Abstract
Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) is deeply invested in the liberatory and transformative potential of children's play. Children's play in Barbie is the site of self-actualisation for adult women, whereby the subversive potential of Barbie-play facilitates nostalgia, self-discovery and choice for the film's adult protagonists. This move towards self-actualisation is core to Barbie's feminist ethic, which I argue is a type of ‘commodity feminism’ that reasons that such female empowerment can be marketed and purchased. The invocation of the playing child throughout Barbie, accompanied by scant representations of actual playing children, is central to this ethic, performing what Jacqueline Rose calls a ‘mystification of the child’ as a product of adult desires and anxieties. In Barbie, children's play is a blank screen onto which can be projected adult female desires for self-actualisation, concealing concomitant anxieties about the role of capitalist patriarchy in this commodity-feminist project. Drawing on Robin Bernstein's conception of dolls as ‘scriptive things’, I explore how Barbie and its doll characters script forms of play. I demonstrate that the rhetorical power of children's play can be co-opted into feminism and corporate capitalism alike, and used to disguise the uneasy but often very profitable marriage between the two.
In January 2024, in the run-up to the Oscars, the Writers Branch executive committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences caused a stir by reclassifying Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) from an original screenplay, as it had been deemed by the Writers Guild of America, to an adapted screenplay (Davis, 2024; St Martin, 2024). The expressions of approval, disgust and confusion that then circulated around social and news media were a small flurry in the veritable storm of online discourse surrounding Gerwig's comedy, a flurry that nonetheless suggests a broader discomfort around the boundaries of what a text is and does. Barbie was deemed an adapted text on the grounds that Mattel's Barbie, the doll and the franchise, constitutes the original. If a doll can be considered a text, this invites questions about how such a text might be read, or to borrow a formulation from Robin Bernstein (2011), what scripts the doll invites playing children to rehearse and perform. This opens a space to inquire how the on-screen adaptation of this text responds to such scripts of doll-play. Taking up this inquiry, I explore how Barbie invokes and represents dolls, play and the playing child in the service of what Jacqueline Rose calls the ‘mystification of the child’ as a product of adult desires and anxieties (1993: 11). Barbie is deeply invested in the subversive, transformative and liberatory potential of children's play, in service to the self-actualisation of the adult female main characters. The invocation of the playing child therefore functions as a cloak for the uneasy alliance between globalised capitalism and female empowerment that underpins Gerwig's on-screen representation of this mass-produced doll.
Following on from a brief discussion of the transformative potential of play and Mattel's capitalisation on this, I move through three ways in which the position of children's play emerges within Barbie's vision of female empowerment. Firstly, I explore the normative value and logic of play that the film establishes. Play is represented as aspirational, functioning to prepare children for adulthood. The logic of this aspirational play governs Barbie Land, invoking the presence of an invisible playing child, and establishing a normative mode of play. Secondly, I illustrate how the characters of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) are used to explore subversive modes of play in opposition to this normative mode. Barbie valorises the subversive potential of children's play, but also limits this subversion to serve the needs of the adult women for whom this play is nostalgic and liberatory. Finally, I explore how Mattel's presence in Barbie invokes the figure of the girl as consumer. This invisible figure presents female agency as a product that can be purchased, and which exists, as with the playing child, to serve the self-actualisation of the adult female characters. As an original exploration of Barbie's representations of children's play, this article also sheds light on the ways that children's play and childhood might be more broadly invoked in the service of such visions of female empowerment as that conveyed through Barbie. The rhetorical power of children's play can be co-opted into feminism and corporate capitalism alike, and used to disguise the uneasy but often very profitable marriage between the two.
