If only Barbie film captured complexity of women’s lives

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/09/2023 (1127 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was a little girl, I was given an Aunt Jemima rag doll, a racist representation of happy Black enslavement, akin to the Lucky Jew figurines and dolls, popular in Poland, where, since the Second World War, real Jews are few, having been mostly exterminated, while the dolls and figurines thrive.

These artifacts are part of an array of toys in the marketplace representing cultures, ethnicities and civilizations oppressed and destroyed by historical, economic and political forces.

Then there are dolls, promoted by seemingly less hostile mainstream, that customize children’s play, promote gender stereotypes and breed materialism. Such branding often involves toy giants such as Disney and Mattel.

Currently, I am living through the phenomenon of the blockbuster billion-dollar Barbie movie, co-produced by Mattel. The movie adds millions to Mattel’s fortunes (sales rose dramatically in the first quarter; film revenue is about $100 million; stock price is up by almost a third).

Its heroine — invented by Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel — is modelled on a German Bild Lilli doll, which was not a child’s toy originally. Based on a cartoon character admired for her sexualized banter and outfits who appeared in the West German newspaper Bild-Zeitung, she was made into a plastic doll in 1955 and circulated as a racy gag gift for men.

Barbie’s seductive curves were deemed offensive, but Mattel marketed the doll directly to children and thus a three-dimensional, plastic pin-up arrived — with non-articulating ankles, blond hair and blue eyes, wonderfully “white,” an adept (compulsive) consumer profile, sterile but incarnate (though superficially so) in disparate careers and cultures.

Barbie’s origins are omitted in the movie. In fact, Handler, Barbie’s corporate movie mother, played by Rhea Perlman, speaks glowingly of this “daughter’s” metamorphosis into womanhood in the midst of a clichéd mommy-daughter montage, culminating in the observation (welcomed by some as the movie’s “most profound line”): “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.”

As a woman, as a mother, as a grandmother, the last thing I did and do is stand still. I do not see myself as having sacrificed my life for my children, though I know the standard, reductive characterization of mother as selfless is favoured by the patriarchy, in keeping with the desire to make sure that women who are mothering cannot define their goals or follow their dreams (or should feel guilty if they do).

As a woman, I am alive with movement. I walk beside, sometimes ahead. I am not alone in this embrace of change and growth. This is what women’s wisdom brings to the generations before and after. It is our responsibility, carefully tended.

While I understand the Barbie movie is both popular and lucrative, I find it needlessly superficial. In 2023, Barbie’s metamorphosis could advocate for a much wider and deeper grasp of women’s lives. We are the seed savers, protectors and promoters of dynamic connectivity among all living creatures, caregivers of intersections between magic, nature, mystery and creativity, midwives to authenticity and compassion.

Barbie is a vacuous comedy posing as critique. It avoids Barbie’s birth story, diminishes women’s realities, promotes the usual gender binary, pits men against men in a conventional gang war, secures its perhaps most textured characters as Ken and Allan and makes the canny marketing geniuses at Mattel into buffoonish executives so they are dismissible and forgettable.

Is this asking too much? Many might say so, but I need to ask this much.

When my boys were young, we would take field trips to Toys R Us. First we would note the aggressive pink-for-girls and blue-for-boys colour coding. Then we would observe various related phenomena: the tricycle with the machine gun soldered to the handle bars; the glut of GI Joe dolls; the bespoke Lego sets.

I would scour clothing stores for apparel that did not have mainstream branding or gendered logos. I did not want pyjamas with trucks on them or T-shirts that said Buddy or Sport. I didn’t want to duplicate contemporary biases. I wanted my children to have choices, to make choices. Like many parents, I asked for a deep pause when it came to video games, encouraged in my boys an analysis of what gaming could do.

When I was growing up, I lived in a small town; Barbie had not infiltrated its two toy stores. I had a Betsy Wetsy Doll who could take a bottle with water in it and pee so that I could learn about feeding a baby and changing its diaper. That “mommy” training also involved a precious, pretty, stand-up doll under wraps in a cardboard box with a cellophane front that I could unbox at my grandparents’ house and hold in my lap. I would sit very still in an upstairs’ bedroom. I did not remove her pretty green chiffon dress or her pretty white ankle socks and plastic shoes. I did not ruffle her in any way. She remained immaculate.

And so I have a strong reaction when I read critiques by women who note how they had tormented their Barbies, cutting their hair, using markers to tattoo them, amputating their limbs because they were never ever going to look like Barbie, or when I read about the women who use purges, starvation and plastic surgery to simulate manufactured cartoon and commercialized woman-as-object images, or when I recall the opening of the movie, in which little girls are applauded for mutilating their old-fashioned baby dolls with glee once they are exposed to Barbie.

I know Barbie is supposed to be informed by some kind of feminist thinking. I know it might have sequels; Barbie may become a mother. I know the movie has intriguing production design. I know it will rake in more and more money.

I also know that the Aunt Jemima rag doll of my childhood and the Barbie and her kin that populate the globe — there are 100 Barbies bought every minute in the world — are equally and inherently pernicious and bankrupt.