So, a guy writing on the summer’s big hit, Barbie, who is older than Barbie? What’s with that? Well, she was created by Ruth Handler in 1959; I was created by Wanda Dolzani in 1951. We are, at least, of the same generation, and, in fact, share a March birthday, hers March 9, mine March 31. But as a boy, I had no dolls, only toy soldiers that I imagined into superheroes in an age before action figures. So why did I go to a movie about a female figure whose superpower is to turn everything pink? I was one of three men in the theatre. One was a father bringing his daughter; the other was a young man in the company of four young women—somebody’s Ken? I am not usually afflicted with FOMO, fear of missing out, but, as an English professor, I teach classes full of women who will, I know, want to talk about a movie that has a rather amazing appeal to women beyond differences not only of age but ideology. Barbie, the blond beach babe with big boobs whose feet are permanently arched for high heels (on a beach?), has become a feminist rallying point, she who used to be attacked as a Bad Role Model. Barbie has clearly transcended her origins and become a symbol of something else. The question is, of what? The movie’s whole purpose is to explore that question, and it does so with intelligence and sophistication without ceasing to be high-spirited fun.
There are detractors, but most that I have encountered seem to be the type of movie reviewer who seems terribly insecure of being seen as naïve and gullible, and who therefore adopts a stance of knowing, ironic superiority. To grant such reviewers their due, I suppose that they might well damage their reputations by daring to express unguarded enjoyment and admiration of, say, a superhero movie, no matter how well made. Hence the dismissal of Barbie as “bumper sticker feminism” and tool of a corporate capitalism shrewd enough to incorporate its own critique. The suits who run Mattel have allowed themselves to look like a pack of fools led by Will Ferrell, their reward being that Mattel’s bottom line will get a healthy boost. Well, whatever. It is clear from their nettled tone that some reviewers are quite annoyed with a film that cleverly anticipates and incorporates most of the expectable elitist put-downs, leaving them with nothing to say.
The film is a comedy, a genre that has itself been the object of elitist put-downs for hundreds of years, as Northrop Frye, possibly the greatest writer on comedy in our time, has repeatedly pointed out. How can comedy claim the kind of high seriousness that is supposed to characterize great literature? That question becomes all the more pointed in light of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, the pairing of Barbie with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a film with all the characteristics of “high art.” It is characterized by Wagnerian solemnity and Wagnerian scale (3 hours long to Barbie’s 1 hour, 54 minutes). If, like my fiancée, you have recently dislocated your jaw, you will not risk injuring it again by involuntary laughter. And it is unremittingly ironic, grounded in the reality principle. Mind you, I greatly admire Oppenheimer, which figured into the previous newsletter’s discussion of evil. But, after my own very long and solemn disquisition, I promised readers my own version of Barbenheimer, asking whether, despite the contempt in which it has been held by much of the critical tradition, we can consider the form of comedy as artistically important, as something more than escapist entertainment, and asking whether Barbie itself has anything to say that is, unlike beauty, more than skin deep.
A movie about Barbie must cope with the difficulty that she is a doll, and therefore has no inherent narrative. If you are making a movie of The Hobbit or Little Women, you have a story you are trying to recreate. Even a superhero figure like Spiderman or Batman comes with a rudimentary attached narrative, “fights supervillains,” so that playing with it opens into the endless fight scenes, faithfully mimicked by the superhero movies, that boys and boys-at-heart never seem to tire of, even though they are mind-numbing to everyone else.