Mattel and the scripts of girlhood
My analysis of children's play in Barbie relies on Bernstein's understanding of dolls, and any materials involved in play, as scriptive things: ‘a scriptive thing, like a playscript, broadly structures a performance while allowing for agency and unleashing original, live variations’ (2011: 12). Dolls like Barbie are ‘dynamic texts’ that script certain modes of play, which playing children respond to in ways that perform, subvert and exceed these scripts (Forman-Brunell, 2021: 5). As Bernstein describes, playing children are ‘experts in the scripts of children's culture, […] virtuoso performers’, and play is the child's expert negotiation of social context, narrative and material culture (2011: 28). Using the lens of scriptive things in this article allows me to explore how Barbie and the doll characters it depicts script forms of play, and how these forms construct an ideal playing child. The effects of Barbie-play on girls’ career aspiration, beauty ideals and body image have been widely studied (Dittmar et al., 2006; Sherman and Zurbriggen, 2014; Rice et al., 2016), but so has the subversive and liberatory potential of such play (Hohmann, 1985; Reid-Walsh and Mitchell, 2000; Wright, 2003). Erica Rand has documented numerous remembered accounts of Barbie-play and their queer potential, and notes that Mattel ‘has by no means sold all Barbie's consumers on the kind of play seen in commercials’ (1995: 9). However, both Rand and Bernstein have cautioned against applauding subversive forms of play as the truer signs of children's agency. As I go on to argue, Barbie's representation of subversive play does not reveal any interest in the agency of playing children per se, but rather fetishises the notion of the subversive child as tool of adult liberation.
Scholars of play attend to its importance for children's psychological and educational development, but also to its creative power (Piaget, 1962; Bruner et al., 1976). Thomas Henricks notes that ‘play resembles creative activity in literature and art’ (2020: 124), but is also ‘an exercise in self-realization’ (2020: 135), through which players transform both their environments and themselves. Play does not exist in a cultural vacuum but is subject to economic forces, and from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, ‘mass production offered an easy way to manufacture abundant playthings, and mass media provided a means to advertise these wonderful, engaging new products to children’ (Hains and Jennings, 2021: 13). The power of transformation and self-realisation that play offers becomes something that can be purchased. Companies such as Mattel, which have been at the forefront of mass-produced children's toys since the Second World War, have turned the transformative value of play to profit, manufacturing dolls that both reflect and shape the evolving social roles of women and children. For Amy La Porte and Lena Cavusoglu, this has created a ‘feverish need to control [Barbie] as a money-making enterprise’ on the part of Mattel, a need that is both parodied and indulged in Barbie (2023: 6). Mapping Barbie's early history, Rebecca Hains describes how the doll was originally marketed in 1959 as ‘a tool to teach girls self-presentation skills’ (2021: 267). This emphasis on physical beauty evolved into the combination of beauty and career aspiration that is recognisable in today's Barbies. Mattel's vision for Barbie, exemplified by the early slogan ‘We can do anything, right Barbie?’, is that playing with the dolls will instil in girls the values of choice and ambition (La Porte and Cavusoglu, 2023: 3). The forms of Barbie-play scripted by Mattel can be read from packaging and advertising, which Louise Collins et al. trace to argue that ‘classic Barbie-play involves sitting still, in a domestic venue, dressing the doll in various purchased outfits and grooming her hair’ (2012: 107). This sits in tension with the emphasis on choice in Barbie's branding, but these two seemingly contradictory elements are tied together, both ‘always mediated by consumption’ (Collins et al., 2012: 107). In the twenty-first century, Mattel's control of the narrative of Barbie's genesis and purpose has entailed a ‘remediation of Barbie’, including through a series of straight-to-DVD cartoon films produced between 2001 and 2012 (Vered and Maizonniaux, 2017: 199). Gerwig's Barbie, for which Mattel was a co-producer and took 5 per cent of the profits, can be viewed as a part of this remediation, through which the power of play as a consumable good is continually reevaluated.
