This is a text about Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s new film. Or rather, this is a text surrounding Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s new film.

This text is not necessarily a proper review of Barbie. Nor does this text contain references to, quotations from, or paraphrases of the Eurodance hit song “Barbie Girl”, released by Aqua in 1997.

This text is only tangentially about Barbie dolls, which were launched in 1959 by Mattel. Just as it is only tangentially about Ken dolls, the first Barbie movies, or other related artifacts.

This is a text that tries to explain the object that is Barbie, in the film. Or, at least, one in which the author tries to explain (herself) this object, the context in which it is situated, and her own biases, nostalgia, and weaknesses.

Last but not least, it would be fair to say the last part of this text contains detailed spoilers about the plot of Barbie.

Memories from a mythological time

It’s the early 2000s – and even though I watch the fall of the Twin Towers live on television, I’m unable to gauge the true proportion of the event and the futures that will have been lost in its wake. One of my main activities, at the time, like so many other children that were born during the post-communist transition, is to daydream about the toys that I see in the commercials on Cartoon Network – and while I’ve already lost all hope of having my own Mouse Trap, and all those miniature, Happy Meal versions of famous toys (Bratz dolls, Furbies, various Disney and Star Wars characters, etc.) can only do so much, there is one doll in particular that I keep on hoping and dreaming about – and that’s Barbie. Not Betty. Not Sindy. Barbie. (I accepted a single no-name doll in my life: a mermaid whose tail changed colors when you put it under hot water.)

The first Barbie I ever get is at age seven, gifted to me by a cousin of my father’s, which, in about a year’s time, is followed by a second one, this time from my godmother who lived abroad, and this one had a twist – it was the Sleeping Beauty Barbie, who had a little switch on the back of her head, which made her close her eyes. (Also, unlike the previous one, she could also raise her arms in a T-shape.) Soon enough, whenever she came back to visit, my godmother followed up with various accessories, a Ken doll, then a black Barbie, the latter of which was simply adored by my mother. I reached the apex of my collection is reached at age nine when my dad’s sister gifts me a white, purple-eyed Barbie pony for my birthday. All of these toys, together with some adjacent extras (a table set, several changes of clothes and shoes), become the centerpiece of any playdate that we hosted at our house in those years – and together with my cousins or my classmates, we invent myriad scenarios that ranging from the domestic to the fantastic. Naturally, among other things, we’d more often than not end up stripping Barbie and Ken naked, examining their shapeless erogenous zones in minute detail, and then bumping them into one another while whispering “Oh, oh, oh!”. Still, at the time, I didn’t really understand why we did this, beyond the fact that I saw something very similar once, on TV, before my mom quickly covered my eyes with her hand.

Speaking of television, this is where, apart from the aforementioned series on Cartoon Network, plus the ones showing Fox Kids and Minimax (an endless roster), I also get to see some animated feature films from time to time – those very first exercises in cinephilia that I saw either on the regular channels (The Addams Family, Babe, The Flintstones – Viva Rock Vegas!, the Home Alone and Richie Rich series), or on the cartoon stations, which would re-run the same handful of titles a few times throughout the year. The supply was quite limited – I saw all of these titles at least 4-5 times –, and was mostly composed of spin-offs and specials of the classical Hanna-Barbera shows (The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones was always my favorite, then the endless series of Scooby Doo flicks – Arabian Nights, Zombie Island, The Witch’s Ghost, Alien Invaders, etc. –, Yogi Bear and Top Cat), later followed by the first CN Studios productions (the brilliant Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter and Samurai Jack features, The Powerpuff Girls Movie, and so on).

Then came the era of Pixar and Dreamworks, with Monsters Inc. and especially Shrek I & II, which we get on a bootleg DVD at some point, and which I will watch over and over again until I learn the lines by heart. They were absolutely futuristic in this landscape, one in which the blend between live-action and animation in The Pagemaster (with Macauly Caulkin!), my favorite of the CN feature films to this day, was more than enough for me to slip into endless reveries about how I could escape into the world of television. And just like All Dogs Go To Heaven or Dumbo made me weep for hours on end (Bambi not so much – in that case, my reaction was one of existential horror, which is pretty similar to what Tarantino described in Cinema Speculation).

