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Guest Essay

Barbie Has Never Been a Great Symbol, but She’s an Excellent Mirror

By Andi Zeisler

Ms. Zeisler is the author of “We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement.”

The “Barbie” movie arrives today as the culmination of a nearly 15-year process that started when Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the character — which isn’t an unusually long time in Hollywood, where scripts regularly languish in turnaround until a combination of big names and deep pockets brings them to life. But Barbie’s film debut also comes in the context of a much longer and more tortuous journey with an existential question at its core: After all these years, does Barbie still matter? And if she does, then … why?

From the moment Barbara Millicent Roberts — Barbie — came on the scene in 1959, the doll was controversial. Male toy executives, conditioned to believe that little girls wanted to play with babies, were flummoxed by this representation of a fully grown woman. But little girls, as they do, understood. Barbie became a sensation. And then a lightning rod. Then a concern. For the past 64 years, Barbie has been at the center of countless debates about who women are, who they should be, how they look and what they want.

Barbie looms as simultaneously an unrealistically proportioned airhead and a striving Everywoman. Most of the time she can’t utter a word, yet she’s believed to speak for a critical mass of us. Perhaps that’s why the “Barbie” movie that finally exists is the only one that could exist: one that acknowledges and embraces that weirdness under the vigilant gaze of a corporate chaperone. The trailer’s tagline (“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.”) is confirmation that Barbie is, in the most literal way, everyone’s business.

I get it. At 6 years old, I was offered a choice between two dolls for my birthday: the Bionic Woman or Barbie. I didn’t, in contemporary toy-representation parlance, see myself in Barbie; the Bionic Woman’s brown hair and jumpsuit much more accurately mirrored my ponytail and hand-me-down corduroy overalls. Barbie, with her white-blond cascade of flosslike hair and a plunge-necked pink dress, was nothing like any woman I’d ever seen. Wasn’t that the point?

I chose Barbie.

In my childhood, the doll was always there — perched on my dresser, toted along on car trips, surfing the waves of my bathtub on a tortoiseshell comb. She was more distant in my adulthood, as Barbie had become a subject of feminist concern. I followed many authors, artists, musicians and assorted culture jammers who were publicly working out their own Barbie issues in fascinating ways. Along the way, I realized this: Barbie is that childish thing none of us can put away, because as long as she’s existed, she’s never been a child. Rather, she’s been an emblem, a scapegoat, a lightning rod, a target and, most of all, a mirror. However we feel about Barbie at a given moment says a lot more about us than it does about Barbie.

When the 1980s backlash against women’s liberation bled into the ’90s, psychologists started raising the alarm over a crisis in girls’ confidence in best-selling books like “Reviving Ophelia.” Anita Hill was explaining sexual harassment to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and women on college campuses were reporting an alarming incidence of sexual assaults. A new wave of feminism was cresting, and it was dragging Barbie under. There was the matter of her unnatural proportions, like a waist-to-hip ratio that could not exist in real life without sacrificing key internal organs. Later, it was her inescapable blondness and whiteness. Despite introductions of Black and Latina Barbies in 1980, along with special collections like the 1980s’ Barbies of the World, everyone knew the real Barbie — the icon, the ur-Barbie, the one true Barbie — was a testament to the same Western beauty ideal inscribed into America’s other institutions of ornamental femininity, from Hollywood to Miss America to Playboy.

As with every iteration of feminism, those of us in the third wave that rose in the ’90s had to grapple with the missteps, misgivings and unfinished business of the previous generations. Barbie certainly wasn’t the most important issue, but she was, after all, right there, nakedly and even proudly what we would come to term problematic. So we donned our hot-pink hair shirts.

Barbie’s overlords were also being humbled. In 1992, Mattel introduced Teen Talk Barbie, which uttered, among other phrases, a chirpy “Math class is tough!” confirming that the historically trend-savvy brand was falling behind the times — and prompting criticism from the American Association of University Women. Mattel’s litigious responses to things like the 1998 intersectional feminist body-image essay collection “Adios, Barbie” and Aqua’s gratingly ubiquitous earworm “Barbie Girl” didn’t help its P.R. Mattel celebrated Barbie’s 40th birthday in 1999 with a brand overhaul that shifted focus from dolls to actual girls, debuting an ad campaign that exhorted its young audience to “become your own hero.”