Within Barbie, the playing child in question is, apart from one exception that I go on to explore, a girl child. Jennifer Helgren and Colleen A. Vasconcellos state that ‘girlhood is a social construct much like gender and race’ (2010: 3), but it is perhaps more accurate to say that girlhood brings gender and race to bear upon the interplay of social and historical signification and biological development that is childhood. As well as a state or stage of being, girlhood is also ‘a cultural space in and of itself’, as a site of play and cultural production (Reid-Walsh and Mitchell, 2000: 188). While Mattel's Barbie sits firmly with a binary understanding of gender, girlhood, like childhood, is a capacious category with blurred boundaries. Just as ‘childhood is a performance’ (Bernstein, 2011: 22), girlhood also constitutes a performance, or rather a cluster of modes of performance which can be produced by, among other things, playing with dolls. The subject of my analysis here is not the real children who play with Barbies, or indeed watch Barbie. As discussed above, such real children represent an important area of research that has been taken up by other scholars, and the ways in which real children play with Barbie and with the concept of girlhood far exceeds Mattel's narrow conception of play. My intention here is to explore how this narrow conception of play manifests itself in Gerwig's film, and what sort of playing child is invoked in the service of the narrative. Through its appeal to adult women's desires for self-actualisation, the feminist ethic of Barbie is revealed to be a sort of ‘commodity feminism’, whereby the tenets of feminism are turned into ‘yet another raw material in the never-ending drive to expand or renew the commodity-sign values of consumer goods’ (Goldman et al., 1991: 336). This is not a feminism that seeks to expand its understanding of gender, or indeed to interrogate its own whiteness, but rather seeks to market itself as a product. It is important to note that doll-play, and girlhood itself, is haunted by whiteness. Bernstein argues that white dolls in the nineteenth century created ‘an imagining of white girls as tender, innocently doll-like, and deserving of protection’ (2011: 29), and this marriage of childhood with whiteness serves to enshrine the innocence, invisibility and neutrality of whiteness as a racial category in ways that persist today. Mattel has made a show of dismantling this in recent decades, but these attempts often commodify Latinx and Black cultures whilst keeping white Barbie front and centre (Aguiló-Pérez, 2021; Seow, 2021). Barbie has made a similar attempt in its diverse casting, particularly with regard to Latina characters Gloria (America Ferrara) and Sasha, but the whiteness of Barbie persists in the centring of white, blonde Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie). Whilst the gendered and raced nature of Barbie is not the chief focus of my analysis, the white, cisgender girlhood that she scripts undergirds all of what follows.
The purpose and metaphysics of play in Barbie Land
What Barbie suggests at its outset is that the Barbie doll revolutionised play. Before Barbie, the Narrator (Helen Mirren) relays, girls ‘could only ever play at being mothers’. The film's opening scene depicts a wasteland, in which girls tend to their dolls, iron clothes and serve tea. This scene proposes a critique of the gender roles encoded in this type of play, framing them by references to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968) as prehistoric and unevolved. The humour of this scene lies in its violence as well as its Kubrickian parody, as the aspiring child-mothers smash their baby dolls into the ground to the sound of Richard Strauss's ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ (1896), while Margot Robbie's gargantuan Barbie winks at the audience over her sunglasses. Whilst Kubrick's apes, inspired by the alien monolith, learned basic tool use, these children are inspired by Barbie to destroy the tools of their own oppression. However, what is most significant about the revolutionised play heralded by Barbie is what it shares with the mode of play that it seeks to displace. Both modes are aspirational: while the baby doll says ‘you can be a mother’, Barbie says ‘you can be whatever you want to be’. As the narrator continues, Barbie has ‘her own money, her own house, her own car, her own career. Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything’, and this emphasis on women, i.e. adults, is crucial. Within Barbie, play is an adult-focused endeavour. The child is represented as an adult-in-progress for whom play is the ground from which to shape one's ideal adult self. This opening scene establishes the film's ethic of children's play as a vessel for adult desire. The conception of the child within this formulation of play harks back to the eighteenth-century thought of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose philosophies ‘the child [is] a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state’ (Rose, 1993: 8). For Rose, ‘the child can be used to hold off a panic’ about the lack of fixity in human language and sexuality, and ‘often serves as a term of universal social reference which conceals all […] historical divisions’ (1993: 10). In the case of Barbie, the child and children's play serve as a blank screen onto which can be projected adult female desires for self-actualisation, concealing concomitant anxieties about the role of capitalist patriarchy in this commodity-feminist project. As I go on to discuss, the logic of play and the role of the child in Barbie are both recruited to this project of adult desire.