Briefly put: it’s the golden age of cartoons, which predated the wide-scale domestic availability of Internet connections by just a few years – and like any given era, it had its apexes: for example, one of them was the heyday of Disney Princess culture (at least, in their animated iteration), soon to be followed by the obsession with W.I.T.C.H., a manga-style series of comic books that were later turned into a lesser-successful animated show. While dominating our desires when it came to the realm of toys, Barbie (who also had her own comic book-style magazine, with strips assembled from professional photographs of the dolls) had somehow failed to win over the small screen.

And that is because Disney’s near-dominance in the field of animated features posed a problem for Barbie’s then-emerging 3-D media empire (which now spans over 40 entries) from the very outset: virtually all the classic stories of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were already reserved. The initial solution found by erstwhile Barbie director Owen Hurley – who helmed the first three features in a series that stretches to the present day – looks ingenious, in context: he decided to adapt two of the most recognizable stories in the field of opera and ballet, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, replacing the lead roles with CGI Barbies and Kens, which were followed up by an adaptation of Rapunzel (which, at the time, has not yet been turned by Disney into Tangled). These are the only Barbie features that I recall seeing – by the time that the rest of them came out on Minimax, I had already transitioned to the gore and ultraviolence of anime, on Animax.

Anime gave way to series, series gave way to cinema. The years swept on by – and many of the material traces of that time vanished into boxes, the houses of others, or into the garbage can. I don’t think I would’ve ended up recalling my Barbies (or, in any case, not anytime soon) if it weren’t for the fact that they, together with every other Barbie doll in the world, had turned into the seeds of a global phenomenon.

The subconscious, its ghosts, and mainstream cinema

In the last few years, I’ve been thinking of Kracauer quite often.

Of all the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School, Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was perhaps the closest of them all to the object of cinema (Walter Benjamin, though providing a tremendous theoretical framework with his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, did not approach it in such a detailed manner, compared to his colleague). Beyond being a pioneer (and ardent advocate) of the concept of cinematic realism in its early stages of development, Kracauer’s most important contribution to film history remains his method of correlating cinematic narratives and latent phenomena, tendencies of society – to be more specific, using cinema as a means to seek an answer to one of the most difficult questions of modernity: how was it possible for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to come to power?

Kracauer obtained his answer by looking at how cinema reflects a certain social subconscious – if films from a particular national space reflect the collective mentality of its inhabitants, their various social predispositions and consensuses, and are thus closely tied to the specific socio-historical context in which they appear, then they also reveal the particular needs that the spectators are satisfying through them. (Alternatively, a film can also question, even act disruptively on, these desires. )

The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Kracauer opined, was a film with a script written in a revolutionary, anti-authoritarian, and anti-military spirit (the struggle against the terrible Caligari and his somnambulist, Cesare) that, in its final form, became a conformist tale, its message perverted by its narrative frame towards a completely opposite direction (that is, everything we see is the hallucinations of a patient who has been committed to a mental asylum). He wrote that the film “exposes the soul that hovers between tyranny and chaos, facing a desperate situation” – and “if it holds true that during the postwar years, most Germans eagerly tended to withdraw from a harsh outer world into the intangible realm of the soul (…) [then] this version faithfully mirrored the general retreat into a shell”.

Precedent – as far as film history is concerned – shows us that cinema (or, at the very least, its branches that are geared towards mass appeal) has a particular tendency in the immediate aftermath of collective trauma: it becomes escapist. The four black walls of the cinema become a place where, for a few dozen minutes, the spectator escapes from tangible reality, whereby the film presented to them fulfills various functions – distracting their attention from the (mostly material, thus political) problems of the present, placating and sweetening said problems under the form of mobilizing narratives, strengthening group cohesion and one’s sense of belonging (to what is usually a national construct – as was the case with the Heimatfilm current). This was most evident in the period that immediately followed the Second World War (with the absolutely extraordinary exception of Italian Neorealism), but was also visible in other parts of the world, in various other circumstances (like the Wuxia films of the 1960s).

Knowing all this, it was quite clear to me, pretty early on in 2020, that by the time all the things we were living through individually and collectively would have become just horrible memories (and thus, its documentary age would also be over), that cinema would undergo this mutation once again – and that it would be global, fit for the size of the pandemic. (Just look at the awful reception that 99% of lockdown movies have been getting lately. Nobody wants to see them anymore.) And the time has finally arrived – and with it, franchise cinema, markedly declining in terms of superhero narratives (and not just artistically – after all, the idea of the magical, supernatural, Deus Ex Machina intervention is also suffering a deep crisis), has revved its engines to full throttle to welcome the era of reopenings, reunions, and returns: John Wick, Mission Impossible, Top Gun, all those CGI remakes of Disney classics, Dune, and so on. As if to tell us that our own lives are enjoying a sequel – so what other narrative formats could be more conducive than this, the Hollywood executives ask rhetorically, busy as they are these days to suppress the biggest strike of its workers in over half a century?

