to be their mommies but not remind them of their mommy. Any power you have must be masked under a giggle. And then there’s pretending to be terrible at every sport ever. . . . Or distract them with the old standby. Wearing glasses so they can discover that you’re pretty. . . . The final stage of our plan [is] to turn the Kens against each other.”
Gloria pronounces her conceptualization of what the girls are plotting: “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power.” Really?
Barbie excitedly concludes before they carry out the plot: “It’s like I’m a woman already.” Really? The dialogue embarrassingly reads like something from Mrs. Humphry’s Rules of Etiquette, from 1902, on how to be a dainty girl. She and real females use sexualized old-fashioned “female” wiliness to lure the Kens into voting her once more the leader of Barbieland.
Meanwhile Ken and his discovery of the patriarchy, even the making of a rivalrous “Ken” movie by a rival company, are cheered on by real men: “What does it matter if it’s Barbie or Ken? The money is pouring in.”
“Shame on you, Executive Number Two!” comes the CEO’s retort. “You think I spent my entire life in boardrooms because of a bottom line? No! I got into this business because of little girls and their dreams. In the least creepy way possible.”
This is the cynical endpoint of pseudo-concern for their own misogyny, of course. This movie laughs indulgently at their resilience. Boys will be boys, after all, it says. And they’ll comfortably stay that way, supporting each other against “them.”
It is impossible to take the female struggle qua female seriously, when the body is dealt with in such distorted ways. First, the grand smashing of the baby dolls in the opening scene is celebrated in favor of the model of the Playboy centerfold. The message is actually the worst of old-fashioned second wave feminism at its height. We females must smash and get rid of motherhood in us if we are to become pilots, doctors, and such. (My businesswoman daughter said to me, “Oh, Ma—aren’t you taking that all a bit seriously?” That’s a message straight from Mattel: “Get rid of those baby dolls—we don’t make them!”)
So, the movie, having messaged “Smash all things motherhood, especially in childhood when it becomes fascinating,” proceeds to deny the female body and its uses, except for self-decoration and its erotic interest for males. It is as if this Barbie with a female body identity crisis asks, “What is wrong? What am I missing?” She sings, “What am I made for?” (The script will come up with penis envy next?) Sasha’s mother, of course, was the human in crisis, who got a little “lonesome” and started playing with her daughter’s old Barbie.
As I read it, Gloria was sad to be in menopause. (That, of course, would be too weird to mention!) She was nostalgic and competitive, sad that her Sasha was growing up. This is a classic female sadness, especially trenchant for dissatisfied mothers like Gloria. She is losing her youthful attractiveness. Cellulite, OMG! She might as well be dead. This is the crisis of a woman in a post-birthing body, though that was magically imposed on Barbie. When Barbie meets up with Grandma Ruth near the end, she is told to “feel” to become real. The prospects of mature womanhood and motherhood offered, however, are either discontented menopause or being formerly creative, with serious tax problems and a double mastectomy (particularly poignant for Barbie). I don’t know why Barbie would elect to be a real, sexually mature woman, based on this movie! The condition of womanhood seems to be lost in a vale of tears, and dominated by men who are enjoying themselves. I think that the archconservatives who misdirectedly found this movie too “woke” for their daughters actually have nothing to fear.