“She’s everything”: feminism and the Barbie movie

ABSTRACT

Hyped, discussed, and anticipated: Barbie is surely the film of the year. Even before its premiere at the height of the summer blockbuster season, the Barbie movie had achieved a level of public celebration and saturation that is uncommon in twenty-first century media culture. Today, buy-in for Barbie can still be witnessed in the proliferation of online memes, cross-promotions official and unofficial, and huge box-office profits. Barbie is also significant for being the highest-grossing feature film by a single woman director, an important achievement given Hollywood’s marginalization of women in directorial roles, and the film has also been explicitly described as a feminist movie by its producer and star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig. As Gerwig explains, “It’s feminist in a way that includes everyone.”¹

This introduction posits Barbie as both a landmark film and a way of measuring feminism’s place in popular discourse. The authors consider whether Barbie is the best evidence yet of the popularity of fourth-wave feminism in integrating feminist discourse into the mainstream, or simply another co-optation of feminist ideas. They also investigate the film’s negotiation of issues affecting contemporary women, including the cultural meanings of femininity, women’s aspirations and limitations, intersectionality, and the manosphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Barbie
• popular feminism
• greta gerwig
• margot robbie
• doll
• ambivalence

When asked to describe her motivation to produce a film adaptation of Mattel’s Barbie, Margot Robbie replied:

The word “Barbie” is just already globally recognised. And people feel really strongly about Barbie. Some people love Barbie, some people have a lot of problems with Barbie, but everyone has an associated memory with Barbie; whether they felt ambivalent or indifferent about her, they still remember her. She was kind of omnipresent, I think, in nearly everyone’s childhood, and that’s just kind of an interesting place to start off with an audience … It felt like we could ignite something with it. (2023)

Writer-director Greta Gerwig agrees, adding that there is “something sparky” about Barbie (2023) Robbie and Gerwig’s assessment rightfully positions the doll as a readymade for public discourse, one that brings the baggage of specific material and cultural histories. Individuals also have a personal history with the toy, holding a multitude of opinions and feelings about her. Robbie and Gerwig play on these associations with their 2023 film, Barbie. It is a film that invites numerous perspectives and topics for analysis: transcultural branding, the feminist politics of plastic, gendered consumption in neoliberal Hollywood, to name only a few. This issue of Commentary and Criticism is foremost concerned with how the film places those “ambivalent” feelings that Barbie registers in conversation with popular feminism. Our contributors delineate the various possibilities and complications that emerge when a cultural object—both Barbie the doll and Barbie the film—vows to be for everyone.

Hyped, discussed, and much anticipated, Barbie was surely the film of 2023. Premiering at the height of the summer blockbuster season, Barbie became the highest-grossing film of the year, earning US $1.4 billion worldwide. (Box Office Mojo, n. d.) Indeed, even before its premiere, Barbie achieved a level of public visibility and saturation that is uncommon in twenty-first century media culture. “Barbiemania” proliferated across online memes, cross-promotions and tie-ins: including collaborations with fashion retailers Gap and Hot Topic, a dating event with Bumble, a bookable Malibu Dreamhouse on Airbnb, and numerous other examples (Whizy Kim 2023; Jessica Riga 2023). In fact, enthusiasm for Barbie was so widespread that small businesses risked breaching copyright with their own unofficial cross-promotions and pink, Barbie-themed products (Graeme Austin 2023). Yet Barbie is also significant for reasons beyond its commercial success. It is the highest-grossing feature film by a sole woman director, an important achievement given Hollywood’s marginalization of women in directorial roles. Perversely, Gerwig’s omission from the list of Best Directors at the year’s Academy Awards only underscored the film’s cultural import, given negative reactions this exclusion provoked (Neda Ulaby 2024). Moreover, the film is explicitly described as a feminist movie by Gerwig. As she explains: “It most certainly is a feminist film […] It’s feminist in a way that includes everyone” (2023). Whereas Mattel’s Barbie doll has become synonymous with sexist, infantilised and unattainable womanhood in the cultural imagination, Gerwig and Robbie’s Barbie engages directly and overtly with notions of feminism and women’s experience.

