Full disclosure. I have not seen the movie. And I have never owned the doll. In my mind, that makes me eminently qualified to write about a plaything that most women beyond the Anglo-Saxon world do not recognise or care about. And yet as Greta Gerwig’s movie crosses the $1 billion mark at the box office in just two weeks (biggest opening for a woman director, biggest opening weekend of 2023), I cannot but dip my sensible flat shoe (not pink) into the bubbling pool of opinion that spans ardent worship and cynical dissent.
Growing up in pre-liberalised India, I spent my childhood with my face flattened on a shop window full of delights that I could never have. I had to make do with toys available in the local market: mostly clunky wooden educational aids like an abacus to improve my math or badly stitched stuffed dolls that would lose eyes and arms with alarming regularity; perhaps a subliminal nudge towards a career in medicine.
There was only one girl in my class of 40 who was lucky enough to have a father who travelled abroad and she owned two Barbies. I remember marvelling at Barbie’s luminous golden hair, her impossibly slim body, her fashionable clothes and shoes and feeling a sense of adulation. I could never be her. I looked nothing like her. She belonged to a different world, one that I had never seen. There was no envy – I knew I could never be Barbie just as I could never be a Goddess with many arms. How could I be envious?
I remember brushing Barbie’s hair with a mixture of maternal affection and unadulterated joy. I did feel a slight twinge of envy whenever my friend spoke about a new accessory for her dolls that her father had ever-so-casually plucked off a foreign airport and brought home. But the feeling was short-lived and drowned by the eager anticipation of being called to her home to admire the latest pool, or car in all its miniaturised perfection.
Based on this experience, not uncommon in this big wide world of ours, I have mixed feelings about the hype surrounding the film. What the ardent feminists in the western world are missing is the intersectionality between enforced femininity, colonialism and racism. What Barbie sowed in girls like me across the third world was a feeling of inferiority – not to men, but to white women. I do realise now that I was amongst the fortunate few to have any kind of toys. Or a childhood for that matter.
There were girls in Rajasthan walking 10 miles a day to fetch water; there were others who were looking after younger siblings and cooking while their mothers worked in paddy fields. At least I had the luxury of a childhood: even though it was Barbie-less. So what is it about a doll that perches on tiptoe, always about to topple over in the direction of her too-big boobs that makes it to the intellectual heights of the New Yorker?
It is the sad fact that feminists in the western world have not had a movie to write about for many decades. Or a cause to rally around, since the me-too movement in 2017. By bonding over a doll that has been a universal childhood experience for girls in their world, they seek to make sense of their own reality. A classmate of mine at Stanford called the film ‘a religious experience.’ She is a Harvard undergrad – as articulate and intelligent as they come – so I am pretty sure she had solid reasons to feel that way. Through Barbie she was re-living her own unfulfilled potential.
She was traveling with Barbie from a fantasy world that had been sold to her and the real world which was patriarchal and not as kind. American women are particularly affected by the promise/potential of education in the developed world where they are told they can achieve pretty much what they want and the rude reality they face after getting married and having children.
There are too many aborted careers to count. So American women who seem to have it all, including Barbie, often end up in middle age, bitter that they did not achieve their potential in the real world. Women have had to give up careers because the economics of staying on in a job just don’t work. Childcare is too expensive, the hours too long and unforgiving and families too scattered to support them.
My friend was re-living her own reality through Barbie. The dream world of her childhood and youth when she was the centre of the world contrasted with the real world where men got ahead regardless of talent, because the dice was loaded in their favour. I have another quarrel with the debate as it appears in American media. By focusing solely on the feminist/patriarchy angle, it neglects a whole genre of movies and books that deal with fantasy vs reality. Essentially the Barbie film is about stepping out of a utopian existence and finding that reality is not what it seems or is imagined.
From the Stepford Wives to the Little Mermaid, the sinister truth of the real world is not pleasant. This dialectic between fantasy and reality has fascinated us since Eve tempted Adam with the apple. Paradise was lost but something real was attained and we live that reality to this day.
For me, the film explores this divide very cleverly. The pink fluff disguises the serious message but it is there for all to see. If you imagine Barbie, not as Barbie but as a wetsuit clad figure in a sci-fi film, the parallel with Matrix, 1984 and Westworld is very clear.
Where does fantasy end and reality begin? Reality brings pain with it and yet it has to be embraced because it is the truth. The little Mermaid gave up her underwater paradise and the Barbie film ends with her going to a doctor, presumably to transition to the real world. The triumph of feminism for me is that here is a female director who has made a film close to her heart, done it with flair and walked away with a cool billion dollars at the box office. Without so much as a wobble on her high heels. All power to you Greta Gerwig.
(The writer is a 2022 DCI Fellow at Stanford University USA. She lives in London and is the author of East or West: An NRI mum’s manual on bringing up desi children overseas.)