Twelve-Step Barbie (Richard Grayson) imagines Dysfunctional Barbie, Reflective Barbie, Litigious Barbie etc—rather like the ones America Ferrara’s character draws for/of herself.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
To see Greta Gerwig’s new film either as reinventing Barbie or capitulating, holds if the most obvious critique—aka Barbie the pernicious body standard—is your reference point.
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The film had me ferreting out my stash of “90s girl books”. I found Barbie, A Life in Fashion: As told to Laura Jacob, a Tiny Folio art book, where the narrator—supposedly Barbie—tells the writer her life-story as a fashion history; a Running Press Barbie postcard book full of arch scenarios featuring Barbies with blurbs. An example: Ken stares blankly ahead. Two Barbies chat. “Wouldn’t the world be perfect if all men were Ken?” “Yes! When you’re tired of one, you can just buy another for $6.99”. This is a familiar feminist pop art style. Outwardly stereotypical femininity is contradicted through wry, witty, scandalous inner thoughts, rolling their eyes at gendered expectations. Mondo Barbie was an anthology of diverse Barbie riffs. In a poem called Kinky (Denise Duhamel), Barbie and Ken exchange heads. Twelve-Step Barbie (Richard Grayson) imagines Dysfunctional Barbie, Reflective Barbie, Litigious Barbie etc—rather like the ones America Ferrara’s character draws for/of herself.
The film continues this practice of feminist reassemblage—where the interiority of women complicates and therefore challenges the uni-dimensionality of the stereotype. We are reminded of Madonna, constantly assembling and reassembling personae through makeup and costume to infuse pleasure, freedom, sex and assert control over image through play and fashion. And linking back through the video of Material Girl to this concept as embodied in Marilyn Monroe’s persona and characters, because, you know, girls just wanna have fun. In the end Barbie too, wants to create images, not just be one. As filmmakers do.
As a film Barbie is patchy, and struggles to find its footing (quite like its tip-toe protagonist) for a good half-hour. But eventually its crazy joyfulness achieves much. It addresses the issue of masculinity as a flamboyant feminist, not an apologetic one. There are numerous ongoing conversations about masculinity which hinge on how men need our empathy. Nothing to disagree with there, except that uneasy feeling of a lurking binary. That women venting about their experiences of men are harpies. That the world must tend to men, more than men crafting liberating journeys (as feminists do) empathetic to themselves and the world, rather than devoted to power.
The film, manages to hold both things in one place with good-natured ease—the many #BoreMatKarYaar experiences of women perfectly executed in the Ken collective singing ‘at’ the Barbies—alongside tender sympathy for men, fooled by patriarchy into thinking they are cool, when they are merely stereotypes. Ken thinks patriarchy is about horses (hi Marlboro Man) but finds, “It’s too hard.”
Through pleasure and song and dance, the film reminds us that femininity and masculinity are also fantasies—dreamed one way by patriarchy, another by feminism, yet another by art. Like cinema, Barbie is a fantasy space. And Fantasy makes place for our flawed humanness, our contradictions and desires to imagine fluid realities outside what’s known. It exists to accommodate that human self, not serve liberal or conservative norms. It’s not politically correct, but it is politically potent, for it helps us re-mould reality (quite like plastic, ain’t that fantastic?). Through it we transform imperfectly, to feel shiny and new (yaniki, like a version, touched for the very first time).
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at [email protected]
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