A proposal in plastic: Jane Austen in Barbie Land

Barbie (2023) began filming in March 2022, with the casting largely conducted in the six months prior to this. This timeline is noteworthy with the casting of Nicola Coughlan as Diplomat Barbie. Coughlan noted that she had auditioned for a potentially larger role originally, but plans had to change, presumably because of her Bridgerton (2020–) filming commitments:

I auditioned for Barbie back in January 22 […] When I found out she wanted to have me be part of @barbiethemovie, and then that I probably wouldn’t be able to make it work because of my schedule I was firstly elated and quickly heartbroken. So when I was asked if I wanted to pop into Barbieland even briefly my answer was an immediate, and very emphatic yes. (Coughlan, 2023)

While Coughlan is on screen for only a matter of moments, she marks a significant point in the opening scenes in Barbie Land. Her Diplomat Barbie presents two awards in the Barbie Nobel Awards – the Nobel Prize for Journalism, and the Nobel Prize for Literature – and both recipients acknowledge their award with confidence: Journalism Barbie (Ritu Arya) assertively states that ‘I work very hard, so I deserve it’, while Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), when heralded by Diplomat Barbie with the claim that ‘You’re the voice of a generation’, responds self-assuredly ‘I know’. This sets up the premise of the film in terms of women's voice, women's self-actualisation and – with its claiming of independent selfhood – a rejection of heteronormative structures of romance as being one of the primary modes of defining women's role and function.

The date of Coughlan's January 2022 audition is significant, however, as this took place after the release of Season One of Bridgerton. This show – based on Julia Quinn's eight Bridgerton novels – hit Netflix screens in very late 2020 to huge international attention: the reveal at the end of Season One that Coughlan's Penelope Featherington was the writer and society gossip Lady Whistledown was the big bombshell which, along with the erotic on-screen couplings of the Duchess (Phoebe Dynevor) and Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), secured Bridgerton's status as must-watch television. The Bridgerton novels and their adaptation are part of the Regency Romance genre: texts which are primarily authored by women, and which take their inspiration from the fiction, fashion and mores of the British Regency. ¹ The marriage plots of the comedies of manners and silver fork novels published during the longer Regency provide much of the plot impetus for Regency Romance novels across the long twentieth century, a genealogy of which can be traced from Georgette Heyer to Barbara Cartland through to Quinn (Gillis, 2018). Shondaland's Bridgerton series picks up the teleological marriage plots – and, by extension, the inheritance and property ownership ramifications of marriage – found in the early nineteenth-century comedies of manners and silver fork novels, whilst reworking the racial politics of the Regency, with a frothy updating of clothing, mores and music: it is serious about being unserious. This has tremendous resonances with how Barbie uses satire and parody to challenge and disrupt the structures of heteronormative romance and capitalism.

Greta Gerwig's flexibility in finding a way for Coughlan to be a part of the film, despite the latter's filming commitments, can be read as a riff on the cultural anxieties about popular culture, particularly considering the categories of the awards which she presents – both to do with story-telling – and the response of the Barbies who receive the awards. Penelope Featherington / Whistledown is explicitly referenced in this Nobel Prize Barbie scene, with Coughlan the only person on the stage styled in a full-length dress with over-the-top furbelows, à la Lady Featherington's (Polly Walker) dressing of her daughter – played for comedic effect – in Seasons One and Two of Bridgerton. Women's writing and self-actualisation is vital to this figuration; Featherington's career (a highly lucrative one, as revealed in Season Three) is a space for her to escape – albeit momentarily – the restrictive mores of the marriage market. Featherington satirically unp(r)icks the gender politics of the ton's heteronormative drive to futurity. There is an irony to this, of course, in a genre which is predicated upon the resolution of romance and marriage (especially so for the Bridgertons, who are a family ultimately united in the exultation of the marital state). That Bridgerton is signalled in Barbie speaks to this longer history of the representation of women, and of the marriage and inheritance narratives within which women are contained and constrained in the Real World.

Cultural anxieties about popular culture are nothing new, and we can trace them in the Global North, at least, back to the concerns about novel reading and the Gothic genre in the late eighteenth century, through to the concerns about sensation novels in the 1860s, in the highbrow denigration of the mass-market periodical in the 1920s and 1930s, as the genres of crime fiction and science fiction consolidated in the cultural imaginary, and then still again in the public reactions to both video games and rap music in the 1980s and 1990s. But there is something particularly pernicious about the cultural anxieties about the forms of women's popular culture, particularly popular fiction: the meshing together of gender and genre renders (more) visible how women's voices are denigrated or disregarded. ² The Regency Romance is often dismissed as low-brow, as ‘too girly’ and as unserious – a triple whammy of critical opprobrium which both Shondaland's Bridgerton and Barbie turn on its head; the former with its unapologetic mining of the romance genre to foreground women's sexual desire and the female gaze, and the latter with its played-for-laughs yet often poignant piss-take of the patriarchy in its referencing of the Regency Romance. Margaret Atwood asked ‘why do men feel threatened by women?’, with the answer that ‘[t]hey’re afraid women will laugh at them’ and that they ‘[u]ndercut their world view’ (1982: 413). Some of the reactions to Barbie from the right-wing end of the political spectrum speak to this fear (see: Dickson, 2023). ³ It is here that we can see the potential of apparently unserious popular fictions to challenge positions of power: for Barbie to consciously locate itself within the longer history of anxieties about women and popular culture, whilst promulgating women's voices and self-actualisation, is a political statement about gender and genre.

