Contemporary American fiction is ultimately about fantasy. Our stories fixate on the past or the future, avoiding the great discomfort for the present. We gravitate towards utopia or dystopia, never daring to touch the no-mans-land of where, and who, we are without mediation. Barbie (2023) is wrought with timely political thought. This is not in spite of its distance from us in the real world, but because of it. It acts as a mediator to reality, and using literal dolls to illustrate this point makes for a very successful satire. I sense that Greta Gerwig was acutely aware of this. Anyone who has played with dolls knows that they are projections of the self. You’re play with Barbie as if you are her, and the film harnesses that phenomenon as a means of familiar fantasy-making. I assert that Barbie affirms the tradition of leveraging fantasy to explore societal tides. It puts a pink lens over what is all-too-real in order to explore volatile truths from a agreeable distance.
What’s tricky about Barbie is also one of its most powerful aspects: aesthetics. It’s bright, fun, pristine, but not uncanny. It’s utopian, but rather than alienating the viewer, it draws us in to desire her life and her perfection. Aesthetics can either be the most illustrative or the most diminishing part of using fantasy to talk about the real world. But rather than overshadowing the poignant story being told, the vibrancy of Barbieland, and the reaction it inspires in the audience, is a crucial to a point I believe the director is trying to make. It’s a grave mistake to believe that something has to look serious in order to be serious, and what I see in these aesthetic choices is Greta Gerwig pushing back on respectability politics. She has set a story about a woman’s search for self, for humanity, and for an understanding of her own mortality against a glittery backdrop. It forces us to grapple with our own notions of what an important story looks like, and of whose story is important. The aesthetics of fantasy are being used to confront and reject phenomena of the real world–– namely respectability politics. Gerwig makes many references to the work of iconic “alpha male directors” (Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Spielberg) and satirizes it. The visuals act as a great equalizing force to show how meaningful art does not need to conform to dark, dramatic aesthetics in order to remain meaningful; and furthermore, colour and laughter are too often assumed to negate meaning. If you cannot take Barbie’s depth of emotion seriously because she is Barbie, the parallels being drawn to iconic masculine art forces you to look at yourself and consider “why?”.
The idea of a doll being assigned the role of the everywoman makes a lot of sense. Gerwig seeks to give a neutral, recognizable face to universal struggles. As iterated many times in the film: all of these women are Barbie, and Barbie is all of these women. This aspect of fantasy-making is conducive to exploring what experiences are ubiquitous to contemporary American womanhood. Barbie’s fall from innocence is a direct parallel to what happens in the life of every young girl. As a woman, I can confirm that there is a point in every girl’s life that she will gain social consciousness (usually around puberty if not earlier) and realize that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. She may not have the words to describe it as patriarchy, but she will realize that this world is not made for her. It does not like her. And it is going to be an uphill battle to make sense of this. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie isn’t just the story of a doll becoming human– it’s a coming of age story. Something beyond Barbie’s control changes (in her case flat feet, in our case adolescence), and suddenly her entire understanding of self and society is forced to change with it. It’s an aspect of female adolescence that is simultaneously highly personal and highly collective. We all grow into social consciousness independently and in different contexts, but it is nevertheless an inevitable and pervasive experience. Gerwig is placing fantasy as the lens to which we understand our universality. By allowing us to root for and sympathize with Barbie, we better understand ourselves as subjects of the same gender politics.
Furthermore, Barbie, stereotypical Barbie to be precise, is so foreign from the real-life experience of American womanhood, yet so deeply entwined in the popular image of what an American woman is. She is a mirror to us, but better. I’d go so far as to call Barbie (the abstract cultural symbol) the ubermensch of contemporary American womanhood. There are heavy implications to making a film about her, because it necessarily means that you are making a film about womanhood in abstract rather than about that unique character. This opens a lot of creative possibility to interrogate our real world through the vessel of something so widely understood– and widely adored. There is no fact checking like in a biopic, you can apply an infinite amount of creative liberty to her story, and you do not need to earn the viewer’s investment in her plight. We already love her. Every single student in ENG365 had personal memories and thoughts related to Barbie before ever seeing the film. Her iconography already means something to us. Because of this, she is the most efficient vessel for communicating the current American experience. Unlike with a polarizing figure like Gerwig’s Ladybird, you do not need to be of a certain demographic for the messaging to be relevant. There is a lot of merit to mass appeal. By stepping away from the niche and realist realm of mumblecore into the virality and pastels of Barbieland, the messaging holds infinitely more weight in the collective conscience. Paradoxically, by drifting into fantasy, into aesthetics that are “less serious, less like the real world”, the concrete implications for the real world (how viewers relate to themselves and others) increases exponentially. This of course is not on accident. It is through a thorough, thoughtful understanding of Barbie’s enormous soft power and status as a cultural icon who needs no introduction.
In a volatile America, Barbie is a safe text to argue about. Opinions can be split in any possible way, without threat of real world repercussion or violence. As a mediator text, Barbie stands in as a kind of padded room for the American public to engage with social conflict in a controlled way. In an era of hostility, texts like these are absolutely essential to social discourse. This is part of the reason that the film was so successful financially at the box office, and socially successful as a topic of dinner table conversation. At the end of the day, we are able to walk away from the discourse of fantasy, unlike discourse that lands closer to home and cannot be distanced from the self. Barbie plays an important role as a unifying force. The film is in no way apolitical (albeit presenting a diluted version of fourth wave feminism), yet it has near universal appeal. This is exceedingly rare for a contemporary work of fiction. What its success signals is a deep desire for this rare combination. It tells us that Americans want something that they can mutually bond over. They want something in common. It doesn’t have to be something that they can agree on, but something that is not catastrophic to disagree on. Part of the fun of Barbie is the potential for multiple interpretations. There is relief in the lack of danger it presents, yet intrigue by its pseudo-controversiality.
This is further supported by the film’s casting choices. Margot Robbie is an uncontroversial star. She checks all the boxes of conservative aesthetics by being white, conventionally attractive, and similar in appearance to the cultural imagery of Barbie. As an actor, she is also a doll. What I mean by this is that with no obvious political allegiances, Robbie is the ideal candidate to be a unifying figure head. Everyone likes Barbie, but even more importantly, everyone likes Margot Robbie. She exists in the real world with the rest of us, yet her role as a celebrity is also a fantasy through which we try to understand ourselves. The same can be said for other neutral, popular figures like Taylor Swift. She takes on the role of something unreal, of the lens through which we apply our own thoughts and circumstance. Contemporary America has a parasocial relationship to celebrities that is identical to the parasocial relationship we have with fictional characters. The casting of a neutral actress in a monumental role like Barbie is an effective way of further removing reality from the text. As an actor, Robbie is the glass that we look through to see the character. As a public figure, she is whoever we believe her to be.
By taking on Barbie, Great Gerwig departed from the present moment in a big way. Yet at the same time, it allowed her to speak more clearly about integral truths of contemporary American life. The perspective of fantasy allowed for a larger audience to hear what she had to say, as well as being more receptive to it. She told lies in order to better tell the truth, and the paradox was successful in its goal. Barbie’s distance from reality in aesthetic, in abstraction, and as something to be compartmentalized (“it’s only a film”) laid the groundwork for it to be an incredibly effective exploration of American womanhood. It was its glitter and distance that truly did the heavy lifting of interrogating our, not so glittery, contemporary truths.