["She was flawless, something had to be wrong. I wanted to heal
her, but I also needed her sick. I wanted to become Barbie, and I
wanted to destroy her. I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to
punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be."]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY BARBIE MUST BE PUNISHED  
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Leslie Jamison
July 29, 2023
The NewYorker
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_ "She was flawless, something had to be wrong. I wanted to heal
her, but I also needed her sick. I wanted to become Barbie, and I
wanted to destroy her. I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to
punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be." _

Barbie Film Poster,

 

My childhood Barbies were always in trouble. I was constantly giving
them diagnoses of rare diseases, performing risky surgeries to cure
them, or else kidnapping them—jamming them into the deepest reaches
of my closet, without plastic food or plastic water, so they could be
saved again, returned to their plastic doll-cakes and their
slightly-too-small wooden home. (My mother had drawn her lines in the
sand; we had no Dreamhouse.) My abusive behavior was nothing special.
Most girls I know liked to mess their Barbies up; and when it comes to
child’s play, crisis is hardly unusual. It’s a way to make sense
of the thrills and terrors of autonomy, the problem of other
people’s desires, the brute force of parental disapproval. But there
was something about Barbie that _especially_ demanded crisis: her
perfection. That’s why Barbie needed to have a special kind of
surgery; why she was dying; why she was in danger. She was too
flawless, something had to be _wrong_. I treated Barbie the way a
mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy
[[link removed]] might
treat her child: I wanted to heal her, but I also needed her sick. I
wanted to become Barbie, and I wanted to destroy her. I wanted her
perfection, but I also wanted to punish her for being more perfect
than I’d ever be.

It’s not that I literally wanted to _become_ her, of course—to
wake up with a pair of hard plastic tits, coarse blond hair, waxy
holes in my feet betraying the robotic fingerprint of my factory
birthplace—but some part of me was already spoke for: beauty as a
kind of spiritual guarantor, writing blank checks for my destiny; the
self-effacing ease afforded by wealth and whiteness; selfhood as
triumphant brand consistency, the erasure of opacity and
self-destructive tendency. I craved all of these—still do,
sometimes—even as my own awareness of their impossibility makes me
want to destroy their false prophet: Barbie as snake-oil saleswoman
hawking the existential and plasticine wares of her impossible
femininity, one Pepto-Bismol-pink pet shop at a time.

Even after I grew out of playing with Barbies, I found a surrogate to
embody the same fraught double helix of adoration and resentment: the
popular girl. As a figure, the popular girl was at once
supernatural—larger than life—and many-headed all around me. At my
prep school in Los Angeles, popular girls were _everywhere_,
spritzing themselves with the Gap perfume called Heaven and presumably
all gathering at the same Beverly Hills mansion to snort coke, get
waxed, and act aloof around the same boys who only ever spoke to me if
they were asking to borrow my TI-82 graphing calculator. It only got
worse when I became friendly with two of these popular girls—we ran
cross-country together—and found them wickedly funny, and (worse)
genuinely _nice_. It all seemed like a cosmic clerical error, a
lopsided allocation of assets. The story that was helping me survive
my own adolescence—that the popular girls were hopelessly vapid and
morally bankrupt—had collapsed; now I had a more robust vision of
their superiority, validated and verified, to wear like a hair shirt.
Turns out that Barbie was just the first name I gave to the lifelong
project of punishing myself with the imagined perfection of others.

If Barbie embodied something that always felt beyond my reach, then
playing with Barbie—subjecting her to an array of trials and
tribulations—was less about becoming her than it was about exerting
some sort of power over the archetypes that tyrannized me. I didn’t
have to become her; I could be her god—a loving god, or a vengeful
one. Walter Benjamin once observed that “ownership is the most
intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” but—as
everyone knows—intimacy is never a pure feeling. It’s never as
simple as unmitigated affection or adoration; it’s always striated
with resistance and resentment. Perhaps this is what Barbie offers,
the chance to feel both things at once: wanting
something _and_ wanting to destroy it. Wanting to become something
and hating yourself for wanting to become it.

Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster, “Barbie
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by a marketing campaign so large you can practically see it from outer
space—knows that much of Barbie’s appeal stems from the fact that
people love to hate her. The film’s slogan promises “If you love
Barbie, this film is for you; If you hate Barbie, this film is for
you,” a pledge that seems to knowingly _get it_ while actually
missing the point entirely. It frames love and hate as mutually
exclusive states, when Barbie’s power rises from her ability to make
you love her and hate her at once.

In the early stages of developing Barbie, in the late
nineteen-fifties, Mattel commissioned a report from a marketing expert
named Ernest Dichter, who recommended leaning _into_ rather than
away from Barbie’s potential as an antagonist: perhaps instead of
“a nice kid, friendly and loved by everyone,” she could be “vain
and selfish, maybe even cheap?” Dichter’s report understood that
hating Barbie is not so much an act of rebellion as it is part of the
plan.

Gerwig’s “Barbie” certainly knows that little girls—or, at
least, a certain kind of little girl—likes to ruin her Barbies:
deface them, torture them, dismember them. One of the film’s pivotal
characters is Weird Barbie, played by Kate McKinnon, a Barbieland
misfit who has turned strange because “someone played with her too
hard in the real world.” We see a flashback montage of the cruel
experiments that have left her with clownish makeup, streaked and
singed hair, and legs stuck in “permanent splits.”

But Weird Barbie, like the Weird Sisters in “Macbeth,” becomes a
kind of dark guide, serving up unwanted truths. She helps the film’s
heroine—Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie—make sense of what
is happening to her, as her “perfect” life and “perfect” body
succumb to a series of glitches: her morning waffle is burnt. Her milk
has curdled. Her plastic feet—permanently molded to high heels, even
when she isn’t wearing them—have flattened, so that her heels (to
her horror) now touch the ground. As in Chantal Akerman’s classic
film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
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trouble first shows up as a series of minor domestic disruptions. (In
Akerman’s film, a pot of overcooked potatoes is the first sign that
something is afoot.) In a female life circumscribed by domesticity or
fantasy, these banal disruptions are the seismograph upon which deeper
tremors first make themselves felt.

For Barbie, these tremors eventually force her to reckon with the
claustrophobic chokehold of her own seamless existence. Her body
begins to age, her thighs rippling with cellulite, and she finds
herself ambushed by anxieties about her own mortality. In the middle
of her own disco party, Barbie asks her gold-lamé-clad friends, “Do
you guys ever think about dying?” and the music suddenly stops. No
one responds. Barbie corrects herself, “I mean, I’m just dying to
dance,” and the music kicks up again.

When Barbie seeks counsel from Weird Barbie, she is told that she will
have to cross from Barbieland to the real world to seek out the little
girl playing with her. (“You are becoming inextricably
intertwined,” Weird Barbie says. As Benjamin could have told her,
they always were.) The film’s promotional materials describe the
quest that ensues—Barbie rides her neon Rollerblades right into the
real world, where she immediately gets catcalled by a cluster of
construction workers—as a “full-on existential crisis.” But, at
the end of the day, it’s a Mattel-authorized crisis. Does it
ultimately disrupt Barbie’s brand or simply consolidate it? (As
Slavoj Žižek argues, fair-trade coffee is also a clever bit of
inoculation designed to make us feel better about capitalism.)

Indeed, it turns out that even Barbie’s existential crisis
is—quite literally—a call coming from inside the corporate house;
specifically, from a high-level executive assistant named Gloria
(America Ferrera) who works on the top floor of the Mattel
headquarters. Gloria is a lifelong Barbie devotee, but mother to a
teen, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who has emphatically outgrown hers.
Gloria has been secretly drawing rogue Barbie models at her desk:
Crippling Shame Barbie, Cellulite Barbie, and Irrepressible Thoughts
of Death Barbie.

