Barbie: War and Pink

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Barbie movie starts out cleverly with a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof, showing the origin of the doll as a baby doll so that girls could play at being mothers. As Helen Mirren points out in the narration, this wasn't always fun. "Just ask your own mother." Coming in like a monolith is Margot Robbie as the original Barbie doll in her iconic black-and-white swimsuit and high heels (to match her high-heeled feet), whereupon the girls see their future as stylish and in-command women.  

We then travel to Barbie Land, where all the Barbies live in pink plastic houses, while running the show in all professions, including the President and all the Supreme Court justices, as well as doctor, lawyer, and astronaut. Robbie as "Stereotypical Barbie" travels around in her pink car prettily applauding her sisters' successes. Meanwhile, Ken (Ryan Gosling) and the other Kens exist purposelessly while "beaching" (hanging out on the beach). 

A moment of self-realization leads Barbie, Inanna-like, through a portal to the Real World, and when Ken comes along, he quickly discovers that gender roles are reversed there. Meanwhile, Barbie discovers she hasn't been the empowering role model to girls she'd thought she was, and hooks up with working mother Gloria (America Ferrera, much slimmed down and prettied up from her "Ugly Betty" days) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) to travel back to Barbie Land and set things right. Except that once they return, Ken has turned it into a patriarchal nightmare, with the Barbies relinquishing their power positions to become good little girlfriends mooning over their Kens while they all play guitar and sing Matchbox 20's song, "I wanna push you around." Meanwhile Will Farrell as the Mattel CEO tries to scold Barbie back into her box and Barbie Land by calling her a Jezebel, and she has a Proustian flashback.  

It's a lot like life. Girls play with Barbies and imagine they'll grow up to have perfect, empowered lives like their dolls do, with great wardrobes. Then we often realize it's easier to get boys' attention by ditching all that and being attentive to male needs. 

In the movie, Ferrara's character recites a monologue about the tightrope modern women must walk, and she and Robbie's character capture and deprogram her fellow Barbies with Gloria's help. Just before a vote on matriarchy vs. patriarchy, they distract the Kens by sparking their jealousy and setting them at war against each other while they win the vote.

It's a lot like our history (or herstory, as I like to say). As Joseph Campbell put it, "There can be no doubt that in the very earliest ages of human history, the magical force and wonder of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself; and this gave to woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of the masculine part of the population to break, control, and employ to its own ends." So while women were thought to be the sole creators of life we were indeed everything, until men figured out they had something to do with paternity and took over, waging war over Helen of Troy and such.  

The problem I have with Barbie is that its solution is a war among men—something we've had quite enough of already—and switching back to putting only one sex in charge. (I guess that the Lysistrata anti-war technique wouldn't have worked in Barbie Land since they don't have genitals there.) It seems filmmaker Greta Gerwig's research didn't include reading Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, where she makes a case for a partnership model of power sharing between the sexes going forward. At least Barbie apologizes to Ken for negating him in the end, saying, "Every night didn't have to be girl's night." And at least the "war" is fought with beach toys instead of real weapons. 

Gosling as Ken almost steals the show; the former Mousketeer shines in the musical numbers/ersatz fighting scenes in the second half. Robbie gets points for co-producing the film, and for raking in an estimated $50 million on it, as well for her good, uglied-up performance as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya (2017) and for appearing on SNL in 2016 in a marijuana-leaf-themed dress.  

Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler, the creatrix of Barbie, doesn't add much Wise Women's wisdom but does give Robbie's Barbie permission to turn human, as we all must.

BARBIE'S BIRTH AND INFLUENCE

The Barbie Doll was born when Ruth and her daughter Barbara spotted a Lilli doll on a trip to Germany in 1956. Based on a comic-book character, Lilli was "a saucy high-end call girl" which "could be bought in tobacco shops, bars and adult-themed toy stores,” writes Robin Gerber, the author of Barbie and Ruth. “Men got Lilli dolls as gag gifts at bachelor parties, put them on their car dashboard, dangled them from the rearview mirror, or gave them to girlfriends as a suggestive keepsake.” Ruth, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company, brought three of the dolls home with her to California and three years later, she introduced a doll modeled on the trashy Lilli and named for her daughter. 

It's been calculated that if Barbie were an actual woman, she would be 5'9” tall, have a 39” bust, an 18” waist, 33” hips and a size 3 shoe. There is a mention in the movie about this unrealistic version of womanhood taking its toll on girls, by Sasha and her Bratz-like friends. "Slumber Party Barbie" was introduced in 1965 and came with a bathroom scale permanently set at 110 lbs with a book entitled “How to Lose Weight” and directions inside stating simply “Don’t eat.”

Issa Rae, who plays President Barbie in the movie, spoke about how she didn't think her body was "Barbie ready" when she was cast, but added that Gerwig made an effort to include all  races and body types (though in a rather cursory way, it seemed to me). 

