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HELLO, DOLLY!

While it might be easy to dismiss Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as a cynical corporate effort to justify an extended advert, this sharp, funny film has a lot to say about feminism, patriarchy and the gap between real and illusory female empowerment. Who says art can’t exist with contradictions, writes Hannah McGill

Ken’s job might be ‘ beach’, but it ’s Barbie who’s caught between waves. The longgestated, lavishly marketed feature f ilm framing of the venerable and vastly successful Mattel toy could easily have emerged as solely an exercise in winky post-modernism, or in you-go-girl hyper-positivity – and it certainly has both elements, in pink plastic spadefuls. But by selecting in Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach a screenwriting team of edgy, cerebral inclination, and in Gerwig a director hitherto strongly associated with independent film culture and progressive politics, Mattel has got itself a promotional vehicle that primarily runs on feminist angst. Not the straightforward kind that is induced by, say, being commanded to smile for a stranger on the street, or apprised of some of the entry-level basics of one’s job by a less qualified man – but the gnarly stuff, where the fundamental inequities addressed by the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s jam up against the intersectional, sexpositive, consumerist adaptations of the third wave. When Gerwig’s Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, leaves the untroubled pink utopia of Barbieland, she encounters not only the grubbiness and cruelty of the real world, but also its enduring and intractable issues around sex and sex roles. Do messages about our endless potential serve women, or mask our true subjugation? Is the maintenance of a decorative exterior capitulation to male fantasy, or empowered self-care? Is motherhood the ultimate in female achievement, or a block thereon? When a woman succeeds within a capitalist patriarchy, has a feminist or an anti-feminist thing occurred?

For a light film – a toy franchise! – this is heavy stuff. To many, Barbie’s engagement with the vagaries and contradictions of feminist thought will smack loudly of ‘wokewashing’ – a cynical corporate effort to justify an extended advertisement for future landf ill with faux earnestness. It simply won’t occur to many more that a cultural object aimed at kids, and in particular female kids, might seek either to be a significant work of art, or to engage seriously with matters ideological.

“ The most talked about film of the week is about a plastic doll aimed at six-yearolds,” sighed columnist James Marriott in the Times as Barbie hit the UK. “ Trivia has become the main event.” To be fair to Marriott, he likely hadn’t seen Barbie at the time of writing; and the film’s tsunami of bubblegum pink marketing materials has not been geared to denote solemnity. Still, it ’s not a logical conclusion that a film which is aimed at the young (Barbie is in fact rated 12A and courts a teen, twentysomething and nostalgic-adult audience rather than six-year-olds) and engages with the popular is trivial – and the dismissal of the feminine as intellectually unworthy is the oldest one in the book. “It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own in 1929. “Naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail… This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.”

Dismissing dolls themselves as trivial is questionable also, considering the power they retain to charm and unsettle us into adulthood, and the fascination they have held for artists. Franz Kafka penned letters from a lost doll to comfort her child owner; “the letters,” writes Kenneth Gross in his 2012 book On Dolls, “carried the doll’s story forward… to an engagement, wedding preparations, marriage, even finding a house, developments such as prevented her returning home to her mistress”. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of the confounding power of a doll’s silence: “Are we not strange creatures, letting ourselves be guided to direct our earliest inclinations to where there is no hope of response?” Dolls on film have long had power too – ask anyone haunted by the vampiric ones in Barbarella (1968). My colleague Pamela Hutchison has unearthed from the Sight and Sound archive a 1935 defence of dolls as movie stars by Soviet director Aleksandr Ptushko. Far from being just for children, Ptushko states, “dolls possess the theatrical appeal and power to influence the emotions of spectators of any age… Dolls have a mysterious charm.”

Gerwig’s film flips the script on Barbie by emphasising that

she is actually phenomenally accomplished.

And if a patriarchal culture has chosen not to see past her looks – is that really her fault?

OPPOSITE

Margot Robbie in Barbie

BREAKING THE MOULD

Barbie launched in 1959 as a “teen-age fashion model” doll. As the film’s opening sequence illustrates, the toy provided an alternative to baby dolls (although in the real world, Barbie had been preceded by a German fashion doll, Bild Lilli, whose creators first sued Mattel for “a direct takeoff and copy”, and then sold the American company their patent). Ensuing decades saw Barbie evolve from the haughty-looking fashion plate of her first incarnation into a pneumatic all-American bomb shell, and her name become synonymous with unattainable and restrictive beauty standards. Yet along the way, Barbie also amassed a CV almost as voluminous and varied as her wardrobe. She has been, to select a mere sample, an astronaut, a doctor, a surgeon, a dentist, an Olympic sportswoman, a television news reporter, a vet, a rock star, a pilot, a soldier, a diplomat, a rapper, a politician, a scuba diver, a lifeguard and engineer. If the alarmingly pervasive 1997 pop hit ‘Barbie Girl’ by the Danish-Norwegian band Aqua enshrines Barbie as the ultimate sexually provocative airhead – “ You can brush my hair/Undress me everywhere” – Gerwig’s film flips the script by emphasising that Barbie is actually phenomenally accomplished. And if a patriarchal culture has chosen not to see past her looks – is that really her fault?

There’s a reason the f ilm has a vested interest in making Barbie look good, of course. It comes from the Mattel stable; the song, by contrast, earned a Mattel lawsuit. But if Gerwig and Baumbach’s premise is an imaginative commercial f ix for Barbie’s bimbo reputation, it also makes for a film that has a fair amount to say, both explicitly and implicitly, about the gap between real and illusory female empowerment. Barbieland is a matriarchy, in which everything comes easily to women. Barbie and her devoted sidekick Ken (Ryan Gosling) have to visit the real world to discover that real women are not afforded unboundaried career options, flawless flesh or absolute freedom from the complexities of sex and reproduction.

In other words, Barbie is confronted with the practical and political challenges inherent in “having it all”.