These rebel designs are part of a “dark Barbie” lineage: In
“Barbie’s Real Life,” a series of photographs from the eighties,
Susan Evans Grove gives us Office Politics Barbie, standing by a desk
full of papers, getting groped from behind; Battered Barbie, her under
eye smeared with black makeup; and Go Ask Barbie, who leans over a
toilet bowl of floating pills. In Todd Haynes’s cult classic
“Superstar
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his 1987 bio-pic about the life and death of the singer Karen
Carpenter, a Barbie plays the film’s titular anorexic. Part of the
irony of casting Barbie as Karen is that Barbie-Karen _already_ has
a body whose proportions would require illness to sustain. In 1994, a
group of Finnish researchers infamously published a study arguing that
a real-life woman with Barbie’s proportions would not menstruate.

But under Haynes’s direction, Barbie gets even thinner: to dramatize
Carpenter’s illness, Haynes physically chipped away at his doll to
make her appear more emaciated, until she is all sharply angled
plastic cheeks and skeletal arms. We see a closeup of her doll eyes,
blackly terrified at the prospect of a large restaurant meal. We see
closeups of her Ex-Lax boxes, her tiny salads, the miniature bottles
of ipecac syrup that eventually damage the muscles of her heart beyond
repair. The recurring shots of her bathroom scale echo Slumber Party
Barbie (1965), who came with a scale permanently set at a hundred and
ten.

At one point, we watch Karen’s brother Richard berating her with his
scolding concern: “All you ever eat is salad and iced tea!” His
worries are less altruistic than instrumental: “Your fans are
worried. I can hear them gasping when we walk onstage!” When Richard
finds Karen passed out at her dressing-room table, next to an empty
box of Ex-Lax, he rages: “What did you do to your makeup? You’re a
mess!” The one thing Barbie is _never_ allowed to be: a mess.
Which is precisely why we always want to mess her up.

The first time my daughter asked for a Barbie, soon after her fifth
birthday, I felt the sense of dread that comes from watching the
protagonist of a horror film jimmy open a locked door at the end of a
dark hallway. _Don’t go in there!_ Among other things, I worried
that her desire for a Barbie would signal the end of an era: her
two-year fascination with the goddesses of Greek mythology. My pride
in her love for these myths was aspirational, no doubt insufferable. I
loved her savvy questions: “Why is Zeus everyone’s daddy?”
“Was Medusa a regular woman before she was a monster?” I loved the
ways these myths helped her metabolize the inevitable cruelties and
betrayals of the world; the ways they helped her reckon with her own
contradictory desires for dependence and distance; and, perhaps most
of all, the ways they gave her so many fierce and complicated female
figures to arrange her mind around. Wise and ferocious Athena with her
owl and her unnerving, bad-ass birth, straight from the forehead of
Everyone’s Daddy! Or operatic Demeter, plunging the whole world into
winter with her sorrow. Or even Persephone, who wanted to rejoin her
mother while also carving out a separate identity as queen of the
dead. I loved that these goddesses all had their own flaws and
self-thwarting desires: Athena and her pride; Hera and her jealousy;
Aphrodite and her vanity. These goddesses were psychic chiaroscuros:
powerful and wounded, their blood running hot with ambition, animated
by dark attachments and shameless hungers.

The first time my daughter asked for a Barbie—to be precise, a
Butterfly Princess Barbie—it was hard to imagine this princess,
frothy with butterfly-studded pink tulle, bursting out of her
father’s skull or putting snakes into an infant’s crib (as Hera
had done to baby Hercules, one of her husband’s many children by
other women). It was as if, from the glorious ranks of the Greek
goddesses, with their superhuman flaws and flashing eyes, only one had
survived: Aphrodite. As if her beautiful form had endured as the only
possible template for what a woman might fantasize about becoming.
(Mattel in fact released a trio of Goddess Barbies in the late aughts:
Medusa, Athena, and Aphrodite, framed against a pastel seashell. But
the dolls were designed for collecting, not play, and they barely
move; Aphrodite’s limbs are capable of almost no articulation at
all.)

