Darkening Barbie

The long-awaited Barbie movie appeared in the summer of 2023. A vast Mattel public relations and advertising campaign led up to the moment that Barbie's pink, sparkly, bubbly, plastic, blockbuster, bubblegum of light hit the biggest screens in the country. Sick of dreary Covid quarantines, the devastations of climate change, wars, and political strife, we, masses of children and ex-children, festively dressed in pink—male, female, LGBTQ—herded to see the iconic doll, gloriously animated by Margo Robbie. In side-by-side movie houses, a nuclear bomb was exploding every four hours in Oppenheimer, opening into the greatest real-life horror the human world has ever known. This mega-movie confluence cannot be exactly coincidental.

On one big screen, a doll, originally created by a woman (the ghost on the seventeenth floor of Mattel headquarters), is featured also as a mega-corporation, managed and financed by a band of males with a tradition of male CEOs since 1959. Barbie, happy in her pink cocoon, faces an unbidden existential crisis, with intrusive thoughts about death and symptomatic fallen arches, that leads her through the “break in the curtain” between Barbieland and the Real World. Ultimately, she becomes a human being. On the other big screen, humans are prepared to be indiscriminately annihilated, an effort organized by another band of males, scientists working at the behest of a largely male government. One might be tempted to contemplate the dialectic between mostly male fantasies of the heady powers involved in both the creation of life and its utter destruction. This summer we thus immersed ourselves in life and death on the silver screen, after a long helpless sojourn with a threat of a plague that we, in the movie houses, survived, but that had wiped out more than seven million lives worldwide. We Americans took a break in the summer of 2023, for participatory sublimation, processing these same forces of life and death. On offer were artistic and scientific