Barbies

I deliberately wrote my first version of this post before seeing the Barbie movie. I wanted to see how my Barbie story would work with and against the unfolding of the film. I have added sections about the film, written a day or so after the original post, fitting them in thematically and intuitively. These are in italics and can be read separately or as interruptions to the story of my childhood relation to dolls and bodies. I tried before seeing the movie not to read much about it, although my efforts were just about as successful as my attempts to ignore the scores of the Women’s World Cup games played in the middle of the night, U.S time so I could watch them in the morning. (Go, Morocco!)  I have seen comments about the film’s impoverished version of feminism with it’s lack of attention to race and careless invocation of the suffering of indigenous people. People have called it transformative, silly, incoherent, uneven, knowing, ignorant, inspiring and depressing. Some of my friends and colleagues have gone all in and dressed in pink to attend the show, posing for photos in the Barbie House featured in most movie theater lobbies.  Others have been embarrassed to be attending the film at all. This is the first movie I have seen in a theater since lockdown 3 1/2 years ago. I did not know what to expect, either in terms of the film or the process of actually going out to see a movie. I have had to learn about the presence of new, spiffier, movie theaters with “home-style” seating, as well as new protocols for ticket buying.  The fact of returning to this part of public life distracted me and no doubt contributed to what I have to say about the movie, in particular it’s take on reality and community. It is hard to write about the film for many reasons, perhaps the most shallow of which is the toggling between singular and plural Barbies. In Barbieworld, every doll is called Barbie, although sometimes the are distinguished by type (stereotypical, doctor, etc.) These function as distinctions without a difference. Finally, the story is about one (“stereotypical”) Barbie, played by Margot Robbie. As does the film, I negotiate her representative status with some awkwardness.

If you read Erica Rand’s wonderful 1995 book, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, you will come across the genre of the “Barbie story”—that is, adult women describing their relationship over time with Mattel’s signature doll. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the stories Rand cites, including the origin story of Barbie’s creation, begin with mothers. From Ruth Handler, Barbie’s progenitor, who, according to the official myth of Barbie’s origin, created the toy because she was dissatisfied with the “fashion dolls” available to her daughter, to the feminist mothers who resisted buying Barbie and her accessories, the stories, mostly from childhoods lived in the 1960s and 70s, center Barbie first in family systems and then later, as Rand’s title suggests, in wider communities that appropriate Barbie for their own purposes.

The Barbie movie, somewhat oddly, depends for its heavily moralized ending on the character of Ruth Handler, minimizes Handler’s real-life conviction in 1978 for tax fraud with offhand jokes. Rand reminds us that Mattel tried out the Handler origin story only to deemphasize her contribution as time went on. Here, Ruth, as an older woman and a sage, gets Barbie and the moral high ground back in an ending in which, it is implied, she not only created Barbie in the service of female empowerment, but also that she has created a doll that is always in some sense human. After Ruth’s long and somewhat embarrassing speech about what it means to be human, Barbie makes her choice to embrace uncertainty and to move from, as the movie acknowledges, the “plastic” world of Barbie to the “plastic” world of Los Angeles. Here, as in many places in the film, irony and self-awareness sit uncomfortably with clichés about universal human truth.

Rand tells her own Barbie story at some length in the introduction of her book, and it is a haunting one. Rand’s is a story about her father’s death, and the gifts offered by family friends as a form of consolation: a Barbie for her, and a G.I Joe for her brother. Entangled in grief, the story lets us see a mother, initially opposed to letting her daughter play with the doll, giving in to the ideological pressures—and the generous impulses of a wider community.

My own Barbie story, unlike many I have told here, is not in any way I can determine, structured by death or grief. It does, however, feature my mother and her, at least it seemed to me, prolonged resistance to my acquiring a Barbie. My mother offered a variety of reasons, whose very multiplicity suggested intuitively to me not only the insufficiency of any one of them, but also the idea that her reasons were alibis for a real, underlying, and unspeakable objection always just out of my grasp.

My mother was by no means a political radical, and it would be hard to discern a coherent politics that guided her choices (although I suspect and hope she would have hated Trump, she might have been attracted to his status as “a New York character” an identity that for my mother, well, trumped, many deficiencies. That attraction might or might not have persisted through his various candidacies and crimes. On the whole, I am grateful not to know.) She did, however, have a fairly consistent mistrust of corporations that went along with her love of things locally made. They had to be made well, however, and not, in a characteristic phrase be “a loving hands at home” sort of production. Her first objection, then, was a resistance to Mattel, and to mass production. She had herself bought me five dolls, who sat around an exquisite folding picnic table, a miniature of the one on our front terrace. There was a white doll with black curls named Gina after one of my mother’s best friends (I was a compliant namer) and a black doll named Sylvia, whose clothes were glued on to her body. There were three additional white dolls whose names, faces, and bodies have not stayed with me. In our discussions of buying a Barbie, my mother would use these dolls, each individually, as a distraction. Why did I never play with them? Although my mother’s “nevers,” like my own to this day, tended towards the hyperbolic, the truth is that I do not remember playing with them, dressing them, feeding them, or even having tea parties with them involving the beautiful miniature Chinese tea set my parents gave me one Christmas. This is all the odder, because I would definitely play with that tea set now if I had it, having, after a time, inherited my mother’s love of miniatures, especially in china and sandwiches. She is not responsible for my abiding love of plastic food.

