2020’s Barbie film is written by Little Women’s Greta Gerwig and Marriage Story’s Noah Baumbach, with Gerwig pegged to direct. The film – a collaboration between Warner Bros and Mattel – stars Margot Robbie, and with these names involved, it definitely won’t be as simple as a dream-house idyll. Self-proclaimed feminists Gerwig and Robbie are sure to bring something new to the plastic-perfect Barbie narrative. But how progressive can a Barbie movie actually be?
In a statement in 2019, Robbie said: “Playing with Barbie promotes confidence, curiosity and communication throughout a child’s journey to self-discovery. Over the brand’s almost 60 years, Barbie has empowered kids to imagine themselves in aspirational roles from a princess to a president.”
But is that true? Sure, Barbie shows children that they can be president – provided they are blonde, white, and have scientifically impossible body proportions. As Aqua so eloquently put it in 1997, she’s a blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world. Except, she’s not actually living in a fantasy world, is she? She’s living in our bedrooms. And isn’t that a problem?
“I remember being thirteen, and really sad that everybody had grown out of Barbies years ago. I’d have to hide them away to have friends,” says writer Abigail Tarttelin. She’s still obsessed with Barbie. In 2014, she created an online video series, Feminist Barbie, which featured plot lines like: ’When Barbie and her life partner meet up after work, they don’t expect to encounter heteronormative gender stereotyping’. “I started the series because I think Barbie can be irreverent and brilliant,” she explains.
Oh, and she’s still got her entire Barbie collection. Like, all of them. “I asked for one or two every birthday and Christmas. At one point I think I counted over a hundred,” says Tarttelin. “I was an eighties and nineties kid. Ample pink, ample plastic.”
Cat Wildman, co-founder of the Gender Equality Collective, was similarly infatuated with Barbie. “I had a second hand doll, and I adored it with its matted hair and single old dirty dress,” she says. “The thing I loved most about her was her tiny shoes, which I thought were the most perfect things I’d ever seen.”
We’ve all done it. You get the Barbie and, even if it’s a dog-chewed monstrosity from a charity shop, you’re obsessed with the Barbie. You care for it, nurture it, even – you brush its hair more than you would ever brush your own. And then one day something changes. Suddenly, scissors in hand, you’re hacking Barbie’s beautiful locks off one by one, drawing Sharpie tattoos, and cackling cruelly as you erase her peaceful face with nail polish remover.
“One day, I tried to put her hair in a bobble with plasticine and completely ruined it,” says Wildman. “The same day, my younger brother got hold of the beloved Barbie shoes and chewed them.” She ended up going the full self-destructive hog, and vandalised Barbie’s remaining features that afternoon. “My mum said I wasn’t allowed another. I think she was secretly glad – she was a quiet feminist.”
Like dogs and cats, oil and water, orange juice and toothpaste, for years we assumed the obvious: that Barbie and feminists just don’t mix. In 2013, women’s rights organisation Pink Stinks stormed a Barbie Dreamhouse ‘experience’ in Berlin, burning Barbie dolls on mini crucifixes. (Sounds intense, but it got the job done and that’s what matters, right?) More recently, the doll’s been used as an ironic poster-girl for feminist art history campaigning, with
@ArtActivistBarbie’s tongue-in-cheek Twitter posts. You get the point – in her off-the-shelf state, she wasn’t exactly a bastion of liberal ideals. But Gerwig and Robbie’s upcoming film seems to signal something different. And in the past few years, Mattel has released a number of diverse dolls – recently, its Fashionista collection, featuring dolls with vitiligo, no hair, and prosthetic limbs.
Open minded as we are, it’s going to take more than a couple of semi-realistic dolls to shake the image of plastic ‘perfection’ from our minds. Robin Gerber, author of Barbie Forever – released last year to mark the doll’s 60th anniversary – insists that Barbie wasn’t created as a body standard that girls measure themselves against. In fact, Barbie’s founder, Ruth Handler, had something very different in mind when she struck upon the idea in the 50s. “Handler knew that little girls want to play at being big girls,” Gerber explains. “Hand girls an adult doll and they will pretend to be adults, whatever that means to them. It will let them imagine being anything they want to be.”
Katy Canales, acting curator at the V&A Museum of Childhood, also thinks it’s the creativity Barbie brings that’s made the doll so successful. “It provides a blank canvas,” she explains. “Children can project their own values, interests and stories onto the doll. Over the years we’ve seen Barbie become president, and an Olympic athlete, as well as being immortalised in paint by Andy Warhol.”
“For a lot of little girls, growing up in the middle of nowhere, or whitewashed suburbia, or in deprived, out of the way towns, Barbie made us understand that we had a lot of options,” says Abigail Tarttelin. “I just worry about her weight. She needs to eat something.”
“I don’t think she has a look that we want young children to aspire to,” agrees Cat Wildman. “And it worries me that there are still so many skinny, out-of-proportion Barbies still strutting the shelves.”
According to Tarttelin, it’s not just Barbie’s body shape that may drive us to unhelpful comparisons. With a high-flying career, she’s a home-owner, and even has time to spare for a relationship. “In the 90s, Barbie was clearly in her twenties. Now she looks 15,” Tarttelin explains. “A better message for teenagers would be: you don’t have to have accomplished this by 15. That’s just what rich people’s kids do on purpose to annoy us all.”
Whatever your feelings about Barbie, there’s no denying she’s an icon. And she’s here to stay – whether you like it or not. Barbie sales were up last year, earning parent company Mattel almost $1.2 billion. So what can Gerwig and Robbie’s movie bring to the table? A gender-inclusive Barbie? Maybe. A Barbie body with human proportions? Definitely. A new narrative? We’ll have to wait and see. ︎