Feminism is, for instance, conspicuously centred in the film’s plot. Barbie opens in Barbie Land, where blonde, white and beautiful “Stereotypical Barbie” (Robbie) lives in harmony with a diversity of other Barbies and Kens, including “President Barbie” (Issa Rae), “Writer Barbie” (Alexandra Shipp) and “Weird Barbie” (Kate MacKinnon). A succession of “Hi Barbie” echoes across the beaches of Barbie Land, as each doll greets, and is greeted by, Stereotypical Barbie. This quickly became a catchphrase from the film, inviting spectators to participate in the pleasures of a feminine collective (positioning self and other equally as Barbie). As the narrator (Helen Mirren) explains in voice-over: “because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything […] Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved. At least, that’s what the Barbies think.” Barbie Land’s equilibrium is disturbed when Stereotypical Barbie experiences an existential crisis: her pointed feet fall flat, and she develops cellulite. Even worse, she begins to consider her mortality, spoiling the mood of her Girls’ Night party by asking the other Barbies: “You guys ever think about dying?” Accompanied by “Beach Ken” (Ryan Gosling), she leaves Barbie Land to discover the source of her malaise. When Ken imports real-world patriarchy to Barbie Land, the Barbies must band together to restore their utopia and regain control from the Kens. They succeed, and in an ending reminiscent of both The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881–82) and the myth of Galatea, Stereotypical Barbie chooses to become human. She tells the ghost of her creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made.” In declaring her personhood thus, Barbie becomes “a real woman.”

Importantly, with this declaration Barbie also accepts that human finitude precludes her from being “everything,” as Barbie dolls supposedly are. Implicit in her decision is thus the understanding that being “the thing that’s made,” though “everything,” has its limitations. Noting the parallel with Gerwig’s assessment of the film’s feminism as for “everyone,” we take that problematic as our starting point. Just as Stereotypical Barbie comes to the realisation that she cannot be everything, Barbie cannot be the final word on feminism. This issue of Commentary and Criticism thus considers what conversations the film provokes, what its avowed feminism excludes, and what it makes possible for gender researchers in film and media.

As Robbie intimates in her quotation that began this Introduction, Barbie the film cannot be read without the context of Barbie the doll. Barbie was invented by Handler and launched by Mattel in 1959. Her appearance was inspired by the Lilli doll, a suggestive novelty toy for adult men based on a risqué cartoon for the West German newspaper Bild (Juliette Peers 2004, 139). Beyond Lilli, however, Barbie’s lineage also extends to the luxury fashion dolls of nineteenth-century Europe, such as the dressable porcelain and leather dolls of the Jumeau and Bru companies. Barbie, so the story goes, was named after Handler’s daughter Barbara; Handler spotted a gap in the market for an adult-shaped doll after watching her daughter play with paper figurines in their California home (Robin Gerber 2009, 5, 14). According to Peers, Barbie is “one of the most successful creative products by a woman and one of the most widely disseminated women’s artworks in Western European human history” (2004, 11). Her dissemination was assisted by the invention of sister Barbies in the 1960s, including African American, Hispanic, and Asian coded dolls. The millennial evolution of Barbie from mere fashion doll to intellectual property at the centre of a media empire was also vital to her proliferation; Barbie appears in over forty straight-to-DVD and streaming films and animations (from Barbie and the Nutcracker [Owen Hurley, 2001] to Barbie: Skipper and the Big Babysitting Adventure [Steve Daye, 2023]), sixty video games (including the bestselling Barbie Fashion Designer [1996]) and hundreds of books and comics. All told, in the sixty-five years since her launch as a product, Barbie the doll has been the topic of histories (Jennifer Craik 1988; Peers 2004; Gerber 2009), personal essays (Yona Zeldis McDonough 1999; M. G Lord 2004 [1994]) and marketing analyses (Donna L Roberts, 2020; Rebecca C Hains, 2021; “Life In Plastic; Barbie 2002).

