Gerwig is bursting with references and influences, many of which she has gathered to make the film “authentically artificial,” with everything “fake, but Real fake” — fantasy yet tangible, tangible, as if playing with real toys. She called Peter Weir, the director of “The Truman Show,” to ask how she could “execute something that is both artificial and emotional at the same time.” She tried to channel musicals like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” which she says do the same thing. Many of the special effects were based on the analog techniques of 1959, a year chosen because that was when Barbie debuted. The mermaid Barbies we see splashing behind Jeff Koons-esque plastic waves are hoisted by a rig like a seesaw. The blue expanse hovering above Barbieland is not a green screen; it is a vast backdrop of painted sky.
“Barbie” has a wider reach, budget and potential audience than any of Gerwig’s previous work. This was part of its appeal: Gerwig is consciously scaling up. And yet she remains focused on characters’ baby step to adulthood. (Her next project is a Netflix adaptation of the Narnia universe.) The leads she played in “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” — collaborations with Baumbach — would probably make arch remarks about a Barbie IP blockbuster, but she too were figuring out who they were. So were the heroines of Gerwig’s directorial debut ‘Lady Bird’, loosely inspired by her own childhood in Sacramento, and her follow-up ‘Little Women’, based on her favorite childhood novel.
‘Barbie’ is also a coming-of-age story; the maturing figure happens to be a fully grown piece of plastic. “Little Women” would have been a great alternate title for it. The same goes for ‘Mothers & Daughters’, a working title for ‘Lady Bird’. For Barbie, as in both other films, growing up is a matriarchal affair. It’s something you do with your mother, your sisters, your aunts. Or, in the case of Barbie, with the women strung through your product history.
At the beginning, there was Ruth Handler, overhearing her daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls. As little Barbie Handler and a friend dressed the cutouts in different outfits, they imagined their careers and personalities. Her mother’s rather feminist-sounding insight was that there were no three-dimensional dolls for girls to grow into grown women, only baby dolls that encouraged them to practice motherhood.
Handler and her husband, Elliot, already ran Mattel, a toy company they founded in 1945 in their California garage. She ran the company and he invented the toys. Her proposal for a non-baby doll stalled until she came across a potential prototype while traveling through Switzerland. The Bild Lilli was a novelty toy, modeled after a blond fox from a West German comic, that could be used to accessorize a grown man’s car, such as Playboy silhouette mud flaps. Handler took some home as a proof of concept. Manufacturers, retailers, and even Mattel weren’t sure mothers would buy toys for their daughters with such a va-va-voom figure, but the company was advised by a famous Freudian marketing consultant that mothers could be neutralized if they thought Barbie was taught well. commentary. They might not like her sexual precocity, but they would put up with having her model mainstream womanhood.
