Barbie

  In Greta Gerwig’’s brilliant Barbie Rhea Perlman appears as the doll’s inventor (and as it happens Mattel’s founder) Ruth Handler. She’s a historical figure, as are of course the panoply of Barbies and Kens. Handler has the additional heft of having actually enjoyed a flesh-and-blood existence, beyond the others’ plastic. But that doesn’t mean she can’t mean something.

Indeed, as soon as a real character (or prop or event) steps into a fiction it is no longer simply itself. It becomes as open to resonance and interpretation as any of the other, the invented, elements. The real in a work is as capable of becoming metaphor as the invented are. The tree in your garden is just a tree. The tree that is the sole prop in Waiting for Godot is necessarily much more. Even if you moved your tree onstage.

So what as a metaphor does this “real” Ruth Handler mean? First, casting Rhea Perlman mobilizes the character’s Jewish persona. That connects her to the Mattel CEO Will Ferrell’s desperate cliche, “Some of my best friends are Jewish!” That proves little more assuring than the gender equality he claims proved by the company’s two historic woman directors (none, of course, current). That character, a patriarchal authority, constantly blurts out a pretence to virtue or assurance that is immediately undermined.

The inventor’s name is even more meaningful. “Ruth” is the Biblical outsider emblematic of faithfulness and dedication. “Whither thou goest….” etc. “Thy people” — however flesh or plastic — “shall be my people.” More pointedly, the “Handler” is someone who refuses to be handled, who insists on taking control of her life and assert agency herself. 

Hence the Barbie revolution that the opening parody of 2001 dramatizes. Giant monolith Barbie jolts mankind — i.e., little girls playing mummy with their toy babies — into a higher awareness. They reject their reduction to motherhood in favour of the panoply of roles and careers that the army of Barbies will come to represent. 

In his experience of the real world, Ken’s seduction by the patriarchy confirms the old reduction of woman to being handled. Before, he wanted to stay the night with Barbie “because we're girflriend and boyfriend.” “To do what?” “I'm actually not sure.” As Barbie points out, they lack penes and vaginas. The characters have no capacity for action or their own wills -- they are only their role.

Later, when the socially “advanced” Ken and his new posse lope in on imaginary horses he re-enacts the cowboy game little boys played while Sis tended their toy infant. The film’s happy ending derives from both genders accepting woman's power and responsibility, with due awareness of the traditional reality beyond the oppressive societal norms.

Furthermore, the Jewish context makes the film effectively an epilogue to the classic Neil Gabler study, The Jews Who Invented Hollywood. Gabler demonstrated how the Jewish merchants who shaped America’s dream factory defined the national ideal -- a secure, honourable job, a happy home with a garden and white picket fence, a beautiful blonde (e.g., gentile) wife with clean happy kids (one of each). The people's historic persecution has been left behind in Europe, with that Hollywood fantasy their new future. Gerwig’s dramatization of the Barbie world Handler invented is that very fantasy, ballooned. 

Of course the Jews invented the idea of a perfect world long before their Hollywood manifestation. It starts in the Eden that mankind flunked out of, by indulging in that notorious non-kosher nosh. Then there’s “the Promised Land,” the vision that has inspired Jews from Abraham and Moses on to modern Israel. That dream is as old as the antisemitism that continues to threaten to eliminate the state and its people.

        So Ruth Handler has the Jew's eye on a progressive future: "We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they've come." That echoes the Jewish "ledor vedor," the progressive succession of generations, with a nod to the heroic matriarchs. 

        So too her "Humans have only one ending. Ideas live for ever." The perfect world around Barbie draws on the Jewish concept of heaven, a spiritual realm beyond our material reality -- the attainment of which requires our responsible humanity in this material world.  Indeed, if the immediate political heart of the film lies in Gloria's passionate speech --"It is literally impossible to be a woman." -- the mythic context is established by the Jewish moral framework embodied in Ruth Handler. Her criminal sideline is acknowledged but not stressed.

        In American painting this impulse took two antithetical forms. Abstractionists like Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, reached for a spiritual presence beyond our forms of material existence. Even without identifying as Jewish artists they embodied Jewish spirituality. 

On the other hand, the realists like the Ashcan School, Charles Burchfield, Raphael Soyer, Adolph Gottlieb, Ivan Albright, richly detailed their subjects' materiality in a restrictive urban reality. Their physical tension expressed the (often socialist) urge to improve the people’s lives on earth (or rather: on concrete). That is the Jewish dedication to serving mankind, tikun. By meeting our responsibility in the physical world we approach the spiritual. If the devil is in the details, so are the angels. The British Kitchen Sink painter John Bratby found his realist style so close to theirs that he wondered if he were perhaps Jewish himself. That was the blood compliment.

Both schools resonate in this Barbie. The pervasive pink abstraction — which Anthony Lane likens to “being water-boarded with Pepto-Bismol” — projects the monochrome of the abstractionists. It's a naive purity. Barbie’s and Ken’s encounter with the “real” world outside and the danger of Ken importing the vain folly and inhumanity of the (i.e., our) patriarchy summon the spirit of the Jewish realist painters. The schools intersect when the sheltered Barbie reaffirms her newly formed idealistic spirit in the face of our reality: death, fascism, commercialism, vulnerability, cellulite, etc. Paradoxically, the truly mature, unified Barbie is the Kate McKinnon one -- "Weird Barbie," defined by her "