The “Barbie” movie is also about becoming your own hero or at least taking a hero’s journey — one that leads Barbie into a real world that, for the most part, finds her either dangerous or irrelevant. It’s a fitting approach, since the most interesting thing about Barbie has always been our reactions to her. Some reviews have said the film suffers from an attempt by the director, Greta Gerwig, to incorporate the breadth of the Barbie discourse, causing a narrative overload. But how could it not, given just how much discourse Barbie has inspired over 64 years?

There’s a different film — the 2018 documentary “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie” — that, for me, helps put that discourse in context. “Tiny Shoulders” chronicled Mattel as a company in crisis: Faced with shrinking revenues and declining audience interest, the company was poised in 2016 to introduce a collection of dolls whose skin tones and body types tick a few diversity boxes. I was interviewed for the film, alongside the Barbie historians M.G. Lord and Amanda Foreman and the feminist authors Roxane Gay (a contributing Opinion writer) and Gloria Steinem, with each of us offering context and commentary on Barbie’s place in the past, present and future of women’s lives.

I didn’t realize the film’s narrative would essentially serve as a Mattel redemption arc. When I saw the finished film, I realized that in the course of my life I had gone from a guileless Barbie consumer to an enlightened Barbie renouncer to an unwitting Barbie P.R. booster.

Yet for all the ways Barbie has evolved, so have our expectations for her. As Michelle Chidoni, Mattel’s P.R. chief (or, as she describes herself, “Barbie’s publicist”), said, inspiring the documentary’s title, Barbie holds the weight of several generations’ worth of beauty standards and feminist analysis on her tiny shoulders. Those shoulders might get the occasional refashioning — to make them more athletic or fleshier or more diverse in hue or, in the case of this new film, more self-aware of the weight they’ve been tasked with carrying — but that doesn’t change the fact that we keep adding standards for her to live up to. As a symbol, Barbie is so complicated as to be useless. But as a vessel, she’s proved remarkably durable.

I’m willing to acknowledge — even mock — my once-reflexive feminist rejection of everything Barbie: She never had to be a zero-sum figure, a thing you were either with or against. Many of us definitely saw her that way. That we did speaks only to the continuing challenges of a world that, even now, isn’t sure whether women can be free of stereotypes or expectations and be allowed to simply exist.

Andi Zeisler is the author of “We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement.”

Source images by Shelly Still and TomekD76/Getty Images

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• Movie Review
• This Barbie is a feminist parable fighting to be great in spite of Mattel’s input

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is often good and sometimes great, but it always feels like it’s fighting to be itself rather than the movie Warner Bros. and Mattel Films want.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Barbies might “just” be toys, but Barbie™ is an impossibly perfect paragon of glamorous femininity who’s had as many specialized professions over the course of her 64-year-long existence as she has bespoke outfits. There are few pieces of corporate-owned IP that are truly as Iconic (in the pre-social media sense of the word) as the doll that put Mattel on the map and taught children of all genders — but especially little girls — to long for hot pink dreamhouses. That’s why it isn’t all that surprising to see Mattel Studio’s brand protection-minded influence splashed all over Warner Bros.’ new live-action Barbie movie from writer / director Greta Gerwig.

Valuable as the Barbie brand is, it makes all the sense in the world that Mattel would want Gerwig’s feature — a playful, surreal adventure that does double duty as a deconstruction of its namesake and her technicolor, dreamlike world — to play by a set of rules meant to protect their investments. But as well meant as Mattel’s input presumably was, Gerwig clearly came with a bold vision built around the idea of deconstructing some of the more complex realities of what Barbie represents in order to tell a truly modern, feminist story.

