i wish i never met you (babygirl) // tried to walk (b1a4) // every day i am trying new techniques to make myself disappear (e.e. scott) // eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (dir. michel gondry) // eventually (tame impala) // spring day (bts) // the dark interval: letters on loss, grief, and transformation (rainer maria rilke) // letters to ria pt.2 (@aeturnusapientia) // autumn leaves (bts) // words to that effect (john ashbery) // calling a wolf a wolf: poems (kaveh akbar) // nothing but strawberries (sue zhao @blossomfully) // reply 1988
“Suburban Shopper” Barbie is probably the easiest place to start, because it’s Barbie’s most 1950s housewife-y look. It’s Barbie going shopping in the most chic way possible. This look seems to be copied from a cover of Vogue:
Of course that’s nothing like what actual American women looked like while doing their shopping. They looked a lot more like this:
The faces on the Barbieland Mt Rushmore include the original Barbie (1959), Original Christie (1968) (not the first black doll, but the first black *character* in the brand), Oriental Barbie (1981) (shes the first Asian Barbie and the originator of the Kira sculpt), and California Dream Teresa (1987) (she’s the first Latina Barbie friend).
It was so important to have Barbie look at that woman in the bus stop and tell her she’s beautiful. Cause, like Barbie herself says, she (as an idea) doesn’t have an end. As Stereotypical Barbie, she’s meant to be pretty and fun and that’s it.
But she shows that beauty doesn’t end when you get old. Aging isn’t the end of your story, just another phase of it. That old woman is beautiful, and it’s good that she knows it.
That’s why Barbie ultimately chooses to become human. She wants to experience that new and different kind of beauty; not just her physical appearance, but that of a life well lived. She wants scars and wrinkles and cellulite. Barbie’s end is that she lives as a whole narrative rather than some eternal object of visual pleasure.
One thing I appreciate about Barbie was the emphasis on age.
I was emotional when Barbie told the old woman how beautiful she was, and when Ruth came in and helped her become human.
It was also the fact that America Ferrera was the one having the crisis that caused Barbie to do the same.
The whole concept of the toy doesn’t end in childhood. Cause she is an idea; Barbie is forever. She’s everything. She’s meant to inspire women to keep going for what they dream. You don’t age out of these ideas, they grow with you, just like how Margot Robbie grew with America Ferrera.
And also the way Barbie and Ken are role playing heterosexuality without any inherent sexuality of their own, without any understanding of what it means, or even any genitals at all! Just pretty-girl + handsome-guy = obviously a couple. And the way it fucks them both up! Because they’re both stereotypes, neither of them is a specialist version, no brain surgery or pilots license or Nobel prize for either of them. They’re just assigned the roles of Every Man and Every Woman. And Ken ends up doing Way Too Much because he’s hanging his entire self-worth on being important to Barbie. And Barbie just isn’t interested in him, she was assigned a boyfriend she didn’t ask for and doesn’t want and doesn’t know what to do with, just because that’s what society expects of men and women, that they will necessarily couple up and fall in love because… that’s what they do. Regardless of any personal quality of either party.
It’s about heteronormativity and amatonormativity and the unrealistic expectations society sets boys and girls up for from infancy. Barbie and Ken are every pair of toddlers sharing a sandbox while the adults around them call them each other’s little “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” even though neither party understands or is capable of understanding the implied meaning of that. Or wants to.
It’s a literal funhouse mirror of that weird pressure put on kids to perform heterosexuality from an early age. It examines how that leaves us unprepared for the complicated reality of actual relationships even if it turns out that you are heterosexual and do want sex and romance. Boys and girls aren’t really allowed to be just kids on the same team, so they grow up into men and women who generally want very different things from each other and are trained to look for it in everybody because anybody is better than nobody, and try to force it to work.
Barbie and Ken letting each other go in the end was perfect. Barbie the Every Woman realizing that she doesn’t have to be special, she just has to be, and Ken the Every Man realizing he has to seek validation elsewhere and lean on his fellow Kens for emotional support, WHICH THEY GIVE.