The physics and metaphysics of Barbie Land establish a normative mode of children's play and invoke an invisible playing child. Barbie Land is not governed by the recognisable laws of physics but by a different logic, which, at the start of the film at least, is the logic of play. As Weird Barbie explains, ‘we’re all being played with, baby’. The opening scenes in Barbie Land establish the laws that reveal this logic of play: a repurposing of the mundane, the simultaneity of speech and action and pleasure in movement. The first of these alternative laws emphasises mundane tasks, ridding them of their normal purpose yet rendering them more pleasurable. This emphasis on the rehearsal of utilitarian tasks has been well observed as a real characteristic of children's play (Henricks, 2020), and the film relies on its audiences’ recognition of this in the way that Barbie revels in her performance of washing, dressing and eating. These tasks are divorced from their normal functions; Barbie does not eat to fuel her body or wash to be clean, but simply for the pleasure to be derived from the performances of everyday life. These tasks of eating and washing are also devoid of their usual substance. Barbie delightedly performs the act of drinking by turning to one side to reveal herself in profile, miming drinking from the empty cup. It seems that there are no fluids in Barbie Land, at least at this stage of the narrative, and the bodily pleasures of a hot shower or a cold drink are replaced by the pleasures of performance, in a body without permeable borders. 1 The repetition of this performance creates a stasis which over the course of the film Barbie will ultimately seek to escape, but at this stage in the film her actions evoke a mode of play that delights in the performance of the mundane and domestic. The second law within this logic of play relates to thought, speech and action. In front of her closet, Barbie closes her eyes and her pink outfit materialises on her body with a shower of cartoon sparkles; she simply has to think about a process in order for that process to be complete. The best example of this is the medical treatment that Ken receives on the beach after his attempt at surfing. Reassuring him about his recovery, Doctor Barbie says: ‘you should heal up in no time. In fact, in the time it took for me to say that sentence, you healed’. Speech and action are simultaneous, and indeed it is implied that it the declaration of Ken's healing that causes it. This is evocative of play, in that reality in Barbie Land is imagined or spoken into being. Within Barbie Land, actions or thoughts are those of various Barbies, but this also suggests the presence and will of an invisible playing child.
The third law of Barbie Land relates to motion, the pleasure of which is to be found in a rejection of the laws of physics. The narrator makes this clear: ‘When you’re playing with Barbies, nobody bothers to walk them down the stairs’. Indeed, the Barbie Dreamhouse has no stairs. Barbie simply moves out of frame on her first floor, and back into it on the ground, suggesting the presence of an unseen hand. The Dreamhouse does, however, have a waterslide. A shot follows Barbie as she slides gracefully down the slide, as Lizzo's lyrics ‘round and round and round and round’ mimic her motion. It is clear that, like eating and washing, the primary purpose of motion is to take pleasure in it, and so stairs are dispensed with in favour of waterslides. In this way, Barbie's movements also linger on the fabric of the Dreamhouse itself, highlighting it not just as a setting but as a toy itself, in which the mundane and domestic is converted into a site of pleasure. The screentime given to the Barbie Dreamhouse emphasises it as a product, and the advertising potential of this scene is notable. The Mattel Adventure Park is due to open in 2024, complete with a Barbie Beach House that visitors will presumably be able to move around in the manner evoked by the Dreamhouse in Barbie (Mattel Adventure Park, 2024). A different sort of pleasure in motion is suggested in relation to Ken, when he attempts to surf and is flung through the air. Ken spins repeatedly as he falls in a manner that would defy gravity, inviting audiences to imagine a child delightedly throwing Ken around in front of a group of artfully arranged Barbies. In establishing this logic of children's play, these opening scenes also serve to script ‘normal’ Barbie play, establishing a shared understanding of this between film and audience. This mode of play is introduced to the sound of Lizzo's ‘Pink’ (2023), which itself serves a normative function, establishing what and who Barbie is: ‘P: pretty, I: intelligent, N: never sad, K: cool’. The film goes on to introduce subversive forms of play, but to do so it must establish scripts for normal childhood play that are never fully interrogated.
The power of subversive play: Weird Barbie and Sasha
Weird Barbie is positioned to suggest an alternative mode of children's play to that established above. To the other Barbies, she exists as a cautionary tale: ‘I heard that she used to be the most beautiful Barbie of all, but then someone played with her too hard in the real world’. Her weirdness is the product of being played in the wrong way, but more specifically, in an excessive way. If Barbie scripts a mode of play that is domestic, gentle and feminine, Weird Barbie represents a mode of aggressive play that is too hard, too much. This mode performs a queering of Barbie, who is rid of the long hair and high heels associated with her stereotypical femininity, to be replaced with an undercut, combat boots and Birkenstocks. 2 Her Weird House is situated outside of the main cluster of houses in Barbie Land and it is suggested that she is openly shunned by the other Barbies, who admit to calling her ‘Weird Barbie behind her back and also to her face’. The shameful or hidden nature of the type of play she represents is suggested not only by the location of Weird Barbie on the margins of Barbie Land but also by the location of the real doll; as Weird Barbie states: ‘I smell like basement’. Whilst representing a mode of play that is marginal and non-normative, Barbie also represents this mode as ubiquitous. When she meets Weird Barbie, Gloria exclaims ‘Oh my god, I had a weird barbie! You make them weird by playing too hard’, echoing the language used by the Barbies earlier in the film. Weird Barbie is first introduced in a very brief scene depicting a child playing with her weird Barbie. In the background, scrabble tiles spelling ‘GLORIA’ can be seen glued to the central pole of this child's toy tent. As well as suggesting a direct relationship between Gloria and Weird Barbie, I would suggest that this connection invites the audience to recognise the ubiquity of this mode of play, using Gloria as an identification point.