My mother’s second reason was something about the shallowness of fashion. This was puzzling to me then as now, because as I have mentioned earlier in this blog, my mother loved—and for me embodied—fashion. She and her dress designer friend collaborated on cutting-edge outfits; her collection of Ferragamo sandals presaged Carrie Bradshaw’s closet full of Jimmy Choos. Later in life, she would press me to care more about and for my clothes, seeing anything but a full commitment to them as a lack of self-care, and as a sign of unhappiness. “Later in life” may be key here. My mother, as she would say in other contexts “believed in childhood.” Fashion, for her may have been a sign of growing up, incompatible perhaps with dolls. Of course, the distinction between the approved dolls, as they sat soberly in their chairs around the wooden table, and Barbie was not so clear cut.  Dressing and undressing dolls, even buying (or very theoretically) making clothes for them was somehow not fashion, but something else. Something perhaps that my mother would have felt but not articulated as “mothering.” After all, at this point, my mother dressed me as one would a doll, in tiny elaborate outfits: a blue dotted Swiss frock with a matching petticoat; a seersucker A-line dress with an opening at the front to reveal a triangle of flowered fabric; an itchy woolen dress covered in roses ornately (and itchily) smocked across the chest. These dresses, always worn with patent leather shoes and fanciful miniature handbags (my mother called them “pocketbooks,” creating confusion when I inevitably misplaced them and asked for help) prolonged my childhood until I crossed the ocean to New York and to the 1960s where people, especially girls, grew up fast. At ten, I could be a mother but not a grown up, not a teenager, not a Barbie.

The film depends for much of its impact on the pleasures of fashion, and especially on “accessories” the term Rand and others have played with in the re-burgeoning field of Barbie Studies. Taking its visual approach (and one line) from the film Clueless, Barbie the movie lets us into Barbie’s closet—and Ken’s—but usually one outfit at a time. The movie is structured by the problems of dressing and undressing. In Barbieworld, one of the sources of magic is the ability of the dolls to change outfits without effort. Taffeta dress, tutus, and more sober businesslike suits appear on Barbie without the effort of buttoning or unbuttoning, velcroing or un-velcroing. Later in the movie, these outfits magically appear onscreen as commodities, labelled with the names from “real” barbie toys. Barbie, then, is never depicted in Barbieworld undressed, or even undressing. Although Barbie’s trip to L.A. is meant (some ironies acknowledged by the film) to introduce her to the real world, the act of changing one’s clothes retrains its magic. Ken and Barbie, uncomfortable with the glances they—or rather their Barbieworld clothes— are getting on Venice Beach, find new outfits in a market stall, emerging from what we can only imagine is a changing room freshly dressed in clothing that they think are more appropriate to their new environment. Where the film might see change (my family members differ on this question), I see continuity; the new outfits are as garish as the old, and the change from one outfit to the other almost as instantaneous. The Barbies in and from Barbieworld remain fully dressed at all times, although it is in LA that the Barbie protagonist refers for the first time to her body, chirpily announcing to a group of men who are harassing her that “I have no vagina.” The only naked Barbies I remember are those rejected by the little girl, Sasha, in the real world: we are offered a shocking glimpse of a pile of rejected Barbies in a cardboard box and in various stages of undress.

 Which leads me to the great Skipper compromise. After objecting on the grounds of mass-production, lack of originality, fashion, and even (unusual for my mother) cost, my mother gave in, but only through a sort of bait and switch. I could not have a Barbie, but I could, with my “own” money, buy Barbie’s younger sister, Skipper. This time she gave no reasons, but even at ten I could sense the logic of her position. I was young, Skipper was young. Skipper could (generously) be construed as what the Victorians called a “doll baby.” There was a generational logic here in which owning Skipper might yet be a form of mothering.

The movie begins with a group of little girls and their “baby dolls,” furiously resentful over being asked to mother them. Barbie, in this telling, rescues girls from the drudgery of motherhood. A doll without needs, Barbie instead represents female desires and ambitions.