This history does not just figure as pretext for Barbie but is reflexively incorporated into the film’s narrative. Most notably, the film’s prologue features an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—except the hominids here are replaced by little girls, who glumly play with baby-dolls. With the arrival of Barbie (Margot Robbie) as statuesque monolith, the film’s narrator asserts, “Since the first little girl, there has been dolls,” but “Barbie changed everything.” Robbie is wearing the strapless black and white swim-suit worn by the first Barbie doll in 1959, replete with her cat-eye sunglasses and gold hoop earrings. The camera tracks into a close-up on her face; Robbie’s blonde hair set in perfect curls, blue eye-shadow and red lipstick perfectly reminiscent of the doll’s painted face. The camera tracks outwards, revealing a row of other dolls: a nurse, an astronaut, a flight attendant, a gymnast, a hippie. Each Barbie rotates on display, so we might better adore the details of her clothing, which no doubt reference a specific version of the toy from her long history. Another row of women enters the frame, more versions of Barbie: a tennis player, an astronomer, a veterinarian, an Olympian, a hockey player, a judge. This cuts to a sequence where young girls from the Real World are dressed in outfits that match their dolls (a chef, a doctor, a gymnast). Finally, the camera cuts to hundreds of Barbies gathered in rows, grinning serenely.

Barbie’s opening sequence forms a synecdoche for the doll’s history as well as the gendered promise highlighted earlier, that Barbie is “everything.” As the narrator asserts at the prologue’s conclusion, “All of these women are Barbie, and Barbie is all of these women.” Feminist critics have investigated this polysemy of Barbie, noting her capacity to facilitate a range of identifications, uses and meanings for children and adults alike. Kim Toffoletti calls Barbie a “transformer” and “a sign-switcher in constant process” (Kim Toffoletti 2007, 58); M.G. Lord declares that “Barbie may be a universally recognized image, but what she represents in a child’s inner life can be as personal as a fingerprint” (2004, 10). Gerwig also seems aligned with this school of thought when she comments: “[Barbie] exists in the ‘both/and,’ not the ‘either/or’” (2023). Such significatory flexibility is, in part, by design. As Kristin Noelle Weissman observes, Mattel has consistently “facilitated women’s identification with this doll” (Kristin Noelle Weissman 1999, 15) For decades, their commercial strategy has been to create Barbies of different ethnicities, careers and body sizes, thus simultaneously addressing criticisms of Barbie as a product and maximising her market potential (with mixed success). Yet Barbie’s significatory flexibility is also not by Mattel’s design. Erica Rand notes the many “adult subversions of Barbie” (Erica Rand 1995, 10) that exist in, for instance, the poetry of Essex Hemphill (151–2) or on the cover of AIDS activist zines. (157) Rand also observes Barbie’s different applications in childhood too: “My friends told me about how they had loved or hated Barbie and about what they had done with and to her—how they had turned her punk, set her on fire, made her fuck Midge or Ken or G.I. Joe” (Rand 1995, 3) Although never broaching anything so overtly sexual, the character of Weird Barbie in Robbie and Gerwig’s film, portrayed by lesbian actor Kate MacKinnon, is a nod to such queerings of Mattel’s doll. The Barbie movie thus enthusiastically thematizes the premise that Barbie can be everything, from her Mattel-sanctioned iterations to her unofficial, more subversive manifestations.

Alongside this body of discourse that heeds Barbie’s multiplicity in positive terms sits an opposing commentary that points to the inevitable issues with such a positioning. Barbie also excludes, a stance that Gerwig and Robbie’s film mostly dismisses in favour of its theme of Barbie-as-everything. For decades, a dominant criticism of Barbie within feminist scholarship has been her negative ideological messaging, perceived as detrimental to women and girls in promoting highly constrained feminine ideals. Researchers have investigated the impact of Barbie’s thin, plastic form on girls’ body image (see Hains 2021). Others, such as Ann duCille, explore the exclusionary whiteness of Barbie. Despite Mattel’s creation of Barbies of different skin-tones and culturally-specific outfits, duCille contends that Barbie “is an icon—perhaps the icon—of true white womanhood and femininity” and an object that “[does] the dirty work of patriarchy and capitalism” (Ann duCille 2004, 268) Gerwig and Robbie’s film acknowledges such criticisms when high schooler Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) calls Barbie “everything wrong with our culture,” a glorifier of “rampant consumerism” and a “fascist.” In this moment, Gerwig’s screenplay once again engages with Barbie’s cultural history, this time addressing the more negative associations attached to the doll. Yet the film’s emphasis ultimately lies with the paradox of what it considers as Barbie’s status as everything. In Barbie, Barbie’s flaw is that she is too inclusive, too infinite, rather than too thin, too white or too exclusionary.