Hearing my daughter first say the word “Barbie” felt like a
foreshadowing of all those tyrannical tenets of feminine existence I
wanted to shield her from: punishing ideals of beauty, whiteness and
its fantasies of innocence. What I fear about my daughter’s
attachment to her Barbies is something I fear in myself: that I serve
the wrong gods, false ones. But we can’t simply reject our false
gods. We must figure out what they’ve done for us. As a wise shrink
once told me, “You’ll never get over your anorexia until you
figure out what it does for you.”

My own mother, I know, went through her own version of this Barbie
grief—when I requested my own Barbie, for the first time,
thirty-five years ago. For more than sixty years, in fact, daughters
have wanted Barbies that their mothers did not want them to have.
This, too, was part of Mattel’s vision for the doll, and part of the
reason it was the first toy company to market directly to children,
via television, rather than parents. There’s nothing a girl wants
more, perhaps, than a toy it seems like her mother does not want her
to have.

The story of Barbie has always been a story about mothers and
daughters. The very first Barbie—created by a businesswoman named
Ruth Handler, the first president of Mattel—was named after her own
daughter, Barbara. She first came into the world on March 9, 1959,
wearing a black-and-white-striped bathing suit, with red lips and a
high blond ponytail. Handler liked to tell the story of Barbie’s
origins as a polished autobiographical anecdote: that she had seen her
own daughter playing with adult paper dolls and was inspired to create
a doll that was not a baby; that would allow little girls to imagine
their own futures. Over the years, it would become clear that Handler
had specific ideas about what these futures might look like. Barbie
has had more than two hundred careers—from McDonald’s employee to
paleontologist, Marine Corps sergeant to ballerina—but she has never
become a mother. Handler herself once said in an interview, “If I
had to stay at home I would be the most dreadful, mixed-up, unhappy
woman in the world.”

When Mattel was pressured into making Barbie a mother, the closest it
came was introducing Barbie Baby-Sits, in 1963, a set including an
infant doll, a list of phone numbers to call, and a pocket
watch—reminding us that soon this sitter would be off the clock. The
set also came with miniature books: “How to Travel” (a reminder
that this sitter was still a free agent, rather than a “dreadful,
mixed-up” homebound mother), “How to Lose Weight”—its pages
featuring just two words of text, “Don’t Eat”—and “How to
Get a Raise,” a reminder that this Barbie was not a mother but,
rather, a merchant of her own time, a woman getting compensated for
her labor.

Although Handler narrated Barbie’s origins in personal terms, her
true birth story was a bit more complicated: Barbie owed much of her
design to a German fashion doll called Bild Lilli, a risqué gag gift
launched in Germany in 1955, based on a comic-strip character who
first appeared sitting down with a fortune-teller, asking, “Can’t
you give me the name and address of this tall, handsome, rich man?”
The writer M. G. Lord, in her book “Forever Barbie: The
Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll
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offers a shrewd read of Lilli in the context of postwar Germany as a
“vanquished Aryan, gold digging her way back to prosperity.”

The Handlers did not just have a daughter named Barbie, they also had
a son named—yes—Ken, who never wanted to buy Barbies for his own
daughters and has long been troubled by his parents’ cultural
legacy: “I felt a lot of indignation about the effect the dolls had
on impressionable children.” Lord describes Ken as a long-haired and
shaggy-bearded man who looks nothing like his doll doppelgänger. He
laments Barbie’s impossible body (“a figure no young lady could
ever achieve without a severe anorexic leaning”) and lets himself
imagine an elaborate alternative version of the doll, more committed
to global injustice: “If they were to suddenly come to life . . .
I would like to take Barbie and Ken and train them as
ethnobotanists . . . take their blond selves . . . and tan
themselves in the sweat of the equatorial-jungle sun and give
themselves to people that desperately need to learn from them.”
Though Ken’s fantasy carries its own bizarre texture—a
pre-ayahuasca fetishizing of the jungle meets a modern-day “White
Man’s Burden”—it’s also a daydream that falls neatly in line
with two long-standing Barbie traditions: not only imagining elaborate
ways to make Barbie feel uncomfortable but also using her to act out a
minor rebellion against one’s parents.