Watching the movie, you can often feel how Mattel and Gerwig’s plans for Barbie weren’t necessarily in sync and how those differences led to compromises being made. Thankfully, that doesn’t keep the movie from being fun. But it does make it rather hard to get lost in the fantasy of it all — especially once Barbie starts going meta to poke fun at the studios behind it in a way that seems to be becoming more common .

Along with celebrating innumerable pieces of Mattel’s history, Barbie tells the story of how the most Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in all of Barbie Land gains the tiniest bit of self-awareness one day and starts to find her growing sense of complex personhood so alarming that she sets off for the Real World to find out what the hell is going on. Like the vast majority of Barbies who call Barbie Land home, all Stereotypical Barbie knows about her own world is based on the picture-perfect, idealized experiences she and her friends are able to breeze their ways through solely using the power of their imaginations. 

Things don’t just happen to Barbies. They’re very much the arbiters of their own wills who’ve worked hard to become people like President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), and Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp). But life for Barbies also isn’t especially difficult or complicated, partially because they’re all dolls living in a plastic paradise. Mainly, though, it’s because Barbie Land’s an expressly woman-controlled utopia reminiscent of Steven Universe ’s Gem Homeworld , where neither misogyny nor the concept of a patriarchy exists because that’s not what Barbie™ is about.

As an unseen Helen Mirren — who seems to be playing a version of herself as Barbie ’s narrator — points out who’s who in the film’s opening act, you can see how Mattel’s willingness to let Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s script poke fun at Barbie™ led to some extremely good world-building.

Barbie Land isn’t just a predominantly pink pocket dimension where Life-Size -like dolls live in life-sized, yet still toy-like dream homes. It’s the embodiment of the easy-to-digest, corporate-approved feminism and female empowerment that Mattel and many other toy companies deal in. Only in Barbie Land, the idea of a predominantly female supreme court or construction sites full of nothing but hardworking women aren’t just dreams — they’re a regular part of everyday life. And all the Barbies are better for it because of how it reinforces their belief that they can do anything.

But outside of the Stereotypical Barbie-obsessed Ken whose job is to stand on the beach (Ryan Gosling), none of the other Kens (Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, and John Cena) are ever really given personalities to speak of. It’s clearly a purposeful decision meant to reinforce the idea that Ken dolls, which were invented after Barbie dolls, are the Eves to their Adams — accessory-like beings created to be companions rather than their own people. But as solid as the idea is, in practice, it has a way of making the Kens of color feel like thinly-written afterthoughts hovering around Gosling and like Barbie isn’t sure how to utilize its entire cast — a feeling that intensifies more and more as the movie progresses.

Long before Barbie even starts to have her existential crisis and seek guidance from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), it becomes painfully clear that there was a strong desire on either Mattel or Warner Bros. parts for audiences to be spoon-fed as much of the film as possible before actually sitting down in theaters. If you’ve watched even a couple of Barbie ’s lengthier ads or the music video for Dua Lipa’s (who plays Mermaid Barbie) “Dance the Night,” you’ve seen a significant chunk of this film and its more memorable moments.

What you’ve seen less of is how often Barbie slows down to have characters repeat jokes and belabor points as if it doesn’t trust the audience to catch beats on their initial deliveries. Some of that can be attributed to the PG-13 movie trying to make sure that viewers of all ages are able to engage because as existentially heavy and slightly flirty as Barbie gets at times, it’s a movie about Barbies, which is obviously going to appeal to a bunch of literal children. But once Barbie’s in the real world being harassed by lascivious men, ruthless teen girls, and a bumbling, evil corporation that the movie goes to great lengths to make fun of, you also get the sense that more than a bit of the movie’s unevenness on the backend stems from Mattel putting its foot down about how it, too, needed to be a part of Barbie’s live-action, theatrical debut.

There’s a time and a place for corporations to try getting in on the fun of events like this by way of meta humor that acknowledges their own existence and the role they play in bringing projects like movies about Barbie dolls into being. But rather than creating the necessary conditions for those kinds of jokes to land, not need explanation, and add substance to Barbie, both Mattel and Warner Bros.’ self-insert jokes work more to remind you how the movie is ultimately a corporate-branded endeavor designed to move products.

