A few months ago, my two sons, aged 10
and 15, told me they were excited to see the new
Barbie film. I was surprised. They are not
interested in dolls, and, in spite of Barbie
being the top-selling
doll in the world, they were not very familiar with the
iconic toy until they saw an online trailer of
the live-action feature film starring Margot
Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Although I had played
with a much-loved Barbie doll as a child, I had
grown up to hate everything the doll stood for:
dangerously
unattainable beauty standards, the deliberate vapidity of femininity
and feminism, and the centering of whiteness.
But, the clever marketing of the new film
has people of all demographics eager to see it:
“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If
you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” proclaimed the trailer. There should have been
an addendum: “If you’re indifferent because you
have no idea who or what Barbie is, this movie
is also for you.” Because, ultimately the film
is a giant commercial for an outdated toy. Its
interminably long
marketing campaign helped generate
breathless anticipation for months.
Launched in 1959 and conceived
by Ruth Handler, one of the co-founders of Mattel,
Barbie was modeled on a German doll named Bild
Lilli, marketed to adult men as a sort of gag
gift. According to Brennan Kilbane, writing in
Allure, “Bild Lilli was a single-panel comic
character in a German tabloid—a sweet, ditzy,
curvy figment of the male imagination,
frequently losing her clothes and enjoying the
company of men. Each punch line hinged on Bild
Lilli’s hotness, her horniness, or her lack of
common sense. When a police officer informed
Bild Lilli that the two-piece swimsuit she was
wearing was in violation of decency laws, she
responded earnestly, ‘Which piece do you want me
to take off?’”
Handler wanted to market an “adult” doll
to little girls because the prevalent dolls of
her time were either baby dolls or else they
had, in
her words, “flat chests, big bellies, and squatty
legs—they were built like overweight 6- or
8-year-olds.” Apparently, Handler, who appears
in the film as a wise elderly grandmother played
by Rhea Perlman, felt that a doll with
impossibly frail wrists and a thin waist was a
more suitable aspiration.
Vox’s
Constance Grady put it best, saying, “The plastic
body little girls are given to practice being
grown-up with is the same as the plastic body
grown men hang from the rearview mirrors of
their cars as a dirty joke,” referring to the
Bild Lilli dolls. This point is especially
disturbing when, as Grady also pointed out, the
first commercial for the doll featured a girl
singing “Someday I’m gonna be exactly like you…
Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that
I am you.”
The doll has always been tone-deaf. A few
years after it was launched, just as second-wave
feminism was gaining ground, Mattel released Slumber
Party Barbie, who “came with pink pajamas, a pink
scale set at 110 lbs, and a diet book on how to
lose weight, with only one instruction: DON’T
EAT!”
Since then, the doll’s history has been
marked by a constant tug-of-war as it has
attempted to market misogyny to a world whose
women are tired of being trodden upon. The film
is a similar mess of contradictions, and as Andi
Zeisler wrote in a New York Times op-ed, it is “one that acknowledges and
embraces that weirdness under the vigilant gaze
of a corporate chaperone.” Zeisler admitted how
she didn’t realize that “the
film’s narrative would essentially serve as a
Mattel redemption arc,” turning her as a viewer
into, “an unwitting Barbie P.R. booster.”
Now, just as Mattel managed to reinvent a
male fantasy as a girl’s toy, the new Barbie movie is reinventing the doll as a
universally beloved character in our
imagination. Forget product placement—the
insidious insertion of branded products into
films and television shows as a sly form of
advertising—the Barbie movie is one giant advertisement,
the inaugural creation of Mattel
Films. Rather than creating new characters to
tell a story and then milking the profits from
the resulting merchandise—as is the traditional
marketing ploy popularized by films such as Toy
Story—Mattel has followed
in the footsteps of companies such as Lego and
its popular 2015
Lego
Movie.
There has been little mention of this as
problematic within the slew of glowing reviews
of the film. Is this to be the future of film?
Indeed, filmmaker J.J. Abrams is working on a
new Hot
Wheels film.
Audiences are supposed to overlook the
ethical conundrums presented by the Barbie film in part because the film’s
creator, Greta Gerwig, apparently identifies as
a feminist. But, she’s hardly a critic of the
doll and its regressive representation.
According to the film’s costume designer Jacqueline
Durran, “Greta really liked… [the
outfits in the film that had an ’80s aesthetic
because] they chimed with the date of the
Barbies that she used to play with… She was a
great Barbie fan.”
Additionally, because the film validates
the various criticisms leveled at the doll over
the years, audiences are expected to embrace
this bizarre brand-turned-film as entertainment.
