WhEn I grOw uP I wAnt tO bE blOndE AnD hAvE bluE EyEs

I have a complex relationship with Barbie. 

It’s a bizarre love-hate one that is filled with a tension that’s usually linked to associations with real humans. I was one of those Barbie girls. 
It was an obsession, an adoration that spanned the formative years of my childhood. There’s a treasure chest filled with hay-haired plastic limbed entangled memorabilia, and a photograph - the first one I ever took - of said collection in their best, blindingly neon attire perched on a rock in the garden. Big blue eyes, long bleached hair and super-slim elongated bodies semi-replicating the supermodel aesthetic. 

Their perfection entranced me.
There is a note in a diary, upper and lowercase indications of young age: 
WhEn I grOw uP I wAnt tO bE blOndE AnD hAvE bluE EyEs
It’s difficult not to wince when seeing this. Apparently, the main Mattel message of ‘You can be anything you want to be!’ was lost to the more tangible pushing of a specific type of beauty.

It’s June 2023 and there are hot pink tables lining the cafés of Paris and double-decker splashed buses riding the streets of London. Bronzed, bleached hair images of Ryan Gosling and an ever-gorgeous Margot Robbie highlight these marketing ploys, which admittedly are pure genius. 
It seems everyone has Barbie fever.
High street offerings of pink everything embrace this deep-dive into a nostalgia that promises to empty consumers’ pockets and fill theirs. AI-powered filter apps can turn you, oh you with your blemishes and humanness, into an airbrushed vision of doll-like heaven, complete with that juicy Mattel logo hovering just above your head. 

It’s difficult to remove myself from this cynicism.
But when I find out that Greta Gerwig is directing the film there is a sense of relief. That mumbling icon of independent films, spewing witty comebacks, has morphed into a director whose directorial works feed into the intensity of relationships. I watched her directorial debut Lady Bird and at times forgot to breathe. Dramatic as that may sound, her complex depiction of the mother-daughter paradigm is unmatched. 
It’s raw, it’s real. Certainly, she could take on this challenge. 
And perhaps that was the biggest error of mine, in transferring this hope of relatability found in the freedom of independent filmmaking to that of the cogged mass-bleached studio production.

There are glimpses of that characteristic Gerwig and Baumbach screenwriting. Glimpses as attempts to pull that Mattel hyper-commercialism into a direction that allows the dappled light of human truths to shine through: the fleeting conversation between Barbie and an older woman (celebrated as revolutionary for all of its 30 seconds), the acknowledgement of the casting of Robbie as clichéd with a Helen Mirren dryly narrating: ‘Note to the moviemakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point” (falls as flat as Barbie’s now human feet) and the emasculation of Ken, as a weird counter-move, that actually sees Gosling’s Ken exude more depth and complexity than the one-dimensional Barbie (if you’ve seen Robbie in I, Tonya you will know that this is not a comment based on performance abilities but rather on character writing).

And when America Ferrera delivers her momentous monologue of decrying the societal pressures of being a woman, as powerfully delivered as it was, the gist felt ironic, ill-matched to the general leanings of a film heavily riding a wave of product placement and carefully positioned feminist motifs as flags of self-deliverance. You cannot separate the institution and its history from the message, no matter how award-winning of a screenwriter you sign on. 

Barbie was introduced to the Real World on March 9th, 1959. 
Created by designer Jack Ryan - he of coke-fuelled binges who once held his own daughter hostage when confronted by the LAPD - and Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler, Barbie was born from the influence of a Bild Lilli doll Handler had bought in Austria. Based on the West German comic character, created by Reinhard Beuthien for the Bild, Lilli’s existence popped up as a need to fill a blank space within the conservatively nationalist newspaper. Sweet yet sexy, inviting with her bursting curves and fashionable make-up, the Lilli doll was conceived as a ‘fantasy’-gift for the male visitors to the newspaper. With her official release in 1955, she was marketed to men and materialised by toy-manufacturer Greiner & Haußer. The same Haußer of O&M Haußer whose catalogues from a few years prior showcase Elastolene models of Hitler and Wehrmacht soldiers.
Adding to the questionability of character, co-founder Rolf Haußer would further state:

‘Lilli was symbolic of her time. She was sexy, young, innocent, fresh. She was independent but, and this is most important, no one could say she wasn’t a virgin.’

