Greta Gerwig’s Barbie: Can we undo the plastic?
by Zarah Short
Graphic by Emily Chae
After Greta Gerwig produced an entire cinematic world around her this summer, we should all be well-versed in Mattel’s Barbie. Like many young girls since Barbie’s creation, I too grew up playing with Mattel dolls. However, I grew up before the age of their new inclusive marketing, including new variations in size, race, ability, gender, and so on.
All of my Barbies and Bratz dolls looked foundationally and cosmetically similar. Since my dolls sported the same body types, noses, hair patterns and textures, Eurocentric features, and other homogenized characteristics of femininity, I found myself using my imagination to change them in every other way possible. That is the magic of dolls— their exterior is only the beginning of their potential.
Even so, it is important not to undermine the weight that exterior image carries, and the layers of meaning that have accumulated since the start of Barbie’s production in 1959. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie attempts to peel back many of these layers in just 114 minutes through satire, fun, and lengthy monologues of what it means to be a woman.
As a student of sociocultural anthropology, I am thoroughly versed and passionate about feminist theory as both useful and necessary discourse. Throughout high school, I found myself leading conferences, presentations, and discussions on intersectionality and Black feminism, inspired by writers and scholars such as bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It’s no wonder I went into the theater with more of a critical lens versus one of third-wave feminist optimism. I was confident that the movie would be good (look at that cast!), but I had no confidence in Greta Gerwig’s ability to acknowledge all the complications of Barbie, especially considering her history of making films— such as Lady Bird and Little Women— that lack diversity and representation of nuanced narratives.
Anika Kaul of the UK Magazine Varsity wrote about her frustrations with Gerwig’s prior works of feminist filmmaking. She mentioned the general response to Lady Bird: critics hailed it as a “revolutionary piece of feminist cinema” and certain audiences “lauded its depiction of the ‘universal female experience.’” All Kaul and I saw “was whiteness. White cast, audience and critic— all united, flocking to rejoice over a glorified work of Western feminism.”
Non-white characters were used as either a medium to further the plot and development of white characters or as representation that appears performative. Arguably, the problem may not lie in Gerwig’s narratives, but her framing of “feminist” cinema as a whole. Some would say these stories of white women are aching to be told— and Gerwig tells them well— yet the issue lies in the audience universalizing the messages within these works of Western white feminism. This is not a call for Gerwig to solve what she and Mattel have done wrong over the years, but Barbie should have been an opportunity to expand her feminist horizons and redeem herself from past promotions of exclusionary feminism.
Returning to the idea of the importance of an exterior image, the image curated by the cinematic universe of Barbie is an interesting point of conversation. The great thing about Mattel’s Barbie is that she’s just so marketable, not just as a toy, but as a concept. The PR team for Barbie had to do the same thing. They couldn’t just market the film’s universe, with its hot pink backdrop and uniforms; they had to market the message as well. The marketing of Barbie resulted in a completely new attitude towards embracing what it means to be a woman, to own your femininity (or not) unapologetically, and become the freest and pinkest version of oneself.
I don’t think I have ever seen as much pink or heard the word “Barbie” spoken as a verb, noun, and adjective as I did in the months of July and August. The makers of Barbie promoted the message and aesthetic in such a powerful way that it assumed its own name: “Barbiecore.”
The same day Barbie was released, so was its antithesis, Oppenheimer, a three hour biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb. I find the difference between films quite hilarious, considering how strongly they were linked together as a marketing ploy. It’s almost like these movies lie on the exact opposite sides of the gender binary. And, so do their target audiences.
Barbie’s target audience was definitely more open, considering it co-starred Ryan Gosling, whom plenty of men love, but the “Barbieheimer” marketing strategy was definitely an interesting one: each target audience carried their own stereotype— Barbie was for the pink-wearing third-newly-transitioning-into-fourth-wave feminists, and Oppenheimer was for die-hard film-bro fans of The Wolf of Wall Street, and… woman-haters? Congrats Barbieheimer! Your marketing tactic epitomized and took advantage of a polarized gender binary through cinema.
In a cover story of Barbie, Eliana Dockterman of TIME called the film’s existence “an exercise in contradictions.” There are quite a few things she could be referring to, considering the amount of contradictions regarding Mattel’s message of Barbie that has stuck for the majority of her existence— how a woman supposedly can be anything, yet is represented by this model that looks only a specific way, universalizing the category of “woman” completely, still weighed down by external appearance. This is in addition to the fact that Mattel (and therefore Barbie) is controlled by a giant board of whom? Western, white men who attempt to globalize the message of Barbie yet cannot translate that message into specific social, cultural or locational meanings, and instead continue to be spoken through the lens of feminism they can most easily comprehend, which is the white one. This is why Barbie could only be played by Margot Robbie.
I think that Greta Gerwig did a fantastic job with the film, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wore pink to the theater with my boyfriend and roommate (who was watching for the second time), and laughed along with a large majority of it. I would absolutely watch it again.
I agree with Dockterman’s titling of Barbie as a “self-aware romp.” The trailer teased, “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” hinting at the possibility of self-aware satire, which there was plenty of. Gerwig covered many points of interest in Barbie, from the all white male executive board led by Will Ferrell, to the frustrations of children of color (who seem more “woke” than the adults in the film) towards Barbie’s inability to represent complexity. Yet there is still a lack of nuance and actual in-depth acknowledgement or discussion of intersectional experiences and realities. The self-aware satirical jokes still don’t hit the deeper problem, and even the climactic monologue performed by America Ferrera was simply a list of basic examples of double-standards and contradictions that come with being a part of this homogenized category of women.
I don’t blame Gerwig for this lack of depth from a marketing standpoint, but calling attention to duality is not nearly enough to actually teach the audience of Barbie something they don’t already know and experience in reality. A story framed through the lens of “Stereotypical Barbie” and an overabundance of self-aware and self-deprecating humor within a utopian diversity ad is obviously not going to be the most productive way to demonstrate the true complexity of what it means to be “Barbie.” Yet it is the most marketable way.
Unfortunately, there is no way this movie would have been made if it was not exactly what it is. In fact, Barbie was arguably on the verge of being "too political" for how mainstream it has become, which I am impressed by. Gerwig initiated conversation while still respecting (and towing the lines) of media literacy and sociopolitical commentary, and made a huge splash doing so. Nevertheless, it is still important to acknowledge the hegemony that controlled this entire process.
Barbie could only have such an impact because she was played by Margot Robbie. When will we be able to break those barriers and produce culturally-shifting artwork that can explicitly divulge into the complexity of human existence and still have the same acclaim?