Of course, this was not the whole story, as I intuited when I brought Skipper home. Skipper was flat where Barbie was curved. Like my neglected dolls she was prepubescent, although further along in the process to womanhood embodied in the difference between her and Barbie. It did not at that point bother me that Skipper had no breasts. What I did not like about her was another set of missing curves: her feet, as Rand notes were not “pointed,” with impossible arches. I cannot explain my investment in Barbie’s feet, which I maintain perhaps unconvincingly, has in no way persisted into my adult life. Perhaps it was an investment in shoes. Skipper’s shoes, at least as I remember them through a penumbra of resentment, were flat, were in fact what I learned to call “flats.” While they came in pleasingly bright colors and fit snuggly (my approved dolls were always losing both their shoes and socks) they were, in a word, pedestrian. Skipper’s body was not, as my mother would say about human women, “made for clothes.” It is possible of course that my interest in doll’s feet was a Freudian “displacement downward.” It is possible that it was all about Barbie’s monotone, nipple-less breasts for me, as I suspect it was for my mother.

The movie reminded me of the astonishing existence of “Growing Up Skipper” who developed breasts when you turned a knob in her back. I can’t think of anything to say about this, so will live with the memory for a while. Barbie also made much of the difference between curved and “flat” feet; the first sign that Barbie is “changing” is that the soles of her feet touch the ground, making her unable to walk in her high-heeled shoes, or, counterintuitively, in bare feet. While many of us who have made the transition from high heels to flat for comfort and ease walking, Barbieworld is tailored to Barbie’s body and her body to the world. Barbieworld is not a place its namesake protagonists can walk without heels.

I know that the replacement of Barbie by Skipper made me not only resentful but uncomfortable, and that my discomfort had something to do with something unacknowledged, even unspeakable. If I had known the word, I would have called my mother a prude. If I had known the word, I would have called her gynophobic. I would have been only partly right. Of course, Barbie’s body is in itself an embodiment of gynophobia, with its construction of a not-so-plastic plastic ideal that simultaneously fetishizes and sanitizes what we have learned as a culture are ‘female parts.”

To my knowledge female dolls with genitals come in two flavors: as sexual accessories presumed to be used by heterosexual men, and as props for young women to help them tell their stories of abuse. He touched me here, and here, and here. There may be alternatives I don’t know about, that appeared on the market long after I bought my Skipper and later, too late actually, I bought a Barbie for myself. If they exist, I can’t get to them by googling “dolls with genitals.”

The question of Barbie’s genitalia is hinted at early, and directly addressed twice, once in the scene of her harassment and once in the final line of the movie. Barbie’s lack of genitals seems to be at least part of the reason she does not want to be Ken’s girlfriend. When he asks to spend the night, she say something like, “But what would we do?” Ken, despite his announced lack of penis, seems to experience sexual desire, and more to the point perhaps, to be more knowing. His facial expression at this (presumably repeated) rejection registers both frustration and a sort of carnal knowledge seemingly forbidden to the Barbies in Barbieworld. It is hard to know what to do with this asymmetry. Is it referencing the unalterable nature of male sexual desire and thus, despite premise of the movie’s somewhat unconvincing plot, that there was already a hole in the border between Barbieworld and the real world? Is it a critique of heteronormativity in which, as Ken complains, “it is always girls’ night?” Does Barbie experience desire of any kind, since her one wish, until the end of the film, is that things “always stay the same?”

Nothing is cleared up by the climactic line of the film, delivered when Barbie is dropped off by her human friends at an office building. Dressed in a soft version of business clothing and smiling excitedly, she tells a receptionist that she is “here to see my gynecologist.” Does this mean that the newly human Barbie has developed genitals, or perhaps that the gynecologist might create some? I say genitals, but the film has only (once) used the term “vagina,” a more explicit term perhaps, but also one that equates womanhood, and indeed being human, with that one sexual organ. Clearly one way in which this hymn to traditional feminism breaks down is by investing visually and in terms of plot too much in sex and gender binaries, despite the presence of a possibly nonbinary figure in Ken’s friend Allan, who joins the Barbies during the final uprising, and who gazes adoringly at Ken throughout. The visit to the gynecologist could signal a conservative ending, in which to become human is to give up more fluid identities. It could, on the other hand, be a reference to the empowering effects of gender affirming care. Either way, it says nothing about Barbie’s sexual desire either as a doll or as a human. What would a desiring Barbie look like in world where Barbie dolls seem to channel desire into the now predictable plus-one of looks and career?  None of the Barbies, whatever their race or Mattel-inspired identity (Supreme Court Barbie, Dr. Barbie, Author Barbie, even weird Barbie) tell us anything about the issue.