A nostalgia for the 1990s is core to this identification, and as Elizabeth Wesseling notes, ‘childhood nostalgia has come to depend on the availability of tangible memorabilia such as toys and the media products of one's youth, and the potential of the new digital media to satisfy this memorial desire through media convergence is practically limitless’ (2017: 4). Barbie trades heavily in both elements of this childhood nostalgia, the material and the digital, of which the scene showing the creation of a weird Barbie provides a heightened example. The child, dressed in denim dungarees and Converse All Stars, throws her weird Barbie into a box containing Uno Stacko, a Mattel game recognisable as the 1994 edition. Although only seconds long, this scene is impactful in its use of the Spice Girls’ 1997 single ‘Spice Up Your Life’, which jars with the quiet beach scene it interrupts. The Spice Girls are the prime example of the girl power feminism of the 1990s (Hains, 2014), and the anarchic tone of this dance-pop song and the exuberant nostalgia of the scene as a whole also jar with the Barbies’ marginalisation of Weird Barbie. This mode of play, although non-normative, is represented as a common experience of 1990s girlhood. Indeed, the ubiquity of this mode has been recorded among the numerous accounts of Barbie-play remembered to Rand, who records how children ‘turned [Barbie] punk, set her on fire, made her fuck Midge or Ken or G.I. Joe’ (1995: 3). Her location at the margins of Barbie Land positions Weird Barbie as a wise-woman figure, to whom the other Barbies must journey out of the city to find. She is comparable to both The Oracle (Gloria Foster) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) from The Matrix (1999), a reference that further embeds her in the popular culture of the 1990s. Weird Barbie presents Barbie with two choices of shoe, inviting her to pursue knowledge that will transform her. 3 The mode of play that Weird Barbie represents, whilst being ‘wrong’ or ‘too much’, is also the site of knowledge and ultimately liberation. When Barbie returns from the Real World, the Weird House becomes the locus for the Barbies’ feminist resistance against the Kens. This suggests, then, that although Weird Barbie represents an incorrect, excessive and non-normative mode of play, this mode of play has a liberatory potential. This is emblematic of the role that children's play serves in Barbie, whereby the disruptive potential of children's play is the site of liberation for adult women.
For a film so preoccupied with a children's toy, it is notable that children make scant appearances on screen. Children are a ghostly presence throughout the film, invoked and suggested but rarely represented. I would argue that the rhetorical power that childhood play possesses in Barbie functions best when not complicated by the on-screen presence of too many actual children. To paraphrase Weird Barbie, there is the child, and there is the child as rhetorical device, and never the twain shall cross. The closest thing that Barbie has to a child character is Sasha, who self-describes in one of her many scathing addresses to Gloria as ‘your tween daughter’. Gary Cross has noted that tweens are problematic for definitions of childhood, being ‘neither dependent children nor relatively autonomous teenagers’ (2004: 11). This liminality allows Sasha to act as a disruptive presence to Barbie's cosy conception of childhood play, but the disruption she represents must eventually be resolved to facilitate Gloria's character development. To the delight of TikTokers and columnists alike, it has been noted that Sasha shares a name with one of the Bratz dolls (Nesvig, 2023). Sasha and her three friends mirror the hairstyles, ethnic identities and grungier style of MGA Entertainment's dolls. These details, and particularly Gloria's use of ‘Bunny Boo’ to address Sasha, a nickname shared by her doll counterpart, have been described as hidden references and Easter eggs (Gilchrist, 2023). Such details are designed to delight fans, and form part of the intertextuality that seems central to Gerwig's mission for Barbie, from the use of vintage fashion throughout to the aforementioned parody of 2001: a Space Odyssey, establishing the film as a cultural touchstone. From their launch in 2001, Bratz were key rivals to Barbie, not least due to a decade-long legal dispute between MGA and Mattel (Chang, 2011). Bratz lack the aspiration to adult womanhood that Barbie scripts, instead valuing fashion trends and the occupation of urban space. As Lisa Guerrero notes, the Bratz represent a more fluid femininity than that of Barbie, located ‘in the performative possibilities within feminine gender: tomboy, punk, girly girl, sports-star, fashionista’ (2009: 191). The Bratz script forms of play based on the tropes of adolescence; editions such as Slumber Party, Girls’ Nite Out, Sportz and Back to School are key examples. Embedding the Bratz in Barbie is a confident move on the part of Mattel as co-producers, suggesting the ubiquity of doll-play as a means of female identity formation, while associating the film's most disruptive character with Barbie's main rival.