If Bridgerton is the Regency anchor in the opening scenes to signal the film's concerns with women's voice, women's self-actualisation, and the problematic structures of heteronormative romance, it is the mother ship of the Regency who precipitates the film's acts of resistance to the infection of the patriarchy. While the Regency Romance text is one which is concerned with the Regency broadly (and runs the gamut from the material verisimilitude of Heyer's Regency world to the more loosely connected aristo-romps of Cartland), there is one author who is repeatedly referenced in the Regency Romance text, both implicitly and explicitly, and that is Jane Austen. The relationship between the Regency Romance and Austen is a somewhat one-way direction of travel: for example, while Romantic Times (a US-based magazine which specialised in romance fiction) had a Jane Austen Award for those in the romance novel community who had a substantial impact on the genre - (the title both paying homage as well as noting a genealogy of women's writing), - the Regency Romance is often dismissed as ‘Austen-lite’. The explicit representation of sex (particularly in the last thirty years) in the Regency Romance – as exemplified by the Duchess and Duke of Hastings's romps in the first Bridgerton novel – and the general denigration of the popular which has enmeshed romance fiction more generally, means that while the Regency Romance is a highly popular genre, it is one which raises considerable anxieties as a cultural artefact.

This makes Barbie's other gesture to the Regency all the more suggestive, as Austen takes centre stage. The marriage plots of the comedies of manners and silver fork novels of the longer Regency, and of the Regency Romance, are predicated upon a proposal; it is thus significant that there are two proposal scenes in Barbie. The first proposal is when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) returns to Barbie Land with Gloria (America Ferrara) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) has brought patriarchy to Barbie Land and most of the Barbies are now providing brewskis and foot massages for the Kens. Beach Ken has taken over the Barbie Dreamhouse, and tells Stereotypical Barbie that she can stay as his ‘bride-wife’. ⁴ She refuses, and is physically and emotionally overwhelmed by the state of change in Barbie Land. Depressed, she collapses on the ground, and declines to engage with Gloria and Sasha and their suggestions. The film cuts away from Stereotypical Barbie – who is ‘the lowest I’ve ever been’ – to an advertisement for Depression Barbie. It is clear that actions in Barbie Land impact on the Real World as sales for Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa have gone live as a result of him taking over her Dreamhouse – it is already ‘flying off the shelves’ for Mattel in apparently the blink of an eye – so the sales campaign for Depression Barbie is also live. Likewise, the outfit which Stereotypical Barbie is wearing in Barbie Land in this scene is on some of the dolls in the advertisement, emphasising that this is happening in real time, in the Real World, in the film, through some loop in the space–time continuum where the twain are crossed (see: Hall, 2024).

The voice-over for the advertisement is played against children playing with various versions of Depression Barbie: ‘Okay, kids, it's time to run out and get the new Depression Barbie. She wears sweatpants all day and night. She spent seven hours today on Instagram, looking at her estranged best friend's engagement photos, while eating a family-size bag of Starbursts. And now her jaw is killing her’. The standard tropes of gendered depression are played here satirically – not caring what she wears, and engaging in unhealthy social and eating behaviour – while the marriage plot is overtly signalled by the engagement photos. Most pertinently for my purposes here, the last thing mentioned in the advertisement which Depression Barbie does is ‘watch the BBC's Pride and Prejudice for the seventh time until she falls asleep’. The reference to Pride and Prejudice is the second Regency anchor in the film (with romance possibly in lower case, but it begs the question as to whether all adaptations of Austen should be considered part of the Regency Romance genre). The advertisement cuts to the first proposal scene in this Austen adaptation in which Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) has come to Rosings Parsonage to propose to Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle). Bennet is staying in Rosings Parsonage to visit her friend Charlotte Lucas (Lucy Scott), who has accepted the proposal of William Collins (David Bamber) after Bennet has refused him. ⁵ Bennet's refusal of Collins, and then her initial refusal of what Darcy has to offer – an extensive estate, social status and substantial financial security for her and her family – positions her as operating (momentarily, at least) outwith the patriarchal structures which Lucas clarifies, in wanting ‘a comfortable home’, as only to be achieved through marriage. Stereotypical Barbie has her own home – a very comfortable one, with its own slide! – and is ‘not romantic’, with no desire for Beach Ken. But when Beach Ken has his own tautologically titled Mojo Dojo Casa House, he still desires Barbie as his ‘bride-wife or long-term-low-commitment-distance girlfriend’.

