Susan Faludi Thinks ‘Barbie’ Is a Delight. She Also Thinks It’s About Abortion.
Susan Faludi suggested we show up to the “Barbie” movie in a pink Corvette, but unfortunately, the only car available was a pickup truck. So that was how one of the world’s leading feminists and I showed up to her local mall: in a 2002 Black Toyota Tacoma, with tickets to Auditorium 2 for “Barbie.”
I’d asked Ms. Faludi, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and author — whose 1991 book, “Backlash,” became an instant classic — to see this summer’s most joyful and lucrative blockbuster with me because I was hoping she might help me make sense of its morass of hot pink contradictions.
There are few toys quite so confounding as Barbie. Even her origin story: She was based on a sex doll for men, but somehow marketed to mothers for their daughters. Barbie has been a protest slogan (“I am not your Barbie”), a bimbo (remember “Math class is tough” Barbie?), an eating disorder accelerant. In one particularly clever protest against the doll, she had her voice box swapped with G.I. Joe’s, so suddenly she said, “Vengeance is mine!” and he said, “The beach is the place for summer.” But Barbie has also been a lawyer, a pilot, an astronaut and the president. She has never married, lives alone and does not have children.
The movie seemed as full of contradictions as the doll. It was promoted through a marketing campaign that had more licensing deals than Barbie has outfits: There were Barbie clothes and Barbie makeup and ice cream and vacation packages and a takeover of the Google home page, which is currently filling my screen with pink explosions every time I try to fact-check this essay. But it also had a director — Greta Gerwig — with indie street cred, and early reviews focused on the film’s subversiveness. Ms. Gerwig, it seemed, had managed to make Barbie satisfyingly self-aware, likable and mockable; she called out the hypocrisy of the manufacturer — Mattel — while getting its blessing on the project. And then, somehow, she — and the company — marketed it all back to us.
Source: The New York Times