The psychologist D. W. Winnicott made famous the concept of the
“transitional object” as a beloved childhood possession, often a
Teddy bear or security blanket, that becomes a kind of surrogate
mother, allowing the child to separate, and I wonder if for many girls
Barbie functions as a kind of post-transitional object: not a
surrogate mother so much as an anti-mother; a version of the self that
does not need to mother or be mothered; a proto-teen-age self that can
push the mother away more forcibly. Barbie is not a doll for
snuggling. She is made of hard plastic—meant for manipulation and
mischief more than comfort. Many nights I help my daughter navigate a
similar drama of bedtime ambivalence: she wants one of her Barbies to
sleep with her, but—because the doll is so unyielding—she does not
want to lie too close to it.

When my daughter plays with her Barbies, she can undermine their
composure in any way she chooses: the Barbie who is sad because she
wasn’t allowed to go to the birthday party; the Barbie who needed
sidekick medicine from the weedy reaches of our back yard, because
otherwise her sickness would be a forever sickness till the end of
time. Barbie’s tribulations are endless. Among other things, she is
always losing her shoes. (I think often of the sadist who made her
high heels removable—good to grant Barbie that mercy, I suppose, but
for the rest of us it’s endless, the hunt for her tiny plastic
shoes.) My daughter’s imagination _reckons_ with Barbie’s
pristine existence, rather than swallowing it whole, and her play is
not exclusively about identification but, rather, many vectors of
engagement: punishing, wrestling, saving. She wants to do all kinds of
things with her dolls besides just _be_ them. I’m pleased to see
this, even as I also understand that part of what she needs is the
opportunity to do things I am not pleased to see.

It felt like a stroke of cosmic irony that I ended up seeing
“Barbie” in Greece, the birthplace of the goddesses that Barbie
has recently displaced. This was opening weekend, on the island of
Crete, and, on the way to the theatre, I’d passed a storefront full
of lacy thongs and satin bras called “Barbie lingerie,” and, a few
stores down, a toy shop full of endless Barbie boxes, while a little
girl beside me tugged on her mother’s hand, speaking rapidly in
Greek, her fluted voice striking those universal notes of longing:
“Ah . . . Barbie . . .”

Gerwig’s film wrestles with maternity from the get-go. Its opening
shots of little girls playing with baby dolls in the desert is not
only an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey
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its protohumans discovering tools, but also an opportunity to
highlight Barbie’s anti-maternal impulses: “At first, girls could
only play at being mothers,” Helen Mirren’s voice-over laments.
“How much fun is that? Why don’t you ask your mother?” But once
Barbie arrives—the original doll from 1959, looming like a giant in
her zebra swimsuit—the girls start smashing their baby dolls against
the rocks. They’ve been given permission to rage against the
straitjacket of motherhood. But what will give them permission to rage
against the straitjacket that has arrived, gigantic and blonde, to
take its place?

The film proceeds to offer its own riff on the fall from innocence:
humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. (In Barbieland, Barbie
doesn’t have a vagina, but once she chooses to become “fully
human,” she appears to get one—and the film closes with her
triumphant visit to the gynecologist: fig leaf finally removed.) If
it’s Eve who first succumbs to temptation in the Bible, then it’s
Ken who eats the apple here: after accompanying Barbie to the “real
world,” he finds himself falling in love with the patriarchy—which
he understands, charmingly, as a society in which “men and horses
have all the power”—and ends up bringing toxic masculinity back to
Barbieland, like an invasive species. (As if Barbieland does not
already have this version of masculinity as part of its
foundation—would Barbie ever have existed _without_ masculinity?)