Barbie, however, has no necessary story attached to her. So her story has to be imagined by her owner: the word “imagination” occurs repeatedly in the dialogue. That is, I think, the key to the doll’s enormous success, and why it is an appropriate subject for a newsletter on the imagination. Barbie’s origin story, to use superhero lingo, is told in a hilarious opening parody of the opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first thing the doll did was to smash—quite literally in the origin story—the old paradigm of the doll as a “baby doll”—a baby for a little girl to take care of and thereby practice for her eventual traditional role as a mother. Barbie was an adult doll. But I think the real revolution stemmed from the fact that Ruth Handler did not simply trap her creation in the old paradigm by making her “wife and mother Barbie.” The maternal fantasies of some doll owners were later satisfied by the creation of Barbie’s friend Midge, who, in one iteration, was actually pregnant with a fetus inside her, Visible Woman style (gross!). Heaven forbid she should be pregnant without a husband, so she was married to Ken’s buddy Alan, who is played in the film by Michael Sera. Sera’s Alan is not domestic but rather the representative of male-nerd masculinity as a foil to Ryan Gosling’s traditional-masculine Ken. The original Barbie, the one played in the film by Margot Robbie and known as Stereotypical Barbie, was a bombshell beach-blond precisely as a liberation from the Ozzie and Harriet model of womanhood in 1959. Barbie was adult and yet carefree, no 50’s housewife. She had a boyfriend, Ken, but was really unattached.
Whether Ruth Handler was conscious of this or not, the free-woman lifestyle she implied by her doll’s appearance was a feminine counterpart of the “Playboy philosophy” formulated by Hugh Hefner in the same decade, minus the sexual promiscuity. Playboy pretended to be more than a girlie magazine. It modeled a masculine role deliberately subversive of that of the good, responsible, henpecked husband of so many 50’s sitcoms and comic strips. The Playboy male was unmarried, free, independent. Because he was not a wage slave to support a family, he had disposable income to spend on sports cars, high-class alcohol, an expensive hi-fi system, and women would flock to him in order to be part of that lifestyle. Only losers trap themselves in marriage. I think the original Barbie quietly implied a female independent lifestyle of the same sort, minus the promiscuity. Handler had originally modeled Barbie’s appearance on that of a risqué German doll. She eliminated the sexuality, but kept the element of rebellion against good-girl ideas of womanhood that dominated the American 1950’s.
The dolls’ notorious lack of genitalia, subject of so many jokes, was perhaps a way of avoiding that imputation. The Barbies in Barbieland in the movie view all the Kens as fun but, well, who really needs them? They later repent their insensitivity, but that was in fact the Playboy attitude to women: they are fun, but disposable. They are, well, dolls to be played with. The Kens in the movie invent a dumbed-down, beer-drinking, mancave-dwelling version of the independent male, closer to Animal House than to Hefner’s Playboy, who, as his title suggests, is closer to the sophisticated elegance of Ian Fleming’s James Bond—another creation from Barbie’s period. Or perhaps to Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey.
But something more happened to Barbie, whether her creator intended it or not. Actually, Ruth Handler appears in the movie, played by Rhea Perlman: a short, Jewish woman with, in her own witty description, two masectomies and a tax evasion problem. Barbie was named after Handler’s daughter Barbara (and Alan after her husband, Ken after her son), but the point of the doll was not to mimic “real life”—rather, to suggest that women do not have to be limited by “real life,” which really means the social ideology that wanted to imprison women in the role of the 50’s housewife. Women could be independent, unmarried, childless—and having a great time on the beach. One advantage of having a 72-year-old man writing this critique is that my mother was a 50’s housewife, and I remember very well what it was like for her and for the women of her generation after the war. My favorite picture of my mother was of her at 18, sitting in the addressograph office of Timken Roller Bearing. Due to wartime and to her own abilities, she was manager of that office at 18. In the picture, she is young, beautiful, and looks utterly happy. I think that was the best time of her life. She had a meaningful job, financial independence, friendship with other women. Then the war ended, and she married my difficult, alcoholic father, and had two kids. I don’t think she was that happy again until her late 50’s, when her kids were raised and she divorced my dad. The first thing she did was go out and live with her sister, my aunt Mary, in California for a year, where these two single, aging women acted as if they were 18 again, traveling, having adventures, laughing when my aunt’s old junker broke down while they were a bit tipsy from a couple of drinks at lunch. Like most of the women of her generation, my mom didn’t even learn to drive until middle age, because wives went everywhere accompanied by their husbands, even clothes shopping. I remember my mom’s fascinated account of visiting a Renaissance Fair—this woman who went to a one-room school in semi-rural Ohio when she was a girl. I cannot bring myself merely to discard the idea of an all-woman utopia like the film’s Barbieland when I think of my mother, who would probably have been happier in a world without men. She loved her two sons and sacrificed her independence for them, but I wish she could have remained the young woman in the photograph during the war.
