Gerwig brims with references and influences, many of which she compiled to make the film “authentically artificial”, with everything “false but really false” – imagined yet tangible, tactile, like playing with a real toy play. She called Peter Weir, the director of The Truman Show, and asked how you can “do something that’s artificial and emotional at the same time.” She tried to emulate musicals like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Singin’ in the Rain, which she felt do the same thing. Many of the special effects were based on the analog techniques of 1959, a year chosen because that was the year Barbie made its debut. The mermaid Barbies we see splashing around behind Jeff Koons-esque plastic waves are pulled up by a contraption like a seesaw. The blue plane floating over Barbieland isn’t a green screen; It’s a huge painted sky background.
“Barbie” has a larger scope, a larger budget and a larger potential audience than any of Gerwig’s previous works. That was part of his appeal: Gerwig deliberately gained weight. And yet she continues to focus on the characters’ transition into adulthood. (Her next project is a Netflix adaptation of the Narnia universe.) The protagonists she played in “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” — collaborations with Baumbach — would probably make tongue-in-cheek comments about a Barbie IP blockbuster, but they did, too, to find out who they were. So are 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 book.
“Barbie” is also a coming-of-age story; The character that grows up happens to be a full-grown piece of plastic. “Little Women” would have been a good alternative title for it. Ditto for “Mothers & Daughters”, a working title for “Lady Bird”. For Barbie, as in the other two films, coming of age 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 who run through your product story.
At the beginning, There was Ruth Handler, eavesdropping on her daughter Barbara and 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 that girls could use to explore adulthood, only baby dolls that encouraged them to practice motherhood.
Handler and her husband Elliot already ran Mattel, a toy company they founded in their California garage in 1945. She ran the business and he invented the toys. Her proposal for a non-baby doll fell through until she came across a potential prototype while traveling through Switzerland. The Bild Lilli was a novelty toy modeled after a blonde vixen from a West German comic strip that could be used as an accessory for a grown man’s car, much like Playboy-style mudflaps. Handler brought some home as proof of concept. Manufacturers, retailers, and even Mattel were unsure if mothers would buy their daughters a toy featuring such a Va-Va-Voom figure, but a famous Freudian marketing consultant had the company hint that mothers could be neutralized if they did think Barbie teaches proper behavior. They might not like their sexual precocity, but they would put up with it if their exemplary femininity became mainstream.