The cure for this outbreak? Gloria ends up snapping all the Barbies
out of their collective brainwashing by offering an incisive catalogue
of all the paradoxical gender scripts they now have to navigate:
“You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be
thin. . . . You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t
talk about your kids all the damn time.” And it _works_. Barbie
cries out triumphantly, “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance
required to live under the patriarchy, you’ve robbed it of its
power!” (The word “patriarchy” must appear in the film at least
forty times.) This is the fantasy of an artist or an analyst—this
faith that giving voice to something will rob it of its power—and it
gestures implicitly toward the larger aspirations of the film itself:
that a corporate-sponsored film about Barbie could repair the damage
she’s done by describing it, the brand equivalent of a
carbon-neutral flight.

Don’t get me wrong: “Barbie” is brilliantly imagined, and
endlessly delightful, but its social critiques are neither original
nor disruptive. They ratify articles of shared liberal understanding
so that the film can get on with the business of redeeming its
heroine—giving us a Barbie we can stand behind. The film’s
monologues about the patriarchy are simultaneously incisive and
incessant—their sheer abundance, one imagines, meant as an assertion
of directorial autonomy. Its commentary is strongest in its narrative
absurdities (a thousand Kens eager to “explain ‘The
Godfather’ ” to a rapt female audience) and tongue-in-cheek
asides, the tonal equivalent of the teen-age girl who appears
fleetingly at the end of the film, winking at us as she puts on her
makeup. Gerwig might be winking, but she is still putting on her
makeup.

The part of “Barbie” that I ultimately found most compelling was
its reckoning with various forms of motherhood—not so much its
actual mother and daughter, Gloria and Sasha, but its evocation of
subtler maternal bonds: the relationships between Barbie and her
creator, and between the artist and capitalism. Barbie quite literally
meets her maker on the seventeenth floor of Mattel’s headquarters,
in a secret room that looks like a mid-century American kitchen.
Handler (played by Rhea Perlman) introduces herself as “Ruth” and
offers herself as a refuge from the men in suits who are chasing
Barbie through the building, trying to force her (literally) back into
her box. Eventually, Ruth accepts Barbie’s desire for full humanity,
and, in this way, the film offers a version of the Fall that also
serves up a fantasy of reunion: Barbie gets to eat from the Tree of
Knowledge, _and_ she gets to reconcile with her god. She does not
have to choose.

If Barbie ends up falling into humanity with her corporate mother’s
blessing, choosing to accept suffering and mortality in exchange for
full humanity (and a vagina?), it’s also true that her humanity is
more about fragility than culpability. Much is made of Barbie’s
tears throughout the film, their glittering novelty—and her newly
acquired humanity involves foregrounding her vulnerability rather than
facing the harm she’s caused. The film’s most explicit critiques
of Barbie come from the thirteen-year-old Sasha, who is at once a
Barbie critic and an updated Barbie model: Progressive Politics
Popular Girl. Sure, she’s wearing her Gen-Z armor—stringy hair,
ripped jeans, fierce indignation. (She accuses Barbie of embodying
“sexualized capitalism” and sends her away in tears.) But, even as
Sasha seems to push back against Barbie, she still embodies what
Barbie has always represented: the terrifying power of the popular
girl, consolidating her own power by making someone else feel
terrible.

Gerwig’s film does something similar: ostensibly interrogating the
icon whose reach it was designed to expand. In its opening weekend,
the film grossed nearly four hundred million dollars worldwide; and
one can only guess how many Barbies Mattel has sold in the past month.
Ultimately, we can see the film’s genesis as another iteration of
the fraught parent-child dynamic that Barbie has always catalyzed:
Gerwig as a headstrong daughter pushing back against her benefactor,
an auteur both resisting and milking the dark mother of capitalism, a
child casting off the parent-brand whose resources have made her work
possible. This is not to say that Gerwig’s art is hypocritical, only
that it’s emblematic: the artist interrogating the same compromised
structures that underwrite her ventures in the first place. ♦

 

 

Greta Gerwig’s giddily stylized vision of a doll coming to life
makes a serious case for the art of adapting even the most sanitized
I.P.

By Richard Brody

* Film Review
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* Barbie
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* Greta Gervig
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