Several decades ago, before the invention of the internet and the concept of fair representation in cinema, anything went. Films needed two things: Money and an idea. If it had an interesting story to tell, and/or an entertaining way to tell it, chances are, a film would find its audience. And it’s not like that formula has been retired.
But Warner Brothers’ latest, Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, in its marketing and screenplay, has gone an interesting way. It tapped into its USP — hard. Everyone knows Barbie — whatever your relationship with her. By the film’s own admission, “If you love Barbie, if you hate Barbie, this movie is for you”.
With modest estimates suggesting over a $100 million marketing budget aside from the $145 million film budget, Warner Bros went all out to create the perfect “girl summer”. Giant, blank, pink billboards with the release date ensured everyone associated the colour with Mattel’s Barbie this summer. Through its aggressive marketing, the film captured the zeitgeist and came to dominate it.
Everyone involved with the film seemed to know the complicated relationship that people share with Barbie was too immense to ignore. So instead, the film leveraged this to its benefit. It created a story that knew its history.
Just not its future. That it let rest as a desperate plea with the movie-goers.
What we all have in common is knowing Barbie. That is what the marketing focused on and hit the jackpot with: Community. A post-pandemic product, it succeeded in creating a culture around itself and mainstreaming it. For the audience, the idea seems to be: This one is for nostalgia’s sake, for the sake of our complicated relationships with Barbie, womanhood, motherhood and each other. For Mattel, this works perfectly as a rebrand. And rebrand itself it did. (President of global marketing Josh Goldstine, in an interview to Variety said, “Someone took a picture of a pink sunset and thanked the work of Warner Bros marketing department.”)
Step into the dark movie theatre from the bubblegum pink carpet, and the strategy starts to deflate, though. After all, the con of “there’s something in here for everyone” can lure you into the movie theatre, but that is about as far as it goes.
Since the film is essentially a one-and-a-half-hour-long advertisement bankrolled by Mattel in collaboration with other corporate giants, faulting it for promoting its brand is simply not fair. Many have done it before (including Mattel itself) and many continue to do it.
But the movie tries to tackle everything — gender roles, patriarchy, inclusion, corporate greed and Mattel’s role in it all. A slap-stick comedy with political overtones plastered on top, Barbie is self-aware to the point of nausea.
Mattel falls prey to the culture war it tries to call out. The argument is that there is no right way to be a woman. Women are always over scrutinised. Nothing is enough. And yet, it is all too much. So how could Mattel get representing a woman right?
All the antagonists are bumbling buffoons who represent no real threat. The board of directors that feature in the movie are vapid fillers who affect the plot in no way. The impression created is that they play no role in the patriarchy. They are irrelevant to it. Because it existed before Barbie and because it exists today. Where does this inequality come from, though? To that, Barbie has no answers. Answering it would mean shutting down Mattel’s factories in the Global South where they allegedly exploit women’s labour. It would mean the abolition of any standards that the company tries to create for women. That threatens profit. That, we leave in a corner, by itself.
The Kens who take over Barbie world, pulling reverse sexism in an inverse reality, are doing so because of what the matriarchy did to them. This is meta role reversal. And yet, while Barbie world was about all women loving themselves and controlling their lives, Ken-dom is about controlling the Barbies.
The corporate self-awareness in the movie is so in your face, you could miss all the pink if you focused on it. But why? Films based on toys are not new. Even Barbie movies are not. There are 43 of them. Almost all focus on relationships women share with their families and their girl friends. Interestingly, they subvert the male gaze more than they are credited for. The main character is the woman, the main priority her mission and relationships — in neither of which, men or their gaze feature heavily.
But this iteration tries to make a claim that just falls flat. Mattel can’t be the solution as illustrated by Sasha’s suspiciously articulate roast of Barbie when she first meets her. They also can’t be the problem because there are dolls to sell. So, instead, they call themselves the victims.
While we try to raise children teaching them the value of equality and of themselves, the structures around us remain punishing. Young girls don’t just have Barbie now. With her comes the burden of not wanting to be her. Knowing that your politics is wrong if you want her, want to be her. The burden is no longer patriarchy alone, but your pronounced rejection of it.
This tension between knowing better and wanting worse, true for a sizeable part of its audience — this hyper-individualisation — is what Mattel was betting on. The play was: We are just like you. We don’t know how we got here, we don’t know how to fix it, and we are also worse for it because no one wants Barbie anymore.
There is an absurdity that plagues newer generations today: The knowledge that the world is unfair, that not standing up to it is an important marker of one’s character (or lack thereof) and that it is all beyond redemption. The dissonance caused by knowing that everything is on fire and there isn’t anything you can do about it reflects heavily in the structure and treatment of the movie. Through it, the argument being made is that Mattel is also confused, trying its best to serve women’s interests, just not knowing how to.
Mattel leverages the helplessness of the current moment, the absurdity of reality. Barbie thought she fixed the world. She is also upset, humiliated at learning that she didn’t. That perhaps she made it worse. By tapping into the modern woman’s insecurity, by personifying itself as a vulnerable naive Barbie, Mattel tries to get absolution from the audience. And tries to extend absolution to the audience. It fabricates a camaraderie so as to say: You don’t have to choose between feminism and Barbie anymore! We are on your side.
Pink is now Barbie. Barbie is feminism. Feminism is Mattel. Reclaim it all, corporations are on your side!
The fact that the film infantilises its audiences with the sheer audacity that it does, that it tries to evoke their vulnerabilities to forge a connection is perhaps the most anti-feminist thing about it.
sukhmani.malik@expressindia.com