The film's fetishisation of childhood, as a tool in Barbie's commodity feminist project, is undertaken at the expense of adolescence, the cynicism of which Sasha must unlearn through her trip to Barbie Land. Sasha first appears in the film in a position of social dominance, which she exercises through speech. As the child who warns Barbie when she enters the school canteen says: ‘Sasha can talk to you but you can never talk to Sasha’. Shushing her friend who claims to have liked playing with Barbies, Sasha is known for her deliberately acerbic speech. As she prepares her feminist critique of Barbie, her friends egg her on: ‘give it to her’; ‘destroy Barbie’. Sasha's critique is accompanied by rising extra-diegetic beats that accompany her main points about ‘sexualised capitalism’, and the ‘glorification of rampant consumerism’, crescendoing with ‘I haven’t thought about you in years, you fascist’. This structure and the friend's cry of ‘destroy Barbie’ are reminiscent of YouTube videos in which content creators ‘destroy’ those they disagree with through rhetorical takedowns accompanied by explosive visual and sound effects, an apt example being the widely mocked ‘Ben Shapiro DESTROYS the Barbie Movie for 43 Minutes’ (Kilander, 2023). Even if audiences might be invited to agree with Sasha, this format has the effect of parodying her position, which is presented as polemical and unnuanced. Putting the main feminist critique of Barbie into the mouth of Sasha is part of Mattel's ‘carefully crafted self-mockery’, anticipating the most vociferous feminist critiques of the movie whilst packaging them as the polarising rant of a playground tyrant (La Porte and Cavusoglu, 2023: 10). Adolescence is represented as a cynical stage of life, in which the pleasures of doll-play are abandoned in favour of joyless feminist critiques of capitalism.
Sasha's development arc is to become softer and more feminine, and to reconcile with her mother, an arc that is facilitated by her journey to Barbie Land. For Gloria, the journey to Barbie Land is one of nostalgia, in which she rediscovers her favourite boots and identifies her ‘favourite Barbie’ among the many iterations that they travel through. For Sasha, it is a journey of softening towards her mother and Barbie. When Barbie describes the all-female structure of governance in Barbie Land, Sasha concedes that it ‘sounds kinda cool’. She laughs at passing dolphins and asks curious questions, and the camera lingers on her attentiveness to Gloria and Barbie's conversation in shots of the three together in Barbie's car. Having first dressed in androgynous greys and blacks, Sasha appears in her last scene in Barbie Land in a pink dress with a full head of ringlets. In her final scene in the film overall, back in the Real World, she has returned to her loose grey garments, but with the addition of a Barbie-pink tank-top. In embracing the values and aesthetics of Barbie Land, which the film presents as the values and aesthetics of girlhood, Sasha also embraces her mother, literally and figuratively. Crucially, it is Sasha who chooses to return and save Barbie Land, on the grounds that her mother ‘always believed in what [Barbie] could be’. In validating Gloria's belief in Barbie, Sasha also validates the parts of Gloria's personality that she feels she must hide. Sasha describes Gloria's drawings as ‘amazing’: ‘they’re weird and dark and crazy. Everything you pretend not to be’. Gloria's response is to claim this for herself: ‘I am. I’m weird and I’m dark and I’m crazy’, before returning to save Barbie Land. Gloria's ability to save Barbie is dependent on her accessing parts of herself that she has disavowed, and it is implied that it is Sasha's own darkness and weirdness that allows her to draw out those qualities in her mother. This trajectory positions imaginative play as a site of intergenerational understanding and collaboration, but in a manner that reifies the obedience of children towards their parents. Ultimately, it is Sasha's character development that serves Gloria's, and her subversive power is useful only in so far as it serves this development. The film celebrates the rejection of the adolescent individuation that saw Sasha articulating her own brand of anti-capitalist feminism, in favour of her support for her mother's softer, more personal form of feminism whereby she narrates the contradictions of living as a woman under patriarchy. Like the invisible playing children invoked for Barbie's self-actualisation, Sasha's narrative role is to return to a sense of childlike naivety in order to support the growth of the adult female main characters.
