When a junior staffer at Mattel receives word from the FBI that Barbie and Ken have been spotted rollerblading in Santa Monica, he runs to the elevator and hits the button marked “all the way up.” The penthouse boardroom he barges into has a panoramic view of Los Angeles, disrupted only by an adjacent skyscraper bearing the Warner Brothers logo. Mattel’s CEO, as played by Will Ferrell, is presiding over a meeting of the toy company’s senior management in a matching pink shirt and tie; everyone seated around the heart-shaped table is a man. "We sell dreams, imagination, and sparkle,” Ferrell tells the boys, all of them wearing navy suits. “And when you think of sparkle, what do you think of next? Female agency."
With Barbie, Greta Gerwig seems to be gleefully biting the hand that feeds her. The movie was produced by Mattel’s nascent film division, the first in what will surely be a long line of Hollywood entertainments that mine its mother lode of IP — J.J. Abrams is attached to a Hot Wheels project, while the screenwriter behind Cocaine Bear is working on a treatment for the Magic 8 Ball. But with the company’s management acting as a clear antagonist in Barbie’s quest for feminist self-empowerment in the world of the film, shouldn’t the real-world executives at Mattel be concerned that the tens of millions of people who have already seen Barbie in theaters will come away with the impression that their burgeoning franchise factory is morally hollow?
As CEO, Ferrell tries to convince Margot Robbie’s Barbie to go back in the literal, life-size box that sits in the boardroom, then leads his executives on a multidimensional chase after his assistant helps her escape. Once in BarbieLand, he becomes incensed after one of the Barbies confronts him about an all-male corporate team overseeing a toy for girls. “I am the son of a mother,” Ferrell protests, “and the nephew of a female aunt!” His hauteur marks him as a villainous mascot for the lip-service most corporations pay to gender equality.
Ahead of Barbie’s release, the real-world CEO of Mattel, Ynon Kriez (who is, indeed, a man), told Variety, “We take our brands very seriously. We take what we do very seriously. But we don’t take ourselves too seriously.” Still, Gerwig shared some of the friction that her vision for Barbie provoked at the company with the New Yorker’s Alex Barasch for his revealing story about Mattel’s plans to seize Hollywood by force. Rather than the metafictional presence of the company in the film, the suits at Mattel seemed more troubled by Gerwig’s resolution to include a number of failed products, like a figurine named Allen (“All of Ken’s clothes fit him!”) and a pregnant doll called Midge (when Ferrell glimpses Midge in the movie, he grumbles, “I thought we discontinued her”).
Despite what Barasch calls Gerwig’s “gentle mockery of Mattel,” he points out the clear impact of the film on the corporation’s bottom line: “A fifty-dollar doll resembling Robbie as she appears in the film, unveiled in June, has sold out; so has a seventy-five-dollar model of Stereotypical Barbie’s pink Corvette. Brand collaborations have yielded a glut of Barbie-themed offerings, from candles to luggage and frozen yogurt.”
While all publicity may really be good publicity, I can’t help but think that the latitude Mattel afforded Gerwig has more to do with the way her film ultimately endorses the Barbie product family. There are a few moments in Barbie where the premise of the doll comes under scrutiny, most notably when a black-cled preteen in the Real World castigates Robbie: “You set the feminist movement back 50 years! You destroyed girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism.” But that moment is swiftly forgotten, the preteen in question eventually coming around on the dolls, even to the extent she helps them save BarbieLand from patriarchy.
Gerwig doesn’t have any real interest in critiquing Barbie’s source IP. The opening scenes are populated by a diverse array of career-oriented Barbies — most notably Issa Rae as President Barbie and Alexandra Shipp as Nobel Laureate Barbie — with cameos from a Barbie who uses a wheelchair and another with a prosthetic arm. This inclusive world is treated as the standard Barbie universe, when really the first Black Barbie wasn’t introduced until twenty years after the original debuted in 1959, and the first Barbie with a disability wasn’t sold until 1997 (that product rollout turned into a fiasco once kids discovered the wheelchair was too wide to fit through the doorway of the Barbie Dreamhouse). Despite these expansions of the Barbieverse, the doll’s impossibly skinny body remained unchanged until 2016, when a “curvy” version was introduced.
In the film, none of the political and market pressure that forced Mattel to gradually expand the line to encompass more than one farcical vision of femininity is acknowledged. Even the deployment of Midge and Allen serves only to underscore the caprices of capitalism, not criticize Mattel’s approach to selling toys. Indeed, the sort-of inclusive BarbieWorld that Mattel has emphasized in recent years is treated as the baseline, nevermind the four decade tip-toe that led up to it. In classic neoliberal fashion, that means that the actual differences between the many varieties of Barbie that populate the movie exist only for appearance’s sake: Gerwig makes no attempt to disambiguate one type of woman’s experience from another, or even acknowledge the existence of women who aren’t interested in dating a Ken.
Just as in 1959, the stereotypical version of Barbie played by Robbie serves as a stand-in for all womankind — everyone else is just there to cheer her on. When one of Ferrell’s underlings points out that a Ken-centric product line is selling lot hot cakes, he responds, "You think I'm doing this for the bottom line? I’m here for little girls and their dreams… in the least creepy way possible!" That line is meant to get a laugh, but it’s no throwaway: this is the CEO of Mattel confirming his ongoing commitment to the pint-sized consumers that built the company into a $5 billion brand.
Clearly, I’ve got movies on the brain. Earlier this week, The Baffler published my essay on Air, Flamin’ Hot, and BlackBerry, a set of films based on consumer products that represents Hollywood’s latest offering to the altar of intellectual property. What’s most striking about these movies is that, for all the profound differences between the products that inspired them, they follow a very similar narrative template, with whatever personal drama each character might be contending with swept aside so the filmmaker can focus on the most serious matter of all: the battle for market share.
Thanks to the almighty algorithm, I recently discovered that the full run of A Cook’s Tour is available on YouTube. Debuting in 2001, A Cook’s Tour was Anthony Bourdain’s first venture into television, coming hot on the heels of his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential. While Bourdain would go on to master the medium on No Reservations and Parts Unknown, there’s something appealing about how unpolished he is in these early episodes that helped me understand how he managed to become such a beloved figure in the food world. It’s less that he’s a natural on camera — he clearly feels deeply self-conscious, even just when dealing with the junky camcorders that were used to film the show — more that his love of food is completely infectious. From the way he smiles down at a platter of sushi in Tokyo or asks a waiter at the French Laundry to hold a “magnificent beast” of a black truffle up to the camera, it’s impossible not to feel a compulsion to go out into the world and find something delicious to eat.
Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing. You can find me on my website, or kneeling on the carpet with this funky little green grooming tool that is completely overmatched when the bunnies go into a full shed.
Your pal,
Kyle