The first version of Barbie, beach Barbie, the film’s Stereotypical Barbie, modeled a simple wish-fulfilment dream of independence and fun. Feminists later regarded it as a deplorable role model, and Mattel was not always enlightened about its own product. As late as the 1990’s, it rightly was attacked for producing a Teen Talk Barbie who said, “Math is hard.” The film has a lot of fun working in cameo roles for the fair number of failed models over the years, not just of Barbie but of various spinoff characters. There were certainly a number of “What were they thinking?” moments, such as the Growing Up Skipper doll of the 1970’s that grew taller and grew breasts when you lifted her arm (I am not making this up). However, as time went on, Barbie escaped not only from the 50’s ideology of womanhood but increasingly from the limitations of Stereotypical Barbie by releasing a flood of new Barbies that modeled and celebrated all the possible ways of being a woman. The film goes to great lengths to include Barbies of all possible races, ethnicities, and body shapes (including Barbies who are not thin), and all the possible careers and accomplishments possible for women. Women can be astronauts, Supreme Court justices, presidents, anything they can imagine. That became the use of Barbie, teaching girls to imagine a possible identity for themselves beyond the old, limited female role. That is one of the film’s two themes: that identity is not fixed by either genetics or society. It is a creation of the imagination. The doll taught girls to imagine more capaciously.
At this point, however, the film takes a turn from satiric comedy into a kindred literary form, the romance, the tale of wonders. The wonders are very often to be found, not in ordinary reality but in another realm, which in The Productions of Time I called the Otherworld, which is what the scholars call the Celtic realm of Faerie, a land behind or beneath ordinary reality, more akin to dream, with its imagery of wish and nightmare, than to ordinary consciousness and the reality principle. The film’s Otherworld is Barbieland, a fabulous feminine paradise in which women are totally in control, everyone is happy, and every day is perfect. There are men in Barbieland, Ken and his cohort, but they are frivolous boy toys.
Women rule, and women rock. Except that Stereotypical Barbie has begun to have disturbing thoughts about death, and also about that fate worse than death: cellulite. So she has to visit Weird Barbie, the Barbie that was “played with too hard,” her hair chopped off unevenly, with hints of various other mutilations by children, who acts as a kind of fairy godmother. Barbie comes to learn that her episodes of sadness and negativity are influences from another world, ours, specifically from someone who is playing with the doll version of herself and transferring all its angst to Barbie. So Barbie has to travel to our reality to set things right.
This is a film written by two English majors: Greta Gerwig has a degree in English and philosophy from Barnard, Noah Baumbach a degree in English from Vassar. So they have done their homework. Reviewers comment on how they have assimilated the vocabulary of feminist theory, but I suspect they have also done some reading in the theory of fantasy, the modern form of romance. When Barbie travels between worlds, the word “portal” is used, a term that was popularized by Farah Mendlesohn in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) to designate the nexus for travel between our world and some Otherworld—a looking glass in the Alice books, a wardrobe in the Narnia books, a railway station pillar in the Harry Potter books, and so on. An original twist is that the quest is here in the opposite direction from the usual. In a typical portal fantasy, the protagonists travel from our world to an Otherworld. But Barbie is an Otherworld character who travels to our reality, and who will become a real woman rather than a fantasy by doing so. By doing so, she will learn that Barbieland, attractive as it is in many ways, is what the theory of romance calls a false paradise—alluring, yet in the end a temptation. It is too perfect, it is static, and it simply reverses sexism by keeping men trapped in a reductive, ridiculous role.