That doesn’t keep Gerwig’s latest from being an enjoyable time spotlighting a decidedly inspired performance from Robbie. But it is going to make the rabid Barbie discourse even more exhausting than it already is when the feature hits theaters on July 21st.

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‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century

By David Fear

It’s tough to sell a decades-old doll and actively make you question why you’d still buy a toy that comes with so much baggage. (Metaphorically speaking, of course — literal baggage sold separately.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you know that it’s an attempt by Mattel to turn their flagship blonde bombshell into a bona fide intellectual property, coming to a multiplex near you courtesy of Warner Bros. And they’re also well aware that the announcement that Greta Gerwig would be co-writing and directing this movie about everyone’s favorite tiny, leggy bearer of impossible beauty standards suddenly transformed it from “dual corporate cash-in” to “dual corporate cash-in with a very high probability of wit, irony, and someone quoting Betty Friedan and/or Rebecca Walker.”

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Except, in the middle of one of their regular super-cool and totally awesome sing-alongs, Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever think about dying?” No one, least of all the shiny, happy person who said it, has any idea where that random bummer came from. The next morning, Barbie’s imaginary shower is cold. Her imaginary milk has curdled. The collective perkiness of her friends and neighbors only seems to highlight her inexplicably bad mood. Her stiletto-ready arches suddenly fall flat. And then, she comes face to face with what can only be described as the Thanos of the Barbie Cinematic Universe: cellulite.

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Once in our world, Barbie will encounter sexual harassment, gender inequity, the benefits of crying, the CEO of Mattel ( Will Ferrell ) and the mother (America Ferrara) and daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) who’ve introduced such morbid thoughts into her brain. Ken will discover horses, Hummer SUVs, and toxic masculinity . She returns with her new human friends to Barbieland in a state of dazed enlightenment. He comes back as a full-blown Kencel, spreading a gospel of full-frontal dude-ity.

That probably would have been enough for the studio and the toy company footing the bill; throw in some film-nerd catnip like that ingenious 2001: A Space Odyssey parody preamble, and make sure Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling nail the what-me-worry sunniness and wear the various eras’ couture, and boom! The sound of money piling in will drown out the haters. Instead, Barbie adds levels of intelligence and interrogation into not just the script, co-written by Noah Baumbach , but the narrative itself. Rather than turn away from the baggage, the movie unpacks it. What was it about these dolls we loved, and what is it about them that now causes such divisive emotional reactions? Let’s not just drop Barbie and Ken into the real world circa 2023 — let’s have them question what it means to be plastic role models that run up against modern attitudes about womanhood and Neanderthal notions of manhood. You’ll still get your mondo Barbiemania, but you’re going to have deal with some pop-cultural potholes left in its wake. This is a movie that wants to have its Dreamhouse and burn it down to the ground, too.

Critical thinking isn’t mind corruption, of course. Nor is pointing out that you can love something and recognize that it’s flawed or has become inflammatory over time, then striving to fix it. It’s definitely not a bad thing to turn a potential franchise, whether built on a line of dolls or not, into something that refuses to dumb itself down or pander to the lowest common denominator. And the victory that is Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling — along with a supporting cast and crew that revel in the idea of joining a benefic Barbie party — slipping in heady notions about sexualization, capitalism, social devolution, human rights and self-empowerment, under the guise of a lucrative, brand-extending trip down memory lane? That’s enough to make you giddy. We weren’t kidding about the “subversive” part above; ditto the “blockbuster.” A big movie can still have big ideas in 2023. Even a Barbie movie. Especially a Barbie movie.

