Pink Shadow: Barbie's Impossible Dream?

On first encounter I found Barbie disconcerting, vexing, even strangely intimidating. Part of it was a visceral reaction to the deluge of pink. The release of the movie unleashed a pink torrent: pink parties, pink queues on pink theatre carpets. There were pink parades with pink pomp and passion. Pink was no longer limited to a shy blush, the rosy hue of the flesh, or an erotic flush. No passive “pretty-in-pink”, no more a (Victoria's) secret, or the fleeting pop of Double Bubble. Something was in the air. This was a different and potent pink, an alarming pink, and so much of it.

I fretted. Was my pink aversion a reactive guy-thing, like the response of the New Yorker's Anthony Lane who said of the opening of Barbie that it was like “being waterboarded with Pepto Bismol”? Or did this recoil run deeper and share in James Hillman's 1995 “Pink Madness”? Hillman's ribald romp depicting the relegation of Aphrodite to pornography and the silky pinks of the boudoir points to a loss of soul and a pinkening of culture. Sexuality has become misshapen and malignant; the brutishly erect and rejected Priapus is debauched, hidden and shameful. Eros has lost depth, has become sentimentalized, and mass-produced, leaving us maddeningly aroused but psychically starving. Pink makes demands but doesn't deliver; flesh and glamour are on tap but can't slake a thirst.

Barbie's pink is different. It goes beyond Hillman's complaints. Mattel's' production-line Barbie has indeed appropriated and homogenized at least one part of the feminine, but eroticism hasn't just been ignored or dragged into the bedroom. It's entirely eradicated; it doesn't belong in Barbieland. Barbie's unabashed declaration that “I don't have a vagina!” means that Aphrodite as aphrodisiac has entirely disappeared. A generation prior, Hillman's concern with the pornographic commandeering of Aphrodite's eros falls flaccidly short of the point of this new erotic emptiness. In Barbieland there is no phallic reje