The rise of Mattel would be the downfall of this small German company, as they would finally file for bankruptcy in 1983. Disputes, threatened lawsuits, settlements, the Great Saga of Capitalist America vs. Postwar Germany - not forgetting the slight dab of Mattel being then owned by the Jewish Handlers - Rolf Haußer would go to his grave bemoaning the fact that he was never given credit for inspiring Barbie, conveniently forgetting that, creatively, it was Beuthien’s artistry and Max Weißbrodt’s design responsible for Lilli. 
Legal proceedings and controversies seem to continuously mark the backdrop of Barbie’s childhood. Transported to a glitzy Los Angeles of 1978, Ruth Handler was facing the less glamorous reality of being indicted of fraud, conspiracy and false reporting to the SEC and, alongside financial officer Seymour Rosenberg, was sentenced to 500 hours of community service with a five year probation. Herself and co-founder / husband Elliot Handler had already been banished from Mattel in 1974 following the initial investigation of cooking the books and Ruth re-directed her attention to the manufacturing of breast protheses, an arena she entered due to her personal experience with breast cancer and mastectomy in the early 70s.

Ironically, the story of Ruth and her glorious rise and inevitable fall are more rooted in the captivating drama of realism than a sing-along excursion from an imaginary world to reality only to end in a visit to the gynaecologist. I’ll avoid divulging too much into that choice of an ending, except to say it’s great that a recently fleshed and vagina-ed Barbie has access to a healthcare plan or the means to go for a general check-up when that service is financially inaccessible to most inhabitants of the US, complete with her accessing free taxi-rides around Los Angeles provided by the ‘newly-empowered’ Latinx mother and daughter characters.

A few chuckles were had, but ultimately I left the cinema with the same unsavoury taste as when one witnesses a slight in a social setting and fails to step in. I felt tricked, I felt I had done my younger self a disservice for falling for a marketing scheme from a brand that had made me feel ugly as a young child. And the representation of that exact dynamic, in the rebellion posed by the teenage character Sasha (Gloria’s daughter), felt neither cathartic nor consequential. Sasha’s momentary revelation, alongside the virtue-signalling of ‘F*** the Patriarchy!’ and a queer cast who fall as background props to the heteronormative Barbie / Ken dynamic, present themselves as a quick brush-over to avoid overt criticism towards that which is deeply nestled within Barbie’s entire creation.

Kasia Delgado in her piece for Inews hits the nail on the head:

‘What I’d have given for two hours of brainless bright-pink fun, or something genuinely smart. It was neither. Instead it was a faux-feminist collection of Instagram-happy memes, the film version of those notebooks with “Girlboss” embossed on the front, a film akin to a “Live, Laugh, Love” poster. Looks nice, means nothing.’ 

Barbie grossed $1.4 billion at the box office, after a highly-publicised release race with Nolan’s Oppenheimer that would result in the portmanteau of Barbenheimer.
During the months of July and August ’23, my social media was inundated with memes and reminders to ‘watch both films on the same day! Wear pink to the Barbie show (you can buy said outfits at: _ and _) and lol, wear it to Oppenheimer to lift the mood ;) comedian TikTok reel: ‘guess Japan knows which movie they won’t be watching (cue: audience laughter)’.

This Americanism of Good Green Money above all within the daily box office tallies of Barbenheimer was set against the backdrop of the Writers Guild of America strike. This divisive quake painted an ever-omnipresent reality of a tiny varnished pink world raking in the harvest as the majority of The Real World are forced out of their homes with a burdensome baggage of debt, lacking any of that musical bedazzlement. 

A few days after seeing that journal-entry wish to be endowed with blonde hair and blue eyes, whilst rifling through a teenage memory box, I find a Barbie pin with her face somewhat maliciously scratched out.
I can’t recall this Sasha moment of rage, nor what initiated it.
But I do pause and revel in that closing of a toxic relationship.