Andrea Nevins, director of the seminal Barbie documentary 'Tiny Shoulders,' explores the dynamics behind Barbie's escape to the real world.
The gift Ruth Handler offered young girls when she invented the doll 65 years ago was the opportunity to imagine what was then utterly unimaginable: an adulthood of their own. Dolls before this were baby dolls, meant to allow little girls to rehearse the inevitable end of a woman’s story. With this doll, a girl could play-act a world in which she could be a doctor or an astronaut or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company . She could even own her own dream home.
Roadblocks exist in the adult world and that has been Barbie’s problem since the moment of her invention. As soon as the interpretation of her is taken out of a child’s point of view and is seen through the lens of an adult, everything changes. The doll instantly becomes not a toy but a symbol of all the contradictions of modern womanhood.
And so it’s when the adult world intrudes into Barbie Land that Gerwig’s Barbie’s unshakeable optimism turns to existential dread. The dolls are only meant to exist to spark the imaginations of children, not adults, and the tear in the fabric of the universe is when an adult begins to play with the doll. The character Gloria is a working mother struggling with questions of meaning and self-worth as her maturing daughter begins to push her away.
She begins to play with the doll, imagining costumes for her that bespeak human mid-life crisis concerns, including Full Body Cellulite Barbie and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie. And because an adult is playing with this doll, imbuing her with middle-age concerns,
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