The girl as consumer and the limits of Barbie's metaphysics
Thus far I have explored Barbie's representations of the playing child, but the presence of Mattel throughout Barbie also invokes the child as consumer. Mattel World Headquarters is depicted as the opposite of Barbie Land, whose vivid colours and scenes of women having fun together contrasts with the grey Mattel offices, in which identically dressed men sit in blank, doorless cubicles, alone. 4 The all-male Executive Board, whilst depicted as ‘clueless executive jocks’, are also naively idealistic (Maines, 2024: 338). Having described Barbie's mission as ‘always be empowering girls’, Will Ferrell's CEO asks rhetorically: ‘and when you think of sparkle, what do you think of after that? Female agency’. This parody of Mattel's marketing to girls serves a similar purpose to Sasha's ‘destroy Barbie’ speech, anticipating critiques of Mattel and disarming them through parody. Ferrell's casting here can be seen as a reprisal of his role as President Business in The Lego Movie (2014), the megalomaniac villain intent on controlling the world of play. As another layer to Barbie's self-parody, the parallels with The Lego Movie are notable, the earlier Warner Bros. production also offering criticism of corporate greed whilst creating copious fodder for merchandise in its celebration of mass-produced toys. The CEO's reasons for fearing Barbie's presence in the real world are vague – it is only stated that it would be ‘catastrophic’ – but the fact that their aims are to contain and restrict Barbie presents them as gently villainous. Part of the horror of putting Barbie back in her box, apart from the obvious connotations of being put in one's place, come from the implication that this would revert her to a state of never having been played with at all. What Barbie chooses in running from them seems to be a continued access to the transformative potential of play.
The presence of Mattel in Barbie causes a breakdown of the metaphysics of Barbie Land established at the film's outset, suggestive of the powerful presence of another invisible child figure: the child as consumer. Mattel, unlike the rest of the Real World, seems to be governed by some of the same logic of play seen in Barbie Land. There is the sense that the board and CEO take a child-like pleasure in cosplaying their managerial roles. The CEO leads meetings with pink drumsticks in his hands, and delights in the use of corporate jargon such as ‘EOD’. He accepts Aaron Dinkins’ (Connor Swindells) urgent message about Barbie's presence in LA as ‘a whisper’, mimicking the playground game. When Barbie escapes the box, the chase scene that ensues is comical and exaggerated, with the characters moving through the space in illogical yet entertaining ways that mirror the use of movement in the Barbie Land scenes. This parallel suggests that the Mattel staff could also be dolls in a children's game. This depiction of Mattel serves a tonal function, preventing a loss of the film's carefully constructed whimsy, but these scenes also have the effect of suggesting the presence of a child agent shaping events. This child agent is playing not only a child but a consumer, who shapes the market forces that govern Mattel. Immediately after Ken has declared Barbie's Dreamhouse his Mojo Dojo Casa House within Barbie Land, the scene cuts to Real World, in which the Mattel CEO roller blades whilst on the phone to a Mattel employee. This employee explains that ‘these Mojo Dojo Casa Houses are literally flying off the shelves. The kids are clamouring for them. Ken is on t-shirts, mugs, it's the number one tattoo. Warner Bros. have started auditions for the Ken Movie, which is already a blockbuster hit’. It is never established whether there is a child playing with Ken in the Real World, as is the case with Barbie. The role of the playing child within this chain of cause and effect is unclear, but this exchange nonetheless has the effect of invoking the child as consumer, whose ‘clamouring’ for certain toys governs what Mattel will produce. Crucially, as implied from the heavily gendered marketing of the Mojo Dojo Casa House, the child consumer invoked in this case is a boy child. For the CEO, who ‘got into this business because of little girls and their dreams’, this is the wrong sort of child consumer. Ken's actions in Barbie Land are disruptive not only for their introduction of patriarchy to a previously matriarchal society but for their undermining of the girl-consumer, whose purchasing power is to be courted and preserved.
