The Individuation of Barbie

When I heard writer/director, Greta Gerwig, was going to helm a movie about Barbie, I wondered if she had lost her way. Between the pink tsunami of Mattel's advertising campaign and the juggernaut of Barbieheimer (the idea being to go see something serious followed by something to help you forget what you just saw), I was not convinced that Barbie was worth seeing. What became persuasive, however, was the wave of collective feeling—joy even—from friends and reviewers that finally made me curious. Sitting in a darkened but very packed movie theatre, I found myself, for the first time in decades, in the hands of a filmmaker who was not only creating a different kind of narrative about the struggle for affective embodied existence, but somehow offering this, miraculously, through Barbie. I have to agree with Richard Brody of The New Yorker who gushed that Barbie is “brilliant, beautiful and fun as hell” (Brody, 2023).

Let's face it, Barbie, the doll, has been fraught with credible charges of being a toy that, because of her impossible proportions, sends little girls all the wrong messages. Just as noxious, her origins and manufacture carry the shadow of our unbridled consumerism. Yet, despite all that—and perhaps because of its very timing, arriving amidst the attacks on women's rights in the US and erosion of democracy worldwide—the film represents a shift in our psychic bedrock. How we hold women and girls in our collective imagination continues to evolve, i.e., our collective individuation around the issue of women's rights is not only alive and well, but on full tilt, high volume, and creative display in Barbie. Precisely because she is a doll we play with and project into, Barbie has always had more to offer than in her role as a confidence-eroding toy. As Gerwig jokes through Helen Mirren's narration that Barbie has solved all the problems of patriarchy, we know that while this is tragically untrue, it is not only possible, but imperative that we make art, even th