Perhaps the most Kracauerian text, in spirit, that I’ve recently read belongs to Austrian critic Patrick Holzapfel, who wrote the following in his review of the new Indiana Jones (another antiquated cultural juggernaut) for Perlentaucher:

“There are many reasons why one would wish to travel through time. At the cinema, all these reasons lend themselves to being sold. (…) When one travels too often through the past, at some point, they end up encountering themselves. And end up suffocating themselves with self-referentiality (…) This contributes to the general feeling of the irrelevance of a medium that has lost touch with reality. You watch, and then you forget. (…) Cinema no longer creates new myths, but rather, it acts as an administrator of those that have already been told. (…) This endless fascination with what seems to have been lost remains the symptom of a society that tries to justify its present while no longer being able to imagine its future.”

Beyond his very precise diagnosis of the exact hour in mainstream cinema, delivered with the sobriety of a doctor that informs his patient that they’re suffering from an incurable illness, Holzapfel brings into question more than just the collective psychology of the moment, eminently escapist, oriented towards the past, with its paradoxical (even aberrant) relationship with reality and the process of remembrance – he also opens the door to a hauntological understanding of the present moment.

The ghosts of our lives

“Wait, wait, wait – hauntology? What’s this, now? When do we get to Barbie? How long are you going to keep on all with these sad, frowny writers?” Just a bit, promise.

Hauntology is a term that originally appeared in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, where the term is used to explain the latency of Marxist ideas in society even after the fall of the Eastern Bloc – basically, it designates a past that continues to haunt the present, despite the fact that it seems to have faded away. Enter Mark Fisher, the theorist par excellence of the late-capitalist imaginary, who, in Ghosts of my Life, uses Derrida’s concept to coin what he called lost futures: meaning, those particular forms of the future that were promised by the popular culture of modernity, yet failed to materialize due to the conditions of neoliberalism, and whose reminiscences (especially in their political dimension) continue to haunt the contemporary popular cultural imaginary, turning nostalgia for them is a dominant feature of the age.

A cursory glance at the shifts in popular culture from 2015 onwards (which coincides with yet another massive trauma – that of the Syrian refugee crisis), we can see how, in rapid succession, the aesthetics of the last few decades and their spectral unfulfilled futures made a strong comeback in pop culture’s aesthetic imagination. It all started with the vaporwave movement, primitive 3-D renderings, neon triangles, sharp cursive fonts, the resurgence of the Moog, and a fascination with ancient sculpture, going through leggings, mom jeans, and brightly-colored jackets. Then, around 2018, the aesthetics of the early Internet were resuscitated, rock music crept back into the mainstream together with sans-serif fonts and a renewed obsession with Britney Spears, accompanied by leather jackets, the nineties’ take on the fashion of the seventies, striped T-shirts and plastic braided necklaces (and, of course, piercings). Finally, we’ve also gradually returned to some of the most heinous fashion crimes of the early millennium: Christina Aguilera shorts, cargo pants, kitschy butterfly prints, and spaghetti tank tops.

If these promised futures have been stolen from us, all that’s left is to consume and buy these materialized specters that remain of them – our nostalgia has been instrumentalized, turned against us, used as a painkiller for the extreme, compounding and aggravating anxieties of the last decade. In all of these years, which have seen both enormous social movements concerning human rights (of women, people of color, queer people, neurodivergent people, and other marginalized categories), as well as vicious counter-reactions, in all this time, one specter, in particular, remained hidden. Hidden, cautiously waiting for the tectonic shifts of society and history to enter a vague and only apparent remission, anticipating the perfect moment for it to emerge from its ghostly closet so that it could haunt the world in a manner so efficient that it would end up dominating it.

That specter is Barbie.

