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Cynics and critics say Gerta Gerwig’s Barbie is just a “cash-grab” by Mattel, but these iconic toys mean far more to the kids who grew up with them.
From movies about the making of the Air Jordan sneaker to Tetris to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, corporate myths are big in cinema. One huge corporation, the Mattel toy company, wants to take over Hollywood like Marvel Studios with their characters. So, while Barbie might be a “cash-grab” made to sell toys, that’s not all this movie can be. Unlike sneakers, snacks or games, toys are tools parents can give their children to help them become storytellers.
Barbie is not the first work of visual art lambasted by cineastes and other snobs as useless dreck meant to push plastic dolls onto kids. Some of the most beloved cartoon franchises of the 1980s were explicitly made to sell toys. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe and Transformers all got their starts as after-school cartoons. Since then, they’ve all had their turn at the box office. Yet, none of those toy franchises have near the history of Barbie. While Mattel says the Barbie universe exists to empower women and girls, it has its critics. From Barbie’s inhuman proportions to the focus on materialism, some believe Barbie is bad for kids. While those arguments deserve consideration, what’s most important is how the kids who grew up with these dolls, playhouses and Dream Cars feel about the character. For many children, toys with vague stories around them give them a framework to let their own imaginations come alive. The biggest threat to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is that her characters don’t match with the characters generations of kids invented for themselves.
Barbie Has Always Been Big Business and Courted Controversy
In the early 1950s, most children’s dolls were depicted as children themselves. However, Ruth Handler, whose husband Elliot was a co-founder at Mattel, noticed her kids playing with paper dolls. She realized her kids, Kenneth and Barbara, were creating “adult” roles for the characters. After traveling to Europe and seeing a similar doll, she and designer Charlotte Johnson developed “teen fashion model” Barbie, whose outfits were sold separately. On March 9, 1959, Barbie debuted, and the marketing for the doll was primarily done on television. Since then, Barbie has been a constant figure in pop culture, though not always for the better.
The doll was controversial from the beginning. Parents were concerned about just how “adult” Barbie looked because of her ample proportions. Later, other parents were concerned the unrealistic proportions of the doll would give young girls a negative body image. Some of Barbie’s early accessories were a diet book with “Don’t Eat!” written on it and a scale with the weight set permanently at 110 pounds. The 1990s talking Barbie upset parents with phrases extolling her love of shopping and hatred of “math class.” A Barbie book in 2014 depicted a clueless Barbie turning to two men to help her figure out “computers.” Yet, from what the marketing has shown about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the movie looks to highlight all of this.
Mattel has a long history of developing toys with stories around them to help get kids interested. Barbie is a movie that’s more skewed for adults, which means it can make reference to Barbie’s troubled past. The film aims to both celebrate what’s great about Barbie while sending up the corporate mistakes that get in the way of the character kids create for themselves. That’s what makes Barbie more than a cash-grab. It’s a chance to define what Barbie is supposed to be.
Barbie and Other Toys Teach Children to Tell Their Own Stories
Many young writers and artists often turn to fanfiction to teach themselves how to tell stories. This is because the characters and world are already established, allowing inexperienced storytellers to focus on coming up with an exciting tale. This is not all that different from how children play with toys. Whether it’s Barbie or Star Wars or a line cobbled together from leftovers around the toy shop like Masters of the Universe, establishing the characters is important. Yet, once kids get the toys, they don’t just act out the movies or cartoons. Rather, they take these characters they love and develop their own adventures with them, jumpstarting their imaginations and creativity. With Barbie, her story is so ever-changing and ill-defined, most of what people love about her are their own creations.
In Barbie, Gerwig sets up two worlds for the characters to inhabit. There is the world of Barbieland, with constant parties, loose laws of physics and permanently arched feet. Eventually, Barbie and a tag-along Ken go into the “real world’ where their simplistic view of things is challenged. The first world is the one found in kids’ imaginations, while the real world is the one where corporate goons like Will Ferrell’s character can get in the way of what’s pure and good about these toys. Sure, Mattel wants to sell toys and make a lot of money at the box office. That makes Barbie just like every film ever made, from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to indie cinema fare like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Every movie is a cash-grab on some level, but not every film gives its audience, especially kids, permission to invent their own stories with the characters.
Barbie debuts in theaters on July 21, 2023.