“The role comes with a lot of
baggage. But with that comes a lot of exciting
ways to attack it,” said
Robbie,
who was one of the initiators of the project and
who stars as the main (white, blonde) Barbie protagonist
(there are many other Barbies in supporting
roles) in the film. But the film doesn’t truly
attack Barbie’s baggage. The opening scene of
the film, showcased in its first
trailer,
was a nod to the deeply problematic original
Barbie, with Robbie appearing in the same
black-and-white striped bathing suit worn
by the first version of the dolls to hit store
shelves in 1959.
In
spite of the film’s clever marketing as a
universal project, it does not challenge
Barbie’s main function as a dress-up doll. Durran told
British Vogue, “Barbie really
is interlinked with fashion, because how you
play with her is by dressing her,” and that
aspect remains central in the film.
One
“trend expert” explained the push to wear pink
to People
Magazine,
saying, “[w]ith many nostalgic for simpler,
sunnier, and more carefree times, it only makes
sense that this ’80s-inspired, unapologetically
pink aesthetic is taking center stage as the
‘it’ style of the summer.”
So
effective is the film’s branding campaign that
there is now a massive social media fashion
trend called #Barbiecore on
TikTok garnering hundreds of millions of views
for posts created by young women influencers heavily
caking their faces with makeup to
look like the doll, wearing pink tulle, batting
fake eyelashes, and pursing plump glittery lips
coyly. Their posts are tagged with the
recognizable Barbie logo, fulfilling Mattel’s
wildest marketing dreams while setting women
back decades. This is apparently the new face of
feminism.
The
criticism that the film is a blow to feminism is
not overblown. The Barbie movie
has popularized the horrific-sounding label of “bimbo
feminism” (really!). “Instead of
abandoning femininity to succeed in a
patriarchal society, bimbo feminism embraces
femininity while supporting women’s
advancement,” wrote Harriet
Fletcher in the Conversation. In
other words, women are supposed to attain career
success while also shaping themselves to fit the
male gaze.
There
persists a belief that Barbie
is indeed a feminist icon in
spite of Mattel
steering
clear of
embracing the f-word. Robbie
Brenner,
head of Mattel Films, has decided that his
company’s film is “the ultimate
female-empowerment movie.” This disturbing state
of discourse on feminism is the direct result of
relying on corporate America to define women’s
rights and status. While America Ferrera’s
character as a real-life woman struggling with
the pressures of patriarchy is the film’s most
refreshing and powerful aspect, she remains
relegated to a supporting role.
Even
the ridiculous right-wing backlash to the film,
casting it as “anti-man,”
is being touted as a measure of the film’s
feminism. If it’s pissing off the misogynist
incels, surely it’s on the feminist track, claim
the film’s defenders. “[I]t’s not a
Barbie doll that threatens women’s rights,
opportunities, and safety—it’s the
patriarchy,” wrote Fletcher in the Conversation. Really, though, both are true, just to
different extents.
When I was about 8 or 9, my immigrant
parents bought me a Barbie doll. They were proud
to be able to (barely) afford a pricey Western
toy for their daughter. My Barbie was blonde and
blue-eyed, and I happily played with her for
years, well before I ever met a blond, blue-eyed
person in real life. My doll set the standard
for feminine beauty—one that was out of reach of
a brown-skinned, dark-haired kid like me whose
body type was chubby in contrast to my Barbie,
but typical for my age and size. In 2016, Mattel
attempted to diversify
the doll’s body types. But “curvy” Barbie was still thinner
than most real-life women.
Defenders
of the film also point to its racially diverse
casting and its embrace of varying body types.
After all, Issa Rae plays a Black Barbie, Simu
Liu is cast as an Asian Ken, and Nicola Coughlan
is a gorgeous plus-size version of the doll.
But, as Kilbane explained in Allure,
“The Barbieverse distinguishes between two
Barbies. There’s Barbie ‘the icon,’ or ‘brand,’
who can be blonde and short, or Black and
svelte, or Frida Kahlo and white. There’s Barbie
‘the character,’ who is exactly who you’re
thinking of, and will be played by Margot
Robbie.”
Unlike
Disney’s recent reboot of The
Little Mermaid,
which actually dared to reimagine the central character
as a young Black woman played by Halle Bailey,
Barbie—the “real” Barbie—will remain white,
blonde, skinny, and conventionally pretty, the
ultimate aspiration. The rest of us are part of
the supporting cast, as per usual.
Even
though Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz said,
“It’s not about making movies so that we can go
and sell more toys,” that’s a misleading claim.
Toy company executives are hoping that the movie
renews interest in dolls to the tune
of billions of dollars.
It is an attempt to redeem Barbie and its
problematic history so that people will go
out and buy the doll.
Ultimately the clearest description of the
film—enjoyable and thought-provoking as it is—is
that it is a $145
million ad campaign for
a toy that should have faded away years ago.
This
commentary was
produced by
Economy
for All,
a project of the
Independent
Media Institute.
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