Objet petit (B)a(rbie)

Long before it was even released, Barbie (together with the film it shared dates with, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – a fact which sparked the most intensive round of memes in recent memory) had already established itself as the pop-cultural event of the year. With its massive appeal, aimed particularly at millennial audiences, but also reaching out to younger audiences as well as Gen X-ers, this fourth feature film by Greta Gerwig – by now a heavyweight of the American industry, capable of bringing both general and high-brow audiences to the table – broke the Internet from the very moment that it was announced, and that it will star Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, that is, two of the most handsome (in the sense of classical beauty standards) people on earth. (The records the two films have shattered in their first week speak for themselves.)

Still, what led to this explosion of enthusiasm, beyond the popularity of the doll, beyond the need for escapism after the massive trauma of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, beyond the explosion of Y2K aesthetics? It is precisely the fact that we are faced with yet another (re)administered myth of a past in which the future was not yet lost, folded into an extreme referentiality and sense of irony typical of millennial audiences, taking the form of a narrative that regards one of the most sublimated objects of our childhoods: the Barbie doll, now escaping from the old, dusty boxes in our attics where we had once relegated them. Once cursing its unrealistic proportions that profoundly damaged our self-esteem and self-image, we’re now giving Barbie a new lease on (our) life.

The millennial – who, in Fischer’s own words, finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – will regard Barbie and its enormous marketing campaign as the perfect opportunity to sublimate. They will sublimate more than just the disappointing present, the future they are incapable of conceiving, or their tendency to retreat into a shell. They will especially sublimate the original trauma of any child born in the very same decade in which capitalism asserted itself as the dominant economic model on the planet: that of lack – which, in the words of Lacan, constitutes the fundamental condition of human existence, the spark that sets the sophisticated mechanism of desire into motion.

So long, mommy and daddy, you’re no longer able to blackmail me with Christmas gifts, you can’t force me to write letters to Santa anymore, you can’t make me mow the lawn or vacuum the house, and you definitely cannot force me to make my bed or wash my hands when I get back home – because now I, your beloved child, have purchasing power. And I will use it to buy myself every single one of the things that you denied to me when I was a kid – or, at the very least, I will buy those adult-oriented products that are dressed up in the fragrant pink of my unfulfilled desires: the NYX makeup palette, the Dragon martini glasses, the Crocs slippers, the pink Burger King burger, the Zara shirts, the Pepco pajamas. In fact, forget about the pajamas, I want Pepco’s Barbie Alarm Clock – because from now on, every time I wake up in the morning, I want to wake up in Barbie Time.

Greta Gerwig can say what she likes about Jacques Tati, Jacques Demy, or Powell & Pressburger – and I’m not saying that she’s being insincere about it, quite the opposite: I really can see the particular point where Mon Oncle or Playtime are capable of intersecting with The Red Shoes, via Les Demoiselles de Cherbourg. Some other titles that she refers to I can understand in the key of multi-layered, dimensional worlds – The Truman Show, or even the radically different symphony of greys that is The Wings of Desire –, others are certain influences on the way she constructed her vintage-style group scenes – Grease, Saturday Night Fever. However, she completely loses me when it comes to Max Ophuls, Hitchcock, and Hawkes.

Is she saying this to pre-emptively strike down the rejection of certain high-minded cinephiles (and after all, many people were simply tickled to hear this list of names)? Is she saying this in order to justify her own choice, as an indie filmmaker, to make a Faustian pact with Hollywood franchise cinema (a market that Mattel has big plans for)? It matters little. At the end of the day, it still rings somewhat false – as false as the ideal life of the beloved doll, no matter how self-consciously we may operate with the idea of falsity, no matter how self-aware of its own devices the film itself is, and no matter how much attention it (also) draws to this fact.

Why? Because absolutely everything is ridiculous. The adult-oriented merchandise that’s flooded the world (infinitely harming the environment in the process of doing so), the widespread adoption of “Ken” puns, and even the bit of information that the film had caused a worldwide shortage of pink paint (manufactured by a particular company, as we learn in paragraphs buried at the bottom of the news items)? It’s a type of ridiculousness that I wouldn’t describe as being self-aware (whatever awareness means in 2023 anymore, anyways), but as outright calculated. It’s fine-tuned to mold itself onto the ironic discourse of millennials (the generation’s ultimate coping mechanism), which celebrates all of these forms of excess as a way to distract from the feeling of having inadequately adapted to adulthood, from a world that one cannot bear to look at.