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The Oscars Are More Barbie Than They’ll Admit

The reasons for the success of “Oppenheimer” at the Oscars —thirteen nominations and seven wins—are self-evident. The movie is about a serious historical and political subject, and it made a zillion dollars. It embodies the venerable formula of doing well while doing good. It’s safe to say that many people who work in movies would rather work on pictures that seem substantial than on ones that seem frivolous and commercial. Whatever the artistic shortcomings of “Oppenheimer,” the importance of its subject is undeniable, and so is Christopher Nolan’s ambition to make a movie that is worthy of that importance. But let’s be clear: if “Oppenheimer” had flopped, or just broken even, it would likely have had the same presence at this year’s ceremony as Martin Scorsese’s “ Killers of the Flower Moon ”—ten respectful nominations, zero wins.

And what of the winner’s prime commercial rival, “ Barbie ”? Forever paired with “Oppenheimer” in the public mind because of the happenstance of a shared release date, comparably extraordinary box-office fortunes, and the snappy portmanteau “Barbenheimer,” the exuberant “Barbie” has had a very different awards season from that enjoyed by Nolan’s self-consciously serious opus. The Oscars are almost always hard on comedies and “Barbie” suffers additionally from a fear of what its profitability and acclaim augur. Movie people who thrill to the idea that, after “Oppenheimer,” studios will be flinging nine-figure budgets at movies with similarly weighty subjects are doubtless terrified that “Barbie” won’t be the last film adapted from a toy-maker’s product line . Great as “Barbie” is, it’s all too easy to imagine that it could usher in an era of formulaic filmmaking akin to that of the superhero era —that Mattel and its competitors may codify not the successful production process of “Barbie” (hiring a boldly original director and granting her an unusual degree of artistic freedom) but the successful results, bringing on lesser filmmakers and constraining them to make something “Barbie”-ish.

Nonetheless, Hollywood, laboring long within the limits of franchise filmmaking, must indeed be feeling a bit of swagger at having made two such idiosyncratic movies and made money from them. This year’s ceremony, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, reflected those good feelings, which were alluded to in his opening monologue . It was a pretty chipper night all around, for better and for worse. Kimmel got in a couple of political zingers of a surprising and welcome acerbity, likening the protagonist of “ Poor Things ,” “an adult woman with the brain of a child,” to Senator Katie Britt, the Republican who delivered the animatronic response to the recent State of the Union address, and asking Donald Trump, who inveighed against Kimmel’s host performance on social media while the broadcast was running, “Isn’t it past your jail time?” Kimmel also added an apt jab at Tinseltown mores. Noting that the nominees Jodie Foster and Robert De Niro were also nominees together, nearly fifty years ago, for “Taxi Driver,” he said that, back then, she was of an age to play his daughter, whereas now “she’s twenty years too old to be his girlfriend.”

Beyond the wisecracks, it was stirring to hear Kimmel speak with pride about the solidarity of the writers’ and actors’ unions during last year’s strikes and to watch him welcome onstage a large crowd of members of other Hollywood labor unions as they approach the crisis point of their own negotiations with the studios. Still, the general tone was self-congratulatory, and spilled over into the main order of business, the bestowing of awards. The announcements for the four acting categories featured not clips of the nominated performances, twenty in all, but accolades from previous winners in the categories. In place of glimpses of the actors’ artistry came displays of sickly sweet scripted emotion. Each of the twenty noteworthy presenters (a group that included Regina King, Ke Huy Quan, Sally Field, and Matthew McConaughey) addressed one nominee directly, with praise so fulsome and sentimental that the statuettes themselves turned rose gold.

The air of hubris also permeated a part of the evening that should properly be a rite of sombre humility, the “In Memoriam” tribute video . This year, it was divided into, in effect, an A-list (those whose image got a moment onscreen to itself), a B-list (onscreen in a group, in an array of five thin vertical images), and a C-list (a bunch of names with no images, seemingly several dozen of them fading in and out onscreen). Only a tiny A-plus class of the departed were briefly seen in actual performance. This crude and insulting decision is starkly reminiscent of the high-handed Hollywood of the studio era. Speaking of omission, the evening’s oddest one appears to have been accidental: Al Pacino , presenting the award for Best Picture, failed to announce the ten films in the running for the award, instead going straight from his brief introductory spiel to the envelope, with its call for “Oppenheimer.”