Rae, who first garnered attention for her work on the YouTube web series "Awkward Black Girl," was the co-creator, co-writer, and star of the HBO television series "Insecure" (2016–2021), for which she was nominated for multiple Golden Globes Awards and Primetime Emmy Awards. Her 2015 memoir, titled The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, became a New York Times bestseller. In 2018 and 2022, Rae was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. But the only question she's asked as President Barbie is, "How come you're so amazing?" To which she replies, "No comment." Mattel, which co-produced the film and doubtlessly has the licensing contract, is selling a President Barbie doll based on Rae's movie portrayal for $50.  

In 2016, The Guardian interviewed a worker at a Chinese factory that produces Barbie dolls. She "works 11-hour days, six days a week, and shares a dormitory with nine other women and gets to see her husband only once a week. She had to leave her three-year-old daughter back home in Sichuan. And there is only a communal bathroom, and if they want hot water they must fetch it from another floor. But at least she has a job, she says." With wages of around $1/hour, workers put in up to 100 hours/month in overtime. 

So, besides clever and omnipresent marketing, why is Barbie and her movie such a hit? And what strange force in the universe brought the film out next to the Oppenheimer movie, about a man who unleashed a force strong enough to destroy our planet? Many saw the films as a double feature. "I survived Barbenheimer 2023" T-shirts ensued. 

Some think the portrayal of Ken in the Barbie movie, co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, looks like a bell hooks critique of masculinity, and that men have the most to gain from watching the movie. As Gerda Lerner wrote in The Creation of the Patriarchy (1986), "The effect on men has been very bad, too, of the omission of women's history, because men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think as a man that everything great in the world and its civilization was created by men, then naturally you have to look down on women. And naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters."

We must reconcile our male and the female forces or we soon won't have either a Barbie Land or a Real One.

ADDENDUM 8/17/23: I found a model of a truly empowered, real woman in a film where I would have least expected it: Lana Turner playing against (and with) Bob Hope in "A Bachelor in Paradise" on TCM. Her character, Hope's landlady who rents him her "California coral" (pink) house, is an unmarried career woman who scoffs at being "sweet and charming, or just obliging to a man." She stands up against banning books, and can, as she says in this clip, "sail a boat, upholster furniture, skin dive for abalone, make strudel, recite the 50 states and their capitals, and play a mean piano."* Meanwhile, she repairs a tape recorder, bowls a strike, and dances a fine hula (after drinking her limit of two drinks "fit for the gods").

Written by Valentine Davies ("Miracle on 34th Street"), Vera Caspary ("Laura"), and Hope's writer Hal Kanter, the film features Agnes Moorehead as a Judge who puts Judy to shame, and the best courtroom admission of love since working woman Barbara Stanwyck admits she loves Gary Cooper on the stand in "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." Opening with Adam and Eve/forbidden fruit references, Bachelor is set in a planned community called Paradise Village where the men work, the children are marched to school, and the wives stay at home with the babies. "The typical American community is entirely matriarchal, dominated entirely by females, a no-man's land more foreboding that Sycthia, dominated by the Amazons," Hope observes. All is resolved thanks to Turner's common sense, compassion and unerring moral compass. Are women required to clean up men's patriarchal messes? No, but we're darned good at it. 

* A bit like the Heinlein quote: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

ANOTHER UPDATE 8/20: It's fun going to parties these days and talking with the (mostly) women there about the movie. Yesterday one woman, who has just made Fortune magazine's 50 Over 50 Women list, revealed she also helped develop Computer Engineer Barbie (pictured) in 2010. She clued us into a 2014 study conducted in a psychology lab at Oregon State University, where 37 girls ages 4 to 7 were given Barbie dolls to play with and then asked how many of ten different occupations they themselves could do in the future and how many of those occupations a boy could do. Researchers found that girls who played with Barbie indicated that they had fewer future career options than boys, whereas girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head foresaw basically the same range of career opportunities as boys did. “Although the marketing slogan suggest[s] that Barbie can ‘Be Anything,’ girls playing with Barbie appear to believe that there are more careers for boys than for themselves,” wrote authors and psychology professors Aurora M. Sherman of Oregon State University and Eileen L. Zurbriggen of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE, 1/24: I suppose I get some of the outrage that Greta Gerwig wasn't Oscar-nominated for Best Director for Barbie, but compared to a movie like Oppenheimer, you realize it was more like directing a farce than a film. It is outrageous that only one token woman is in the field (again), for lots of reasons. As far as Robbie being "Robbed" of a Best Actress nomination, I can't say that her acting in the film was anything other than, well, plastic. Whereas, I certainly noticed Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera's performances, and both got supporting actor nods. Barbie picked up nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (although one must wonder, adapted from what? That could be the real controversy). Nominations for costume and production design, plus two of its songs, made for a total of eight nominations. So, not a bad showing overall. The Golden Globes made a special People's Choice award for the movie, while Oppenheimer won Best Picture. 

Meanwhile, Oliver Stone is in the news for saying in an interview with City AM about Barbie that, “Ryan Gosling is wasting his time if he’s doing that shit for money. He should be doing more serious films. He shouldn’t be a part of this infantilization of Hollywood. Now it’s all fantasy, fantasy, fantasy, including all the war pictures: fantasy, fantasy.”  Reportedly, he later apologized for his "ignorant" statement. Stone pleaded no contest on a marijuana possession charge in 2005.