But perhaps we should not dismiss Barbieland too quickly. Women have been imagining an all-woman utopia for a long time, at least as far back as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in 1915. Wonder Woman is another female protagonist who, like Barbie, travels from an Otherworld, the island of the Amazons, to our reality, where she takes on the alter ego of Diana Prince. Texts debate other texts, and various texts by women seriously debate the virtues and limitations of a female utopia. In the famous science fiction short story “When It Changed,” later incorporated into the novel The Female Man, Joanna Russ, whose ideology has been described as “lesbian separatism,” portrays an all-female society called Whileaway on another planet. When men land and proclaim that the women should rejoice because they are going to be “rescued” from their plight, the women beg to differ. All-female utopias are usually not so much anti-male as anti-masculinist: they are rejecting male domination, hierarchy, war, rape, all the aggressive behaviors of toxic masculinity. The satire in Barbieland follows this pattern, even though the attempt by the Ken cohort to institute patriarchy is so silly and inept that it never poses a serious threat. There is also the complication that women are perfectly capable of buying into the patriarchy. Bill Maher just got done declaring that Barbie is “zombie feminism” because Mattel’s real board of directors has almost as many women on it as men. But the film has that one covered, in an indirect way. It shows plenty of women perfectly eager to turn themselves into beach babes and suck up to the insurrectionist Kens. In the same way, some women, from Margaret Thatcher to Marjorie Taylor Greene, are perfectly willing to become parodies of toxic masculinity in business and politics. They are the zombies, not the feminists.
There is another side to the debate. As I read her, Toni Morrison seems to suggest, especially in Beloved, that an all-female group risks trapping itself in a narcissistic bubble, and that is also true of Barbieland, which is why Stereotypical Barbie is impelled to leave it. Joyful and attractive as it is, a land in which a thought of death is alien and more or less not permissible has something unreal about it. Barbie does not leave her feminine paradise to find a man, and in fact she does not find one, remaining alone at the end of the movie in a way that reminds me of Merida in Pixar’s Brave, who remains alone for the same reason: there is no male in the story remotely worthy of her. Whatever else it is, Barbie is not a rom-com. Barbie travels to our reality to find the woman who has been playing with her doll and thus transferring her troubled thoughts to Barbie in Barbieland, but her troubles on the deepest level have to do with coming to terms with life in time, including aging and mortality. In a brief but telling scene, Barbie looks at an old woman on a park bench. She has never seen an old person before. She says to her, “You’re beautiful.” With wit typical of the script, the woman replies, “I know.”
Barbie finds that the woman who has taken her Barbie doll out of storage and been playing with her as a coping mechanism, a way of dealing with sadness, depression, and feelings of failure. After the woman’s tween daughter has made Barbie cry by calling her a fascist who has made countless women miserable, the tween’s mother, played by America Ferrera, dark to Barbie’s blond, makes a long speech about what still defeats women, even though, yes, they now have opportunities to become and accomplish countless things that were denied their mothers, is the demand for perfection. True, women may do anything—but whatever they attempt to become, they will torment themselves with accusations that they aren’t perfect. They might fail to come up to the ideal level symbolized by Barbie herself, and in striving for it are always accused of making men uncomfortable—of making other women uncomfortable. In one way, they have no gender barriers—in another way, they can’t win. To which we should add that, whatever may be true of Mattel’s board (and Ruth Handler had to fight Mattel’s skepticism about the idea of an adult woman doll), in all too many workplaces women’s careers are obstructed and they feel hopeless because the managers, the CEO’s, CIO’s, the people with the power to make decisions, are incompetent yet egotistical males. If you think that is a zombie idea, Mr. Maher, ask around. I have heard it over and over again. Ken’s attempted takeover of the power structure is handled with gentle absurdism, but in real life it is not so funny: a power structure that is still basically male-controlled produces unhappy, thwarted women like America Ferrera’s character.
