Danish artist: “Barbie’s the breakthrough the film industry needs”
Opinion piece published in Kulturmonitor - 01.08.2023. By Augusta Atla
Published in Kulturmonitor - 01.08.2023. By Augusta Atla
In this debate post, the Danish artist Augusta Atla suggests that the Hollywood film Barbie has, for once and for all, nailed women’s entrée into the film industry.
The newly released Hollywood film Barbie has boosted the cultural phenomenon known as the pink movement and broken every world record. I am certain that even one of Elon Musk’s space satellites has detected Barbie’s pink.
The campaign by Mattel Inc (the manufacturer of the Barbie doll) and Warner Brothers for Barbie was meticulously constructed: in fact, you would swear that Warner Brothers was conducted a US presidential campaign. But in this case it was not about winning ‘voters’ in a single continent, but throughout the entire world. Hollywood has triumphed, proving once again that it has a cultural-propagation weapon that the Russians did not update or deploy in today’s Russia: the art and industry of film.
After little more than a week following the film’s premiere, it is evident that, in terms of global earnings, Barbie is going to end up in the billion dollar club. What’s more, the film has set a new earnings record for a female director and a new 2023 record for the ‘3-day’ premiere, even saving cinemas around the world from total extinction by putting streaming services on the back burner.
No matter who you are in Hollywood or in the film industry – or what you think about the film – it is probably difficult for professionals within the film industry not to take their hat off to Barbie. Although cinemas in Denmark (as opposed to those abroad) have been faring pretty well post-corona, the film shows that audiences the world over are ready to return to the cinema, even spotlighting the fact that you can make money from a completely new audience: so far 65% of the film’s audience have been women and girls.
To cut a long story short, internationally, women seem to have rescued cinemas from a grave post-corona crisis.
New balance in the box office machine
All these records have opened up a completely new, extremely important portal in the Hollywood galaxy: gender equality.
The fact that a female director and an audience comprising 65% women can earn so much money is an event in itself and will improve work opportunities for female directors in the future.
Information from the US organisation Women in Film reveals that only around 14% of top-earning Hollywood film directors are women. Even though here in Denmark things are rosier when it comes to female directors, there is no doubt that Barbie will also pave the way for an increasing number of new types of films featuring female protagonists and new narratives about women as the focal point: something to which more and more film production companies run by women have been devoting their activities. Just take Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment. As it happens, the latter was one of the co-producers on Barbie.
Barbie has, for once and for all, nailed women’s entrée into the film industry.
Perhaps even Tom Cruise needs to get his head around the idea that, in contradiction of what his advisors have so far calculated, there is a whole new audience out there. His latest film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, in cinemas right now, is lagging far behind Barbie in terms of box-office income.
All this means that the film’s director, Greta Gerwig, is simply in the process of adjusting the gender balance in Hollywood and the film industry in general. Whether or not you like the film, she has successfully added a new chapter to film history.
In this light, I see Greta Gerwig as the Joan of Arc of the film industry. Yes, both the Barbie doll and Barbie the movie have their origin in the world of mass consumption and capitalism, but unfortunately this is the only way for female artists – once and for all – to gain respect in the world of film, breaking the glass ceiling in terms of revenue and producing films that rank alongside blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible, The Super Mario Brothers, Top Gun, Spider-Man, The Avengers and Star Wars.
We live in a very one-sided cinematic world, in which the most profitable films pretty much only depict the play universe of boys. So, Barbie paves the way for a new yin and yang balance in the box office machine. In its own mathematical equation, the Barbie doll itself is about the same thing – equality. So, in a strange way, everything adds up.
A reminder of gender construction
As well as breaking the glass ceiling and introducing new gender equality parameters into the film industry, Barbie is actually good, touching and fun with a top-notch Hollywood aesthetic that harks back to a number of classic films, ranging from The Wizard of Oz and Grease to The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The invention of Barbie – and adult-like dolls for children – cannot be attributed to Mattel Inc. Such dolls date all the way back to ancient Greece. Like several museums throughout the world, the Met in New York has a collection of ancient Greek ceramic dolls. But the intentionally political thing about the invention of Barbie in 1959 is the fact that she did not get married and give birth: something we totally understood as children. We followed Ruth Handler’s (Barbie’s inventor) exhortation and imagined our independence in the real world of the future in roles outside marriage and motherhood.
