People have genuinely lost their minds over yesterday’s Barbie trailer and kaleidoscopically diverse cast announcement. Ncuti Gatwa has a cowboy hat. Emerald Fennell has a baby bump. Dua Lipa has blue hair. Feet people had a field day with Barbie’s on-pointe feet out of her shoes. A rash of Barbie memes ensued. Angela Bassett’s Barbie did the thing. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Barbie lost half a day skiing. I’m still waiting for “This Barbie has a ludicrously capacious bag.”
Twitter is a breeding ground for radical film nuts, a creek for all the Dawsons who want to be Spielbergs, but the Barbie movie hysteria does feel distinctly female—or if not female, then distinctly not straight white and male. This is the female version of the superhero industrial complex; this is the Mattel Cinematic Universe.
I’m once again trying to work out why the internet’s lost its collective head. The tone was legitimately giddy, incredibly pink and jolly. (These are good or bad things, depending on your level of personal cynicism.) The Barbie trailer is a mood, in that there’s a lot of world-building and witty quips with no emerging sense of plot. For many, this is a camp classic in the making—classic campiness requires a film to be either legitimately good or so bad that it’s good. (There is no in-between.)
The unbridled fervor boils down to the eternal power of Barbie. She means so many things to so many people. (And by “people,” I mostly mean girls and gays and theys.) On one hand, she pioneered adulthood—before Babs, young girls were given baby dolls to play with, forcing them into a sort of motherhood proxy that perpetuated the tired expectation of a woman’s so-called job to nurture. But Barbie was an adult, someone with a life and an agenda rather than a catalog of infantile needs. For zillions of youngsters, Barbie offered their earliest impression of adult womanhood outside their next of kin.
On the other hand, Barbie’s problematic. Her body is impossibly snatched; she’s essentially a pretty clotheshorse with a high rotation of outfits. I don’t want to be dismissive of Barbie—I feel protective over her too—I just think it’s interesting that we can comfortably hold both of these truths: Barbie is a problem, and Barbie is an icon. Barbie’s body pushes an impossible beauty standard for impressionable female minds, and Barbie can be whatever she fucking wants. Yet as times have changed, Barbie has evolved too; her body type, skin tone, and career pathways (astronaut or physics Nobel Prize winner, hon?) have diversified. I feel like the Barbie movie is her next step into a new world.
There’s also something to be said about a Barbie movie with Greta Gerwig at the helm. The director is an eternal source for dimensionally complex (and predominantly female-first) narratives. Her Barbie will be different from Wes Anderson’s Barbie, from Spielberg’s. A Barbie doll, in layman’s terms, is a little woman, and Greta’s Little Women contained multitudes that drew us in, captivated us, and left us thinking.
It’s so easy to dump on Barbie, to deride her saccharine global appeal, to buy into the idea that because she was created as a blonde, amicable, docile adult woman, she’ll never outgrow that classification. Barbie’s legacy functions under the patriarchy; it’s created a lineage of female fantasy figures drawn by and gazed upon by men (see Lara Croft or Jessica Rabbit). But I’m certain Greta Gerwig’s directional feminism will take us beyond the severe limitations of men and their pornographic doodles; beyond womanhood as a byword for motherhood and default domesticity; beyond Barbie as we think we know her. Greta Gerwig might be Barbie’s final masterstroke of modernization.