Barbie: A Reflection of Society's Complexities, Though Not a Great Symbol

The “Barbie” movie, a culmination of a nearly 15-year process since Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the iconic character, has finally arrived today. While this timeline isn't unusual in Hollywood, where scripts often face delays, Barbie's film debut raises a deeper question: Does Barbie still hold significance after all these years, and if so, why?

Since her introduction in 1959 as Barbara Millicent Roberts, Barbie has been a subject of controversy. Male toy executives were initially puzzled by a doll representing a fully grown woman, but little girls quickly embraced her, making her a sensation. Over the past 64 years, Barbie has been at the center of countless debates, reflecting societal discussions about women's identity, appearance, and aspirations.

Barbie is a paradox, embodying both an unrealistically proportioned airhead and a striving Everywoman. Despite her silence, she is believed to speak for many. This duality is captured in the newly released movie's tagline, emphasizing that it caters to both Barbie enthusiasts and critics alike, highlighting that Barbie has become everyone's business.

Personal experiences with Barbie have varied. Some, like the author, may not have seen themselves in Barbie but still chose her as a childhood toy. Over the years, Barbie became a subject of feminist concern, representing unreal beauty standards and reinforcing Western beauty ideals. However, people's opinions about Barbie often say more about their own beliefs and experiences than about the doll itself.

During various waves of feminism, including the '90s, Barbie faced criticism for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and falling behind changing social norms. Mattel's attempts to modernize Barbie met mixed responses, but the "Barbie" movie embraces the complex discourse surrounding the character and delves into her relevance in today's world.

In the past, documentaries like "Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie" highlighted Mattel's efforts to adapt to evolving expectations. Despite these changes, Barbie continues to carry the weight of generations' beauty standards and feminist scrutiny. As a symbol, she remains a complicated figure, but as a vessel, she has proven remarkably enduring.

The author now recognizes that Barbie need not be a polarizing figure, representing a zero-sum choice between support and rejection. Instead, Barbie's existence reflects the ongoing challenges in society regarding women's liberation from stereotypes and expectations, allowing them to simply exist as themselves.

Barbie looms as both an unrealistically proportioned airhead and a striving Everywoman. Most of the time she can’t utter a word, yet she’s believed to speak for a critical mass of us. Perhaps that’s why the “Barbie” movie that finally exists is the only one that could exist: one that acknowledges and embraces that weirdness under the vigilant gaze of a corporate chaperone. The trailer’s tagline (“If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.”) is confirmation that Barbie is, in the most literal way, everyone’s business.

I get it. At 6 years old, I was offered a choice between two dolls for my birthday: the Bionic Woman or Barbie. I didn’t, in contemporary toy-representation parlance, see myself in Barbie; the Bionic Woman’s brown hair and jumpsuit much more accurately mirrored my ponytail and hand-me-down corduroy overalls. Barbie, with her white-blond cascade of flosslike hair and a plunge-necked pink dress, was nothing like any woman I’d ever seen. Wasn’t that the point?

I chose Barbie.

In my childhood, the doll was always there — perched on my dresser, toted along on car trips, surfing the waves of my bathtub on a tortoiseshell comb. She was more distant in my adulthood, as Barbie had become a subject of feminist concern. I followed many authors, artists, musicians, and assorted culture jammers who were publicly working out their own Barbie issues in fascinating ways. Along the way, I realized this: Barbie is that childish thing none of us can put away, because as long as she’s existed, she’s never been a child. Rather, she’s been an emblem, a scapegoat, a lightning rod, a target, and, most of all, a mirror. However we feel about Barbie at a given moment says a lot more about us than it does about Barbie.

When the 1980s backlash against women’s liberation bled into the ’90s, psychologists started raising the alarm over a crisis in girls’ confidence in best-selling books like “Reviving Ophelia.” Anita Hill was explaining sexual harassment to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and women on college campuses were reporting an alarming incidence of sexual assaults. A new wave of feminism was cresting, and it was dragging Barbie under. There was the matter of her unnatural proportions, like a waist-to-hip ratio that could not exist in real life without sacrificing key internal organs. Later, it was her inescapable blondness and whiteness. Despite introductions of Black and Latina Barbies in 1980, along with special collections like the 1980s’ Barbies of the World, everyone knew the real Barbie — the icon, the ur-Barbie, the one true Barbie — was a testament to the same Western beauty ideal inscribed into America’s other institutions of ornamental femininity, from Hollywood to Miss America to Playboy.

As with every iteration of feminism, those of us in the third wave that rose in the ’90s had to grapple with the missteps, misgivings, and unfinished business of the previous generations. Barbie certainly wasn’t the most important issue, but she was, after all, right there, nakedly and even proudly what we would come to term problematic. So we donned our hot-pink hair shirts.

Barbie’s overlords were also being humbled. In 1992, Mattel introduced Teen Talk Barbie, which uttered, among other phrases, a chirpy “Math class is tough!” confirming that the historically trend-savvy brand was falling behind the times — and prompting criticism from the American Association of University Women. Mattel’s litigious responses to things like the 1998 intersectional feminist body-image essay collection “Adios, Barbie” and Aqua’s gratingly ubiquitous earworm “Barbie Girl” didn’t help its P.R. Mattel celebrated Barbie’s 40th birthday in 1999 with a brand overhaul that shifted focus from dolls to actual girls, debuting an ad campaign that exhorted its young audience to “become your own hero.”

The “Barbie” movie is also about becoming your own hero or at least taking a hero’s journey — one that leads Barbie into a real world that, for the most part, finds her either dangerous or irrelevant. It’s a fitting approach, since the most interesting thing about Barbie has always been our reactions to her. Some reviews have said the film suffers from an attempt by the director, Greta Gerwig, to incorporate the breadth of the Barbie discourse, causing a narrative overload. But how could it not, given just how much discourse Barbie has inspired over 64 years?

There’s a different film — the 2018 documentary “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie” — that, for me, helps put that discourse in context. “Tiny Shoulders” chronicled Mattel as a company in crisis: Faced with shrinking revenues and declining audience interest, the company was poised in