From Caligari to Barbie

In the week that has passed since the first preview screenings of Barbie, the discourse across the internet has covered most of the essential parts of the film – especially in what concerns its plot. For the sake of argument, let’s briefly recap: “Stereotypical” Barbie (Margot Robbie) wakes up one day in Barbieland – a utopian matriarchal land of dolls where Barbies have just about any job one could imagine, while Kens sit around doing nothing – to find that her heels are touching the ground and that she’s contemplating death. This breaks the spell of Barbieland’s magical laws of physics, and so, her body begins to function like that of a normal woman. Taking the advice of Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon, somewhere between Ursula in The Little Mermaid and Tina Turner in Mad Max), Barbie goes to the real world in search of her owner, whose negative emotions have interfered with her existence. She’s accompanied by Ken (Ryan Gosling), who turns from adorable sidekick (who is frustrated by Barbie’s constant spurns) into the film’s main antagonist after he discovers the existence of patriarchy in the real world, and decides to bring it to Barbieland. As she returns home after discovering her depressed human owner,  the doll discovers that it has turned into a land called Kendom, and that all the other Barbies have been brainwashed and turned into sexualized caricatures.

From the outset – a scene that parodies the famous Zarathustra sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the primates are replaced by little girls, the bones with baby dolls, and the monolith turns into the first-ever Barbie –, going through its middle – a blend between Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and The Little Mermaid – and to the very end – a Pinnochio-esque finale, where the protagonist chooses to live among real people – the film is constructed a referential supermix. It’s not an outright adaptation, but rather, a reinterpretation of various traditional myths and narrative structures – which makes Greta Gerwig’s Barbie faithful to the spirit of the original film series, and the audiovisual climate in which they were born: one in which these stories drew upon the classical fairytales of universal literature. However, most of these references are not used to construct the larger narrative superstructure – more often than not, they are gags that are firmly rooted in the pop culture of the early millennium. It’s precisely the suffocation of the self-referential that Holzapfel spoke about, in an extreme version – hardly a minute goes by without some extant cultural object or other being mentioned.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to extract the film from this endless web of references – an octopus caught in a dense, finely woven mesh – from the music bro joke about Stephen Malkmus to the overarching, Lewis Caroll meets Carlo Collodi-type construction. There is such a sheer amount of references to pop culture, cinema, and universal literature that one could write an entire article solely on this topic – such as the textual gag where a high-heeled shoe and a slipper stand in for the red pill and the blue pill in The Matrix. (Don’t get me wrong, many are jokes absolutely hilarious and unexpected, like the cameo by WWE star John Cena as Poseidon-Ken, alongside Dua Lipa’s Mermaid-Barbie.) At other times, these references are woven into the soundtrack – which runs the whole spectrum of millennial (ironic) affinities, from Cyndi Lauper to Matchbox Twenty and back to Crazy Town’s Butterfly (!!!), that is, indelible radio hits that are embedded in our generational psyche like the Excalibur.

Speaking of music, I’ll just give a small example of the extreme referentiality in Barbie: in the scene where the Mattel executives are introduced, the company’s CEO, played by a Will Ferrell who swings between cartoon villain and Willy Wonka, is holding a pair of (pink-colored) drumsticks. Blink and you’ll miss it. There is no reason – at least, not dramaturgically – whatsoever that explains or supports this little flourish: no particular situation, within this scene or otherwise, is triggered by the presence of this prop. The essence of this detail is meta-textual: it nods to a pop-cultural inside joke that’s been around for some decades – namely, the fact that Will Ferrell is uncannily similar to the drummer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Chad Smith.

And even if one does manage to extricate the film from this web of references, if even for a little bit, what you come across is not necessarily easy to unravel. To me, Barbie’s utmost achievement lies in its way of working with kinetic, telluric intuitions: beyond the ubiquitous pink of Barbieland, or the incredible Grease-like dance-off between the Kens, I’m still in awe at how ingenious these proportional sets are, at how Gerwig managed to translate the act of playing with toys into cinematic language. Floating through the air, guided by an invisible hand, drinking from empty glasses, flat refrigerators, and backyard pools, to the design and movements of Weird Barbie and the way Stereotypical Barbie lies down on the floor when all seems lost – all of this is simply brilliant. And to me, this gives the true measure of Gerwig’s creativity, her minute observations, and her hilariousness, much more than any referential joke ever could. (At the same time, it didn’t go lost on me that the first marker of the real world is a reggaeton track playing in the background.)

