Monday
Julia and I attended Barbie over the weekend, and at one point the women in the audience–my wife include–burst into cheers. The occasion is Gloria (America Ferrera), now a mother, giving a speech how on difficult it is to be a woman.
The scene occurs after we have watched her daughter Sasha (Arian Greenblatt) complain about the damage the doll has done to women. Calling Barbie a fascist, she says that her image is used to indoctrinate little girls with its dangerous beauty standards, not to mention an ethos of “sexualized capitalism” and “rampant consumerism.”
Sasha is voicing some of the critique to be found in Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll”:
This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Piercy’s girlchild, unable to live up to both the beauty and behavior expectation of her society, finally gives up (“her good nature wore out like a fan belt) and she commits suicide. Cutting off her “great big nose and fat legs” is another way of saying that she disposed of herself in such a way that they could no longer be criticized.
Edgar Allan Poe notoriously wrote that “the death…of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world (“The Philosophy of Composition”), and he may have thought this because one no longer has to worry about her flawed physique, no to mention her intelligence, abundant sexual drive, and manual dexterity. Instead she can be as ethereal as Annabel Lee in “her tomb by the sounding sea. Instead of asserting her selfhood, she is like Snow White in her glass casquet, lying “still as a gold piece” (as Anne Sexton puts it in “Snow White”).
The film acknowledges this danger but doesn’t stop there since it also wants to explore the exact nature of Barbie love. A very smart New Yorker article by Leslie Jamison points out that girls have always had a love-hate relationship with Barbie and credits the film for noting it. She herself remembers punishing her doll for confronting her with impossible standards, even as the doll also helped her articulate various longings:
If Barbie embodied something that always felt beyond my reach, then playing with Barbie—subjecting her to an array of trials and tribulations—was less about becoming her than it was about exerting some sort of power over the archetypes that tyrannized me. I didn’t have to become her; I could be her god—a loving god, or a vengeful one….Perhaps this is what Barbie offers, the chance to feel both things at once: wanting something and wanting to destroy it. Wanting to become something and hating yourself for wanting to become it.
Or to put it more succinctly, “I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be.”
That love/hate relationship with Barbie is at the core of the film. As the plot goes, Gloria has opened up a crack in Barbie’s universe by imagining the Barbie she used to play with as developing cellulite and having thoughts of death. In other words, she is trying to negotiate the disconnect between Barbie’s ambitions (astronaut, Supreme Court justice, president of the United States) and women’s reality. Her monologue is triggered when she witnesses Barbie’s self-doubt, which she both understands and is infuriated by. Here it is in its entirety:
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining.
You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! 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.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.
The cheers I heard following the speech reminded me of the cheers I used to hear when Lucille Clifton would read her “Wishes for Men,” the wish being that men would experience the world as women do. It alerted me to the depth of the frustrations.
So there you have it: all these mixed emotions, all this psychological processing, poured into a plastic doll. No wonder Barbie, at the end of the movie, wants to become a real woman. It is much more interesting, as both Barbie and Ken learn by the end, if you don’t conform to a shallow stereotype. The lesson, as Dorothy Parker once put it, is that “people are more fun than anyone.”