As I have already noted, the metaphysics of Barbie Land, as a parallel dimension governed by the logic of play and corresponding in some vague sense to playing children in the Real World, quickly falls apart. The film itself acknowledges this and incorporates it for comic effect. When Sasha asks, ‘do giant hands come in and play with you?’, Barbie scoffs: ‘No, that's crazy’. When Aaron Dinkins asks, ‘Is Barbie Land like an alternate reality, or is it a place where your imagination …?’, he is cut off with a chorus of ‘Yes’ from the Executive Board. As audience proxies in these situations, outsiders to Barbie Land asking reasonable questions, Aaron and Gloria are discouraged from thinking too hard about the specific relationship between Barbie Land and the Real World. Barbie is not science fiction or fantasy, and the metaphysical premise is as robust as it needs to be in order to serve the central comedy-drama, which concerns the character development of Barbie and, to a lesser extent, of Gloria. For Gloria, play is a site of nostalgia, allowing her access to the joys of playing with Barbies as a child and to the ‘weird, dark and crazy’ parts of herself that she has repressed. Whilst Weird Barbie represents a subversive form of play that has a liberatory potential, her presence can also attest to Mattel's ever-evolving ability to ‘court the mainstream, accommodate the margin, and even provide a permitted space for (not too) subversive play’ (Rand, 1995: 92). As indicated by Gloria's idea for Ordinary Barbie, who ‘just has a flattering top, and she wants to get through the day feeling kinda good about herself’, dolls are a way for her to find affirmation in the mundanity of being an adult woman. Indeed, Ordinary Barbie represents the feminist ethics of the film, which sees Barbie renounce her perfect life as Stereotypical Barbie in order to become ordinary human Barbara Handler. This ethic tells women that they can be whatever they want to be but also resists the idea that women have to be exceptional in order to be valued. Crucially, this ethic states that this freedom to be anything and nothing is something that can be easily marketed, packaged and sold.
Conclusion: is Barbie for children?
Gerwig's Barbie displays a profound interest in the transformative and liberatory potential of play. It is Gloria's ‘playing wrong’ that allows for both her and Barbie's moves towards self-actualisation, and it is Weird Barbie who possesses the wisdom to facilitate this. There has been much discussion since Barbie was released – on parents’ blogs, on forums, by journalists – about whether the film is for children. An example from the Independent cites profanity and references to genitalia and death as reasons for caution from parents wishing to take their children to see the film (Parkel, 2023). My goal in this article has not been to determine whether this is a children's film. Many children will have watched Barbie, and their appreciation or enjoyment of it will doubtless have been as variable and idiosyncratic as that of the film's large adult audience. The prevalence of such articles as the one from the Independent, and their invocation of the need to protect child cinema-goers, is noteworthy in itself, pointing to perennial anxieties about the innocence of children. And yet the film's classification as PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK is also noteworthy when considering that this is a film about one of the most popular children's toys of the past sixty years. When considered in light of the film's attitude to childhood, as I have explored here, Gerwig's choice to include elements that would warrant such a rating speaks to the function of children's play within Barbie as a vehicle for nostalgia and feminist self-discovery. In establishing Barbie Land as governed by the logic of play, Barbie makes a core set of assumptions about the normative play scripted by Barbie, with minimal recourse to depictions of actual playing children. In opposition to this, Weird Barbie represents the liberatory potential of a subversive mode of play, whilst Sasha represents the limits of this subversion, returning her rebellious teenage cynicism to the naivety of childhood in the service of her mother's character development. Mattel's presence invokes the girl consumer as a powerful force, whilst the film's commodity feminist message reveals a limited interest in girl children beyond this marketing power. Gerwig's representations of childhood and children's play offer them up both as vessels for adult desires and aspirations. In doing so, Barbie uses the innocence perennially associated with childhood to conceal the marriage of feminist values with corporate capitalism that characterises Barbie as she moves forward into the twenty-first century.