As usual, very little of the comedy written for the host and the presenters rose above the level of forced amiability. One smiled for the collective desire to please rather than for actual pleasure. Still, there was one bit of staged comedy that proved effervescently authentic: John Cena, presenting the award for Best Costume, had good fun reprising the role of the streaker who interrupted the Oscars fifty years ago, and using the winner’s envelope as a fig leaf. The best moments of presenter banter involved interactions with the assembled crowd, as when Kate McKinnon did a comic bit wondering whom she’d accidentally been sending her “tasteful nudes” to and Steven Spielberg, in the audience, theatrically pointed to himself. It’s a reminder that the Oscars telecast, stagey as it may be, is a gathering of big personalities overflowing with wit, talent, and playfulness. (Think of Michael Keaton’s fierce comedic stone face in response to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito’s jokey gibes.) The more the Oscars can diminish formality and blur the line between the talent in the audience and the talent onstage, the livelier and the more authentically entertaining the action will be.

But what matters about the Oscars isn’t the show, which is merely a delivery system for the awards. The prizes, of course, don’t ultimately determine a film’s place in cinematic history, but they have real consequences for the careers of the people who win them—and thus for the future of the art form. In this regard, the Academy proved shortsighted this year, particularly by giving the award for Actress in a Leading Role to Emma Stone, for “Poor Things.” It’s an impressive performance, centered as it is on the conceit of a woman who’s been given an unborn fetus’s brain by a mad scientist and who must therefore master all adult skills, including language, from scratch, and fast. Stone delivers the character’s broken, developing, and always off-kilter speech with persuasively committed deftness; though the performance is impressive, it’s not her fault that it proves no more emotionally substantial than the movie does over all.

The actress who deserved to win is Lily Gladstone , for her work in “ Killers of the Flower Moon ,” which is different in kind from the other performances of the year and, for that matter, from most movie acting anywhere. It’s a role of quiet—sometimes even of silent—authority, and her climactic scene, with Leonardo DiCaprio, is one of the most powerful moments of performance I’ve seen in quite a while. But the character is, by design, relatively impassive, stoic, and shy of expression, albeit bursting with thought and emotion. The Academy missed the point, and not, I think, by accident: though Stone is a charismatic actor, her achievement in “Poor Things” is one of effort, of what an actor can control through sheer exertion. This makes it the kind of performance that the Academy can’t resist. By contrast, Gladstone’s performance, though no less accomplished, depends more on inner qualities and the ability to convey thought and feeling by sheer presence. This is not something that can be readily taught, learned, or mastered. The ingrained sublimity of Gladstone’s performance must secretly terrify actors, by setting a standard that none can be confident of meeting.

The Oscars were hard on the year’s best movies. “Killers of the Flower Moon,” with ten nominations, won nothing at all, and “ Barbie ,” which garnered eight nominations, won only for Original Song. Two of its songs were nominated; the winner was “What Was I Made For?,” by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, but the other one, “I’m Just Ken” (by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt) was put over, onstage , by Ryan Gosling with an exuberance that brought the audience of luminaries and their significant others to a peak of spontaneous enthusiasm. It showed the Academy’s reliance, during the show, on the very comedic ingenuity, emotional authenticity, and giddy artifice that it refused to acknowledge in its awards. Oscar is more Barbie than he will admit. Still, at least one exquisitely inventive comedy came away with its prize tonight: “ The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar ,” one of Wes Anderson’s new adaptations of tales by Roald Dahl, which won for Live Action Short Film. It’s Anderson’s first Oscar, and there’s an irony in his winning for a short in a year when he also delivered one of his most ambitious and accomplished features yet, “ Asteroid City ,” which received no nominations whatsoever. The only upside to the Academy’s indifference is that Anderson didn’t have to waste time on an awards campaign. He wasn’t in the theatre, as he starts shooting his next feature , “The Phoenician Scheme,” today—bigger news than any that came from the Dolby Theatre last night. ♦

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