What Can I Say About Barbie?
(Note: contains spoilers)
We were twenty minutes past the start time which was not the actual start time but just the time when the ads would start and people would filter in at leisure with their popcorn and Coke Zero combos. As yet, there was nothing on the screen, not even anything with Kevin Bacon in it. I had eaten most of my (large) hot nuts and whilst I was delighted to be allowed to sit in the darkness with the two daughters who had agreed to come with me mainly because I was paying, I had allocated only two hours to this special bonding moment and time was rapidly marching on. It was less than seven days to my big birthday1.
“I’d have expected ads by now,” I said like a battle-worn midlifer who has expected much and usually been left disappointed. I realised I was the oldest person there. Maybe I needed to take a stand, excuse myself past the youth of today, go out to the lobby and highlight how they’d forgotten about screen three. But that would be so embarrassingly passive-aggressive to mention being forgotten, and I tread a fine line when it comes to being the real me in the presence of my offspring. “I wish I’d got the nachos,” said daughter number one like someone who had missed out on fulfilling her potential. “Away out and get some nachos,” I said to daughter number two. I was their fairy godmother fixing everything with a flick of my credit card. “Did you say anything?” I asked when she came back smelling of sweaty cheese. “No,” she said, “they’re probably sorting it out already and it’s not up to me”. And that, everyone, is the mood in which I started to watch Barbie. IT’S NOT UP TO ME.
As we fast-forwarded through the trailers (twice) and I enjoyed a homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey with cute little girls in glasses smashing the limbs and faces of baby dolls, I felt surprisingly empowered. That hadn’t been an option for me. I’d been given a collection of dolls to nurture. They’d played a major part in my early life - solid, inflexible Shirley who looked like Shirley MacLaine2, Belinda the Baby Alive that I’d had to throw over the side of a boat to stop it sinking3, life-size Andrea who arrived second-hand and needed a good scrub, the nameless one whose head fell off in the car in Dumfries on a hot day. I had never owned a Barbie. It was maybe a bit like Bros and Wet Wet Wet, you were either one or the other. Or maybe like Sweet Valley High and discos and boys and Belfast city centre, she would be a bad influence and I wasn’t allowed access to her in case I went off the rails. I had a basketful of Sindys which I took on holiday with me. It was easy as we only ever travelled back and forward on the Larne-Stranraer ferry. They had encouraged the earliest stirrings of my fertile imagination. On Wednesday afternoon playdates, my best friend and I would create dramatic adventures for them in my bedroom. We’d cut their hair, then I’d immediately feel guilty. There was always a mother to the twenty-six daughters in my basket. She was the one with short hair. Although relegated to the role, she looked great for her age and wore trendy clothes because well, she was the same shape as all the others. She was always out and about – on her horse, in her carriage, at the caravan, on her speedboat. I lived in an idealised imaginary world of motherhood.
As we tackled patriarchy in screen three, I was surrounded by teenage girls dressed in elaborate pink attire and teenage boys who had a theoretical passion for gender equality. It would mainly be over their heads. None of them had, as yet, any clue about what patriarchy did to you and even when their future selves would discover it, the boys would probably not say anything because it wouldn’t impact them, and the girls wouldn’t want to be accused of complaining. “I am the son of a mother,” says Mattel CEO Will Ferrell to prove how much he cares about women. When Ken can’t get a job or perform an appendectomy even though he’s a man, he questions how well this patriarchy thing is working. A businessman assures him that they are still doing patriarchy correctly, they just hide it better than they used to. Barbie Land was a farcical subversion of the Real World. Women hold all the power, take the top jobs, own the houses. They are President, Chiefs of Staff, Supreme Court judges, surgeons, astronauts. The Kens are only there to look good and be their companions.
“Why are you wearing that coat?” asked daughter number two as we’d prepared to leave the house ten minutes in advance of the start time because we’d only be missing the ads. “Sometimes it gets chilly,” I said, “in auditoriums in July”. It was ok for my thirteen-year-old to wear an oodie to a later screening, just a bit cringe for me to wear an outer garment that might keep me warm. When I’d birthed lovely babies, I hadn’t expected them to bring me down to size on such a regular basis.
I couldn’t identity with stereotypical Barbie who panicked at one solitary patch of cellulite and had her dreams shattered at such a late stage in life. But I could identity with irrepressible thoughts of death Gloria. She was having an existential crisis due to her persistent conforming and the realisation that she’d mothered a daughter who openly detested her because she was just so boring. “I’m just a boring mom, with a boring job and a daughter who hates me,” she said. I was reminded of what Virginia Woolf wrote.
It was a typical story in many ways, middle-aged woman tries to reclaim her purpose in a society which marginalises older women. Although the thin/healthy, pretty/not too pretty, never show off/never be selfish resonated, even her speech about the contradictions that women face every day was nothing new. Cynthia Nixon had done one which was much more brutal – “Be a Lady They Said”4. But I was with Gloria as she rescued Barbie from the all-male Board, when she accelerated during the car chase, when she put on the roller-skates. It said, “look at me, I’m a person too”.
“Did they model the teenage daughter on you?” I said to daughter number three who had gone to see it on a different day altogether. “What?” she grunted as I entered her stratosphere uninvited. “Did you cry?” she said. I got the impression she wanted me to. It felt dark. Well, yes there may have been something in my eye when Gloria proved to Sasha that she was actually an interesting person and not just her boring mother. I was disappointed though when she pitched her idea for ordinary Barbie because we need role models who are just getting through the day and not feeling bad about themselves because actually, we need much more than that, more than getting through the day. “It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault,” says Gloria. She was spot on. For me, Barbie was a film for the unseen mothers, not the ones unseen by society but unseen by their own daughters.
When Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler told her that she had to become human because true meaning in life can only be found in the messiness of mortality and when they showed that montage of all the cast and crew mothers and daughters and then in came that whopper of a line, "we must stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come,” it gave me a lump in the throat even though I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. There were hints of self-sacrifice, of every generation of women only ever striving to improve the world for their daughters, never for themselves. As a product never marketed or sold as a mother (even pregnant Midge was quickly removed again from the shelves) and created to show girls they could be anything they wanted to be (you could be 200 different careers), Barbie seemed to be obsessed with motherhood. It was a massive contradiction.
As the end credits rolled and we saw a range of discontinued Barbies, I said “look at me” to the daughters on either side of me. I’d swung my feet up into the air. I may have been wearing a ridiculous quilted puffer but I was also wearing a pair of pink Birkenstocks. I wasn’t sure if they were quite the right shade so after much deliberation, I ordered another pair, the perfect shade of pink. I refuse to be discontinued.
Had I learned anything from Barbie apart from patriarchy is alive and well, motherhood is a paradox, stereotypical means you are everything yet nothing…? Well…
“What do you think of this jacket? Do I look ok?” said my husband as he donned a striped linen affair. “You are Kenough,” I said. “You don’t need my validation and approval. You can be anything you want”.
This is not really relevant. I’m just trying to deal with it.
Showing my age here.
This wasn’t real. I had a bad dream.