In Darcy's first proposal in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, he brutally indicates that his desire for Bennet is at considerable personal cost in terms of social status. It is his appraisal of this cost which is damning in the BBC adaptation: ‘[t]he situation of our families is such that any alliance between us must be regarded as a highly reprehensible connection’. ⁶ These are the only words which Darcy speaks in the Depression Barbie advertisement, and while it is a comedic play on Stereotypical Barbie's feelings – or lack thereof – about the possibility of connection between her and Beach Ken, it can also be read as validating the Barbies’ collective sisterhood. There is no heteronormative alliance which can be read as anything but highly reprehensible for them in terms of women's voice and self-actualisation. Bennet refuses Darcy in the Rosings sequence, although this is not played in the Depression Barbie advertisement: while Bennet is shown reacting visibly to Darcy's statement, the advertisement cuts away before she can speak, and consolidates Darcy as the active romantic protagonist (and beyond, as Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones novels and films). The letter he writes in response to her refusal is the pivot(al) point in terms of their own marriage plot: her refusal makes Darcy re-evaluate his position on desire and marriage, and his letter explaining his motives leads Bennet to do the same. Darcy proposes again, and this time is accepted. This proposal scene in Barbie can usefully be put along the two Bennet-Darcy proposal scenes in Pride and Prejudice in terms of property ownership: to put it bluntly, Bennet finally accepts Darcy when she can have the house and the romance; Stereotypical Barbie rejects Beach Ken as she can have the house without the romance.

The second proposal scene in Barbie is towards the end of the film when Beach Ken cries out that ‘I just don’t know who I am without you’. When she suggests he needs to figure out who he is not in relation to her, he struggles, telling her that ‘I only exist within the warmth of your gaze’ and that she is the reason ‘why [he] was created’. Understood within the structures of the romance genre, Beach Ken is seeking to be desired, as this is the only mode of social structure which offers him validation as an individual. It is his repeated misunderstanding that Stereotypical Barbie is rejecting him (as an individual) which allows Barbie Land to be infected with the patriarchy: Stereotypical Barbie is not rejecting him as an individual (inasmuch as a Ken can be an individual), but the notion of romance as structured by heteronormativity. The Barbies are – quite simply – not interested in marriage or the male gaze. When Ken has his identity crisis after the constitution is restored, Stereotypical Barbie and Beach Ken's conversation pivots on desire and property: he laments ‘I always thought that this would be our house’ about her Barbie Dreamhouse. Stereotypical Barbie not only refuses Beach Ken but can barely countenance or comprehend the mode of relationship and property ownership he is proposing (see: Houghton et al., 2024). She tells Beach Ken in the first proposal scene that ‘this is my Dreamhouse. This is Barbie's Dreamhouse’. Her position runs counter to the dominant modes of heteronormativity, and private property, which are at the heart of patriarchal capitalism.

This challenge to capitalism is rendered ironic, of course, given that these dolls and their homes are available for purchase from Mattel in the Real World, and also the huge sales impact of the film in our world. When Executive Number Two (Andrew Leung) asks the CEO (Will Ferrell) what does it matter whether the sales are for Barbie or Ken, if they are rocketing, the CEO responds by saying – with a shift in musicality from a military overtone to a presidential back line – (both highlighting modes of capitalist masculinist expansion) – ‘You think I spent my entire life in boardrooms because of a bottom line?’. The answer to this in the film may be that he got into ‘this business because of little girls and their dreams’, but the answer outside of the film is always yes, if capitalism is to function effectively. ⁷ The film's comic rendition of white male power and privilege within capitalism is undercut again in the second proposal scene after Stereotypical Barbie tells Beach Ken that ‘maybe it is time to discover who Ken is’, and he attempts another romantic gesture, sweeping her sideways in a dip. She responds by saying he needs to figure out who he is, without reference to her, and says ‘you’re not your house, you’re not your mink’, ⁸ thereby dismissing male property ownership, male privilege and heteronormative romance structures in one fell swoop. Cynthia Enloe wryly notes that the ‘gendered politics of seriousness is serious (2013: 18), and this is particularly pertinent in considering the denigration of women's popular culture. The film's fundamental joy in playing with popular culture – such as foregrounding and then rejecting the heteronormative marriage plot that is indispensable in the Regency Romance – brings us back to the unserious, but this time not as it has been used by the patriarchal apparatus of traditional criticism, but by gesturing powerfully to laughter as a mode of resistance to capitalism and male power.