Real Girl in a Barbie World

On how memory and metaphor collapse in the new Barbie revival

Barbie was a fixture in the ensemble of things that was childhood in the 2000s. The name itself triggers dregs of sensation - the taste of hot potato chips, its flavour toned down by the saccharine icing of birthday cake on the same paper plate, of the sounds of pop corn at that store in 8th cross, and the coarse rustling of faux tulle dresses. It is an ensemble because it is de-personalised, far removed by space and time, to be picked up and examined at leisure, like a curio in the shop that is your memory.

But, of course, childhood isn’t simply an object that one can throw away at whim, as much we desire so. Childhood creeps like childhood’s monsters, from under the bed, while crossing a street or looking down a high balcony. And sometimes, it bursts into our vision, pink and shiny with glamour, and brings with it, its innocuous horrors and banal evil.

But it is so with Barbie. More metaphor than memory.

The Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector describing the mime-like quality of an ad for a soft-drink conglomerate, wrote, “It’s a film about automatic people acutely and solemnly aware that they are automatic and there there’s no escape.” To not be automatic, was to achieve some kind of Godliness. She might as well have been speaking of what the effect of Barbie was on us, growing up, condemned right from childhood to not achieve Godliness. Brown girls, far from the American home of Mattel, would swing and swirl to the voice of Aqua singing, “I’m a Barbie Girl.” There was no escape from it, we were automatic. After all, it was about our beloved Barbie. But unlike Lispector’s automatic people, we weren’t even aware that the song was not innocuous, like the Barbie world we had fashioned for her, and by extension, for ourselves. The film, where we were automatic people, wasn’t our own. A Rolling Stones interview tells us that the song is about taking the “piss out of that kind of perfect girl” and that “it’s OK to be the person you are and look the way you look and be confident in that.” The automatic girls weren’t aware of this. It was in our heads, a celebration of the perfect girl presented to us, an invitation to imitate her. After all, to be called a ‘barbie doll’ was a compliment of the highest order. So, then, we danced to charming lyrics that went, I’m a blond bimbo girl in a fantasy world // Dress me up, make it tight, I’m your dolly. So then, in the weight of an internalised, rather foreign misogyny, we danced in the only we were allowed to.

Sometimes, the automatic girls also shopped - for clothes, for dolls and for doll houses. Broey Deschanel, talking of Love, at the End of History, describes the depiction of the ‘90s chick-flick type of gal as the poster-girl of ‘post-feminism.’ She lives in an ostensibly acultural, apolitical world, where her liberation is sold to her behind glossy mall doors. Feminism is now commodified. While Deschanel talks of a very particular zeitgeist, there are parallels to how Barbie was sold to us. Is it any surprise at all that it is being made by Greta Gerwig who translated a ‘90s Sacramento white girl’s very specific dream of going to ‘New Hampshire, where writers live in the woods’ into an homage to an almost universal teenage angst and heartache?

We, the confident, urban, middle-class daughters of the Indian 2000s, too were apparently inhabiting an apolitical and acultural world. Our parents had apparently shunned the backwardness of their villages and tier-three towns. We were daughters raised like sons - and one way of showing this, was that we were allowed to buy what we desired, which meant dolls. One in a ball gown, another blonde and in a mini skirt, possibly another one as a doctor or a teacher. How many dolls we had was a quantifier of how much we were loved by our parents, and how content we were as children. None of this is to say that the violence of our families, schools and workplaces didn’t come home with us, like it did for so many of us. Didn’t we, after all, break a limb of our dolls sometimes and throw her away when her nylon hair fell out or her plastic face became disfigured?

Yes, the Barbie fuss fizzled out. We threw them away, and stopped playing altogether. But History rhymes, they say. Every store in the mall now has a line of clothes in fuchsia. I am tempted to buy some. Dua Lipa’s song is ridiculously catchy. Watch me dance, she sings. Am I, then, again an automatic girl, but now solemnly aware of my inability to escape?