https://www.city-journal.org/article/barbies-checkmate
I know. You’ve had it up to here with Barbie. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You’re sick of the whole “women are so oppressed yet so wow.” You’ve heard it a million times already; the future is female.
Well, you may not be interested in Barbie, but Barbie—or more precisely, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate puppet master—is interested in you. Young children are Mattel’s core customers, but the company has set its sights on a much wider market. It sees the movie as a way for everyone—“teens, young adults, moms, glammas [a portmanteau for glamorous grandmas]” to “engage in the franchise,” in the words of Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former president and COO (now CEO of clothing retailer Gap).
Judging from the pink tsunami of the past few weeks, Mattel’s efforts are paying off. We shouldn’t be surprised. The movie is only the latest in a long series of brilliant chess moves confirming Mattel’s place as the World Champion Grand Master of marketing to progressive, relatively affluent, sophisticated consumers. I don’t know whether the company or the movie are actually as woke as some are grumbling, but I do know Mattel saw the sales potential of the woke phenomenon when Nikole Hannah-Jones was still in elementary school.
Consider Barbie’s origins. For much of commercial toy history, baby dolls were your basic girl toy. Girls would pretend to bottle-feed, dress, and comfort their dolls in imitation of their housewife mothers, who, in turn, tended to their real-life average of five (!) children. The end of the baby-doll era came in the late 1950s, after Ruth Handler, along with her husband Elliot, a founder of the young Mattel company, had a eureka moment. During a visit to Germany, she spotted an unusual doll known as Bild Lilli in a shop window. Based on a risqué comic book character, Lilli was mostly sold in tobacco shops. The character was something of a floozy, with many R-rated adventures. At the time, Lilli was coveted not by little girls but by grown men, though exactly what they did with the dolls no one was saying. To create Barbie, Mattel desexualized and Americanized Lilli, giving her a California glow, evening out her dramatically arched eyebrows and toning down her red, puckered lips. One other seemingly trivial but significant change: Lilli’s shoes were molded to her invisible feet; Barbie’s shoes are removable.
Director Greta Gerwig’s movie opens with a hilarious take on Barbie’s arrival in the U.S. market. A gargantuan doll dressed in a zebra-striped bathing suit and sunglasses suddenly appears, monolith-like, astride a group of sad-looking young girls. Dressed in dowdy, Amish-inspired smock dresses, they are awestruck at this vision of adult sexiness and glamour and immediately smash their baby dolls in angry disgust, a scene that Gerwig gleefully sets to the majestic orchestral opening of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