We have said that one of the two central themes in Barbie is that identity is not given and fixed, but imagined. Countless women have given the Barbie doll credit for helping them imagine possible identities for themselves. The other central theme is complementary to this. Ruth Handler is brought on towards the end to make another set speech explaining that the reason our sense of identity seems elusive is that it is not a fixed essence but a constant change. We are always in process, and that is our identity. “Man is not here,” said Loren Eiseley. “He is elsewhere.” So is woman. So are we all. Barbie with her 250+ identities is a lighthearted version of Joseph Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces.” The lightheartedness is the spirit of comedy, which returns us to the question of the literary importance of comedy and romance. Tragedy, irony, and realism are all about confronting the fixed and inevitable. The audience is shown terrible things and invited to accept them unflinchingly. If we go through the trauma of vicariously living through grief, loss, catastrophe, our reward, says Aristotle in the Poetics, is “catharsis,” the emotional release after a good cry. This is the high seriousness of tragedy and realism, and there is something very male, or at least masculinist, about it. Tragedy and realism usually have a higher critical reputation because they are toughminded, made of sterner stuff than comedies and romances with their happy endings. But in The Secular Scripture, his study of romance, Northrop Frye observes that Greek literature developed from tragedy and tragic epic “through Euripides to New Comedy and thence to prose romance” (62). Moreover, the comedy-centered world “is not simply the antithesis of its predecessor….It is in some respects a more expanded world, and we sometimes have the feeling in a romance or comedy of moving from one world into a larger one” (62). This is even more obvious in the Biblical tradition. The Fall of humanity is tragedy, as Milton showed in Paradise Lost. But the Biblical vision itself is a divine comedy, which subsumes the tragedy and transmutes it into a Fortunate Fall. A line that occurs in several Greek tragedies is, “Better never to have been born.” Comedy’s lightness of touch can be taken as mere escapism, and sometimes it is. But it can also, especially in the greatest comedies, be a refusal to accept the ironic as inevitable, to say instead, in a line from Blake’s satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell quoted in the previous newsletter, “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.” Nothing is inevitable; change is always possible, if not of circumstances then of vision.
Frye also points out that the protagonists of many comedies and romances are women, who bring about change and a happy ending not through heroic fight scenes but through cleverness and endurance. The people who are complaining that Barbie is anti-male because the women make the men look like doofuses by comparison should stay away from Shakespearean comedy, where this happens on a regular basis. Rosalyn in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night do get married, but only by settling for men who are, to say the least, much less impressive than they are. Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing is lucky: she finds a man as quick-witted and feisty yet good-hearted as she is. Barbie is actually kind to men. (It was, after all, co-written by a man). Barbie gently tells Ken that his task is no different from hers: he has to go find who he really is—not “beach,” not just codependent on Barbie. There is a compassion that arises from the vision that we are all caught in what William Saroyan called “the human comedy.” I have an acquaintance, Cora, who wrote to me via my website to ask questions about literary theory, out of which has developed an ongoing conversation and a friendship. Cora wrote this to me about Barbie: “It was more profound than I had expected it to be, and I cried soo much watching it. In its own way, I feel like it’s an absurdist piece, a testament to the beauty of the human condition. Obviously, it focuses on women’s struggles and such, but I feel like there is an underlying message of how beautiful and lovely humanity can be. Despite the struggles and hardships et cetera, we still live and feel and try to make the best of everything and there is nobility and beauty in that. Who knows, maybe it's my own absurdist determination to see beauty in humanity.” Cora just turned 16. Whether or not one agrees with her about Barbie itself, she is articulating the vision of the forms of comedy and romance as a whole. In a world in which we are told that if nuclear catastrophe, as in Oppenheimer, does not get us, then climate catastrophe and right-wing fascism will, I take great comfort in the fact that someone so young has so clear a sense of what may sustain us after all the ideologies fail.
Reference
Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. In ‘The Secular Scripture’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Volume 18 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006. Originally published 1976.
With a new job and grad school on the horizon for me, this week's newsletter reminded me to stop for a second and marvel and the beauty and humanity that surrounds me. Barbie, I think, is too quickly written off as anti-man. When we open our hearts up a little, I think the beauty it bares, much of which you highlighted, unfolds. Why not let a doll open our imaginations to the possibilities of our own society--our own capabilities? What is any less absurd--or more? Beautiful newsletter yet again, Dr. D.