The week I turn 50 I go to the movies to see Barbie with my partner and my children. It’s not a subject I would naturally have been attracted to, but I am intrigued by the media presence that the film has gained in record time and the returns it reaps.
At the dinner we share after leaving the complex I tell my children that, for the women of my generation, that small mannequin with exuberant breasts and impossible proportions — it is often said that if Barbie were real, her body would not support the weight of her head–represented a model of feminine independence. They look at me with a mixture of tenderness and pity; the definition must seem pathetic to you.
They do not imagine that for those of us who grew up playing mothers with chubby dolls, that plastic girl who lives alone, has no children, drives, travels and exercises the most diverse professions –doctor, journalist, lawyer, astronaut, president– showed us in its time another possible model, unknown to our nine or ten years. “Be what you want to be” was the motto that had worked since the creation of Barbie in 1959 and for us, it even ended up being new in our childhood.
We were aware in our own way that Barbie he made fun, consumerism and glamor a banner of his empty life, but imagining ourselves behind the wheel of a convertible, living in big pink mansions or exhibiting a huge figure, anyway, was tempting. (Few know that her creator, Ruth Handler, was inspired to create her Barbie into a sex toy, a doll named Bild Lilli, that he bought on a trip to Germany, mistaking it for a girl’s toy).
They are Barbie –which he named in homage to his own daughter, Barbara– stepped on the moon in 1965, four years before Neil Armstrong, which illustrates the fact that at the time he represented advanced ideas for the first generations of consumers Of the brand.
In the years after #MeToo, however, the awareness of its inadequacy for these times led Mattel to face a resounding image change: the film that these days breaks box office records around the world is nothing more than an attempt –definitely lucrative and successful– of reformulating the concept to which the doll was historically associated to give it new meanings and even turning it into a feminist icon for the new generation. Or something like that.
Together with Warner Brothers and the producers, Mattel allowed its director, Greta Gerwig, to carry out a disruptive project, precisely with that objective, and the strategy worked.
Barbie Now she returns to us, from the screen, a renewed and more humanized image, which includes her fear of aging and the awareness that the possibility of feeling can throw her into an ocean of contradictory emotions, but it is also proof that she is not just a creature. frivolous, inert and insensitive.
Accustomed and at the same time bored with the endless succession of “perfect days” to which her existence was reduced in Barbieland, (Careful, spoiler) the new one Barbie (Margot Robbie), seems to realize that she does not fit in this world and makes the leap to the “real world”, where she is the target of a diatribe from a teenager –of our children’s generation– who despises everything that embodies, as well as the fiery defense of the girl’s mother, who does understand that she provided her contemporaries with a model that at the time was superior. “Women can aspire to whatever they want, outside of the role of mothers that has been reserved for them since they were girls”, she came to tell us.
The Barbies remixed They are then willing to flee from the dictatorship of plastic perfection to assume their “imperfections” –cellulite as a symbol of the real woman–, in a world that has denied them that possibility during its almost 65 years of existence. And that in turn results in an indirect conquest for the “Kens”, who can also assume their own vulnerability and worth, outside of the masculine mandates that have also weighed on them, and the fact that they have felt like an “accessory” more of Barbie forever.
The humor with which the same creators of the brand laugh at themselves and exhibit these tensions helps them to conquer a new place in the market, symbolic and material, while at the same time they put on the table the question of what it means to be a woman, and in these times.
It is the same one that dethrones the model of the Barbie prototypical, who now appears –in a last attempt at survival– willing to break stereotypes and even become an influencer of the new feminism.
The previous one will be “discontinued” forever, just as the brand has done with the pregnant Barbie with a detachable belly (which the parents questioned) or the one that carried a television on its back (?); models that generated controversy or were not successful and were forgotten.
The Barbie feminist has arrived and is among us. Pink is the new green.