But when you get to the political level, things get complicated. On the one hand, for a film centered on a protagonist played by actress who encapsulates the very definition of European beauty standards, it ticks off a wide range of representations: Barbies of all sizes and ethnic backgrounds, including some with disabilities (and let’s not forget Allan, Ken’s queer-coded pal who doesn’t fall under the patriarchal spell, wishing to escape into reality) appear on the screen; add to that the fact that Barbies seems to work in just about every imaginable field society – scientific, medical, engineering, cultural, political, blue-collar, and so on. It’s also not at all negligible that – even in this rather shallow and cartoonish version, whose margins are represented by Bill Clinton and Sylvester Stallone – this is the first major blockbuster to not only mention the word “patriarchy”, but also represent it in its finer details. And this can be a good thing: it will make scores of people aware of it. And on top of that, I’m not gonna lie: it really is cathartic to see an intentionally caricaturesque portrayal of patriarchy in a film of this scope – the guitar scene? Genius! The fact that Gerwig discusses the crises of modern masculinity while taking even a cursory glance at its deeper motivations, is a very significant achievement.

On the other hand, you can’t help but feel that the film’s politics are somewhat of a farce. From the narrator’s introductory monologue, in which Barbie is credited with having solved all the problems of feminism and equal rights – at least in Barbieland! – to her showdown with the stereotypical rebellious teenage girl that’s going through her period of brutally rejecting gender norms, the ease with which she belts out “You’re a symbol of sexualized capitalism! You’ve set back the feminist movement! You’re a fascist!” gives one the impression that the film outright rejects any feminist strains that might be more radical than its own (along with a wholesale rejection of Gen Z’s politics). And it does so in the same way that it preempts any criticism of its commercial status by deploying a mildly critical approach towards Mattel – after all, it’s not that hard to build rhetorical fortifications onto a citadel so complex.

By defusing the possibility of a truly radical discourse – including through its ending, that draws a parallel between the Kens and the struggle for female emancipation in the real world, rather than just having this plastic Lesbos reset itself – Gerwig sets up the premises for her coup de foudre finale in which Barbie chooses reality, despite the fact that all she desired was to return to normal. And well, of course, I can recognize myself in many of the situations that Barbie – an avatar of a millennial that’s unable to handle the crushing realizations of adulthood – faces in the “real world”, especially when it comes to inhabiting it as a woman, while also seeing myself in what Gloria describes in her magical speech that deprograms the other Barbies, all her fatigue, pressure, confusion, and pain. Hell, I can even recognize myself in the scenes where Barbie has depression. But even so, I just can’t find anything uplifting about the central narrative solution – the act of simply confessing to all the difficulties of womanhood in an exasperated tone, as the sole possible means of emancipation.

Is there an unspoken burden of excellence, even perfection, that weighs down on the shoulders of modern women, no matter what they do? No doubt about it. Nor would I be the person to lament the twilight of girlboss feminism. But I can’t look at Barbie’s political message – especially given its Pinocchio ending: the doll becomes a real girl; the wooden nose turns into a heel that is parallel to the ground (or, well, in light of the final gag, into genitals) – as anything other than defeatist. As yet another retreat into the individualistic shell of Generation Y’s emotional realm. The primary reason why Barbie refuses to take part in the collective efforts to rebuild Barbieland’s society is that her innocence has been compromised. Her contact with the “real” world (that is, the world of adults, whose uniform consists of Birkenstock sandals, white “all-occasions” shirts, and navy-colored cigarette jeans) has irreversibly contaminated her.

Otherwise, why would anyone consciously decide to inhabit a world that has proven itself to be not just fallible, but also especially capable of exporting toxic ideologies like that of patriarchy (and it’s hard not to see a fine parallel with colonialism, here)? Why would someone decide to make away with all of the positive things that I mentioned earlier? Why would anybody abandon what is basically a Communist-style utopia in which one is unburdened by the pressure of material existence, one which seems to have an egalitarian structure, and does not seem to have any economic or banking systems? Why do all of this, if you won’t at least try to change the „real” world? Because of emotions? Because of a moment of transcendence that you had while sitting on a bench in the park?

Barbie’s act of giving up on her immortality is nothing more than a cipher for the political resignation of my generation, which, like others before it, has chosen the shell over the revolution. And as history has shown us, both of these processes are almost always irreversible.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.