As Billie Eilish sings in the film’s theme song: ‘What Was I Made For?’
Greta Gerwig's film shows how, even though heterosexuality remained the brand we all grew up with, it also provided us with a tool that enabled us to play with the concept of gender. Barbie provided us with an image and a ritual with which to explore Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. We learned to step back and look at the construction of gender. I am sure that this is the reason for the success of Barbie the movie: the millions of girls and women who remember and acknowledge how they played ‘performing gender’ and learned to behave critically in the patriarchy of the real world.
Margot Robbie plays Stereotypical Barbie on a journey of development: playing the role so well that we gradually see Barbie with her own soul, just as we invested her with a soul when we played with her as children.
What about Ken?
Right now, the whole world is discussing the character of Ken and his lost or soft male role – the polar opposite to Barbie, as portrayed in the film.
Even Weekendavisen and Danish TV’s Deadline are discussing the character, quite forgetting the fact that Ken is a doll, and that film is a free art form. Both look at the characters in the film’s script as real male (and female) roles in the real world.
The funny thing about the Ken character stealing the scene in the film is that he never stole the scene when we played with him as a child. Ken is not a commentary on man in the real world. He is simply the result of the fact that girls did not see themselves in the Ken doll. He is, therefore, superfluous in Barbie Land: quite literally for the girls who play with him in our world. The film has just transformed this into a comic Ken plot.
Even though in Weekendavisen Anne Sophie Hermansen suggests that the film is about “the best opportunities for women alone”, that is not the case. Neither the Barbie doll nor the Barbie film represents an escapist ideal of a matriarchy in Barbie Land, let alone a dream of a true-world matriarchy or a subordination of men. On the contrary. Because we do not yet have gender equality in the real world; we have Barbie in various liberated and prestigious roles and a variety of top career positions of which the doll helps us dream.
Barbie was intended as a tool for women’s liberation. It would be a pretty sad outcome if we never achieved in the real world what the Barbie doll does in the world of our imagination.
The anarchic, free nature of comedy
What’s more, in her Weekendavisen article, Anne Sophie Hermansen quite forgets the fact that Greta Gerwig’s film is a comedy. What if this film had been about Ken as a person as opposed to a doll, and about a real-world matriarchy? It’s a film. It’s art. It’s comedy. No one I know has ever accused Monty Python of being politically incorrect; everyone knows it is a comedy and that John Cleese is a comic actor. So what is people’s problem with Barbie?
It is even more puzzling when you think about the infinite array of sexist narratives in film history, ranging from Pretty Woman to The Godfather. Actually, I cannot think of any film scripts that aren’t rooted in a patriarchal view of the world. Even though feminist ideas do exist in the films of Lars von Trier and Ingmar Bergman, women still flail around and suffer in the patriarchy.
How refreshing to watch a fantasy film about Barbie rooted in completely new (girl) worlds and with an entirely new perspective.
Then I can better understand the terrified, literal reaction in countries where there is no freedom of speech, (free) art or democracy.
The success of Barbie lies in the very fact that we do not yet have gender equality – even in Denmark. Even Malala Yousafzai – a Pakistani Nobel laureate, human rights advocate and feminist – has posted a photo of herself on her Instagram profile in an outsized Barbie doll box, thereby stressing how important this debate still is.
All in all, Greta Gerwig not only sends Barbie and Mattel skyrocketing into the orbit of the film industry’s billion-dollar club, she also paves the way for much increased earnings for women directors in Hollywood, unearths a brand new female audience, invents a new language for millions of girls around the world for their play and for the social constructions of gender (#patriarchy) – and flies a flag for the anarchic, free nature of comedy.
“I kept thinking: Humans are the people that make dolls and then get mad at the dolls,” Gerwig explained. “We create them and then they create us and we recreate them and they recreate us. We’re in constant conversation with inanimate objects.” Greta Gerwig
