Barbie Biographer on What’s Really Behind the ‘Barbie’ Oscar Snubs (Guest Column)

A mere 17 days after its July 2023 launch, Barbie earned a billion {dollars} — to not point out optimistic opinions and a broad fan base that stored coming again and bringing associates. Mattel’s promoting could have initially lured viewers to the theater, however the movie itself made them return and proselytize.

In a simply world — even a not-especially-feminist world — the movie’s guiding forces, director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie, would have obtained Oscar nominations of their respective particular person classes for conceiving, directing and appearing on this phenomenon. However that didn’t occur. As a substitute, the Academy acknowledged Ryan Gosling’s efficiency as Ken—or as @yosomichael posted on X: “Ken getting nominated and not Barbie is honestly so fitting for a film about a man discovering the power of patriarchy in the Real World.”

Social media erupted in a Vesuvius of indignant memes. The heated dialog — with slurs, accusations and conspiracy theories — continues, and we are actually arguably at the backlash-to-the-backlash stage. I’ve been learning the doll, its equipment and the relationship of those objects to societal change for greater than 30 years. What pursuits me is that this: Why did this film incite such ardour? What’s it about the Barbie doll that has made it a flashpoint for controversy since its introduction in 1959?

The solutions I discovered appear sophisticated and typically contradictory—since the doll has by no means held a single that means to observers. It’s a Rorschach ink blot onto which individuals have projected their very own beliefs and prejudices.

Barbie’s admirers had been, I feel, pissed off by the Academy’s resolution to categorise its script as “adapted” materials. The Academy, they understood, had a precedent for making use of that adjective to characters that had beforehand existed in different types. However whereas Barbie’s categorization could have adhered to the letter of the legislation, many felt it violated the legislation’s spirit. Barbie shouldn’t be based mostly on any present revealed textual content.

What Gerwig captured — and, remarkably, was permitted by Mattel to seize — is the ragged, inspiring method that many little ladies have performed with their Barbie dolls over time. It’s as if Gerwig externalized the wealthy, expansive internal worlds of feminine kids.

To be clear: Mattel didn’t invent “Barbie Land,” the idealized world of creativeness and open-ended risk. Nor did Gerwig. However she picked up on its existence. Barbie land is a metaphor; it embodies the doll’s slogan in the Nineteen Eighties: “We girls can do anything.” Barbie Land is as a lot a way of thinking as it’s a plastic play set. 

Barbie Land can be what vanishes when a bit of woman leaves childhood, when she should confront the actuality of girls’s circumscribed function in a patriarchal society. 

Barbie Land is a spot of sexual innocence, the place girls can appear like, properly, Barbie, and never be eyed lasciviously by males. And never simply salaciously, however, as Robbie’s Barbie notes when she arrives in the Actual World, “with an undertone of violence.”

Barbie Land — and the lack of it — is an expertise to which Barbie’s field workplace numbers counsel many ladies may relate.

I’ve watched the crowd watch Barbie a number of occasions in theaters, each right here and in Europe. Although the awakening of Robbie’s doll is each broadly caricatured and metaphorical, it appeared to ring a bell. From what I noticed, girls go away the theater with a way of having been seen.

Some individuals have in contrast Barbie’s plot to 1 from mythology, the place a goddess comes down from some Olympian place and adapts to the imperfect human world. I feel its bigger lesson — and presumably the lesson gleaned from awards season — is from Daedalus and Icarus: Don’t fly too near the solar.

That, in a method, is the message of Ruth Handler, Barbie’s inventor, who seems briefly in the film, portrayed by Rhea Perlman. She co-founded Mattel in 1944 and continued to run the firm for 2 extra many years, by which period it was publicly traded and a part of the Fortune 500. In the film, she mutters about “legal” troubles, that are by no means totally defined.

What occurred is that this: In the Seventies, when Mattel was accused of economic improprieties, Ruth was kicked out of the firm she based and took the fall.

My mom “was hated because she was a strong, powerful woman,” her son Ken (she named the doll for him) informed me in 1993. He believed her male colleagues “resented her deeply and they conspired against her.”

4 male executives — together with Seymour Rosenberg and comptroller Yasuo Yoshida — had been additionally charged with crimes: violating federal securities, mail and banking legal guidelines by getting ready false monetary data. However Ruth was the public face of the firm. She was abrasive; and she or he — not they — underwent a brutal high-profile take down.

Are Gerwig and Robbie experiencing an identical take down?

Effectively, no. The establishments that appear to be withholding trophies all have believable deniability: The administrators department of the Academy is usually made up of outdated males, so in fact they couldn’t relate to Barbie. And the invention of a brand-new Golden Globe for industrial achievement was a random coincidence, not a pointed method to honor Barbie with out applauding the particular achievements of its director and star.

And much be it from me to weigh in on the widespread notion of conspiracy that has gripped the web. 

But the scenario jogged my memory of that scene in the film the place Ken tells a sinister company sort: “You guys aren’t doing patriarchy very well.”

And the company sort rejoins: “We’re actually doing it very well. We’re just better at hiding it.”

M.G. Lord is an affiliate professor at USC in addition to the writer of Eternally Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Actual Doll