Though Barbie is wise to the doll’s paradox, the attendant proclamation of its feminism as for “everyone” attracts criticism. Indeed, such criticisms were largely inevitable given the cultural context in which Barbie circulates. The film plays in a moment of what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) calls “popular feminism” in the contemporary West. Feminist ideas are no longer the sole purview of specialist academics or activists; feminist concepts and critical frameworks are now routinely deployed by bloggers, fans and audiences as part of their pop culture consumption and engagement with everyday life. To use Rebecca Traister’s words, “more high-profile women are embracing the language, ideas, and symbolism of feminism” (Rebecca Traister 2014) As Banet-Weiser puts it, “feminism is ‘in the water’:” “we are living in a moment in North America and Europe in which feminism has become, somewhat incredibly, popular” (2018, 2, 1) Correspondingly, Barbie uses feminist jargon in its dialogue. In one scene, the Mattel Chief Executive Officer (Will Ferrell) quips: “When you think of sparkle, what do you think of after that? Female agency.” In another, Stereotypical Barbie marvels at the power of consciousness-raising: “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power.” Even without the benefit of Gerwig’s framing of Barbie as “certainly feminist,” the film’s address is to an audience already steeped in popular feminism; its story of Barbie versus the patriarchy becomes conceivable and its jokes intelligible in this context. As Jessica Ford observes, it was somewhat inevitable Barbie should be read in relation to feminism: “We seem to be reaching the zenith of this phenomenon with almost anything ‘women-centric’ likely to be promoted and understood as ‘feminist,’” Ford explains (Jessica Ford 2024). Ford’s point is well-taken, but Gerwig’s screenplay both anticipates and invites the film’s reception as such.

All this is to say that Barbie is a generative, provoking figure that has long been read in relation to feminism; Robbie and Gerwig’s film invites us to do so anew. The contributors to this collection seize the opportunity to examine this significant movie about an iconic product: to consider how feminism is communicated in popular forms and how neoliberal Hollywood might translate the appetite for women-centric stories of empowerment. Ignited by the seemingly infinite ways to be Barbie, Clara Bradbury-Rance’s essay draws out the possibilities of a “Butch Barbie” against the strictures of feminised heterosexuality that the film adopts. Athena Bellas argues for the pleasures of girlhood offered by Barbie, reading the film’s surfaces as allegory for the kinaesthetic joys of window-shopping. Fiona Handyside reads Barbie as a counter narrative to the phallocratic myths of creation and as a film where Gerwig can pursue a deeper interest in the place of the feminine in spirituality. Isabelle McNeill considers the tensions between the real and imaginary spaces of the film, finding a radical ambiguity in the collapse of dream and materiality in the figure of Barbie. Scarlette Nhi Do examines her personal histories with the doll to trace the modes of feminism, melancholia and differential grievability that Barbie constructs. Alicia Byrnes’ essay draws out methodologies of surface and suspicious reading to highlight the feminist ambivalence evident in Gerwig’s authorial style. Though this collection cannot be exhaustive, these essays respond, as Gerwig and Robbie intended, to the “sparky” discourses of popular feminism that Barbie ignites.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alicia Byrnes

Alicia Byrnes is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. She works at the intersection of women’s issues in cinema and film technology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Film-Philosophy, Senses of Cinema, and the edited collection Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the Dream Factory (University of Illinois Press).

Janice Loreck

Janice Loreck is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on women’s representation and filmmaking in global art cinema and experimental screen cultures. She is the author of Provocation in Women’s Filmmaking (2023), Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema (2016) and co-editor of Screening Scarlett Johansson (2019). She is also an organiser of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF).

Nonie May

Nonie May is a Lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research mobilises feminist approaches to traditional film theories, to examine poetic cinematic form as it addresses the body. Her book Sight, Sound, Touch: The Sensory Child of Contemporary Cinema is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press (2024). Recent publications include a book chapter entitled ‘Written on the Body’ in The UnDead Child (Collected Edition, Ed. Debbie Olson & Craig Martin, 2024); and the prize-winning article ‘An Cailín Ciúin [The Quiet Girl]’ for Senses of Cinema (MIFF Dossier, 2022).

Notes

1. Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie (2023). “Extended Interview: Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie Discuss Barbie’s Surprising Feminism.” By Sarah Ferguson. 7:30. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. July 12, 2023. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-12/extended-interview:-greta-gerwig-and-margot-robbie/102594202.