I went to see the Barbie movie with my 39 year old daughter;
neither she nor her friends owned a Barbie doll when they were young. Cards on
the table – I am a psychologist interested in cultural evolution, I was a
consultant for an international toy company for 10 years, and I have been
horse-mad ever since I can remember. Understandably, I have a few concerns
about this movie.
Barbie is a fun movie on many levels. It is hugely
entertaining at times; I particularly liked the weirdo Barbie, and the wise old
woman towards the end of the film. Barbie is already having a profound effect
on culture – evidence the number of movie songs in the charts, the predicted
effect on the fashion industry, the nostalgia effect.
The opening scenes of the Barbie movie show monolithic
Barbie (referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey) towering above young girls playing with
baby dolls and prams. This creates a massive shift in these young girls’
understanding; they begin to destroy their baby dolls, smashing them against
rocks. Am I the only one who felt a little uncomfortable with this scene? It’s
fine for girls to show their feelings, anger even – but if you have visited
Cambodia’s Killing Fields then perhaps you will know why I felt the scene wasn’t
entirely appropriate.
There were no Barbie dolls when I was young but I know
enough to realise one of the most popular ones, the horse rider Barbie, was
absent from the movie. You can see that this would interfere with the storyline
as horses are later equated with male power. Recently I have been struggling to
explain the place that horses have in the play and imagination of young girls.
But this particular aspect of a young girl’s experience, playing with horses
and riders, even if it isn’t Barbie, Play Mobil for instance, is entirely
absent from the movie.
In the movie Ken sees men riding horses in the Real
World and equates this with power; it changes his perspective and when he
returns to Barbie World he changes the balance of power. This includes having constantly
moving images of horses on the walls of his ‘mojo dojo casa house’. There is
even some implication that horses are power in and of themselves?
As a British viewer of Barbie I felt as
though some references were passing me by.
Why was Barbie visiting a gynaecologist at the end of the film? There could
have been so many reasons; possibly depending on whether you are British or
American. A British review by a man who governed this country, until recently, dismisses
the Barbie film as, ‘a rallying cry for humans to have more babies’. It’s not
that simple.
There were many other instances in the film where I
felt that the US cultural experience of this film would be different to the
British one. For example, the reference to the storming of the capitol
buildings after the US elections completely passed me by until I read about it.
In this piece I have only focussed on some concerns
with Barbie. I am convinced that this film is going to have an ongoing effect
on culture. It will be interesting to see. What do other people think? Have I taken
it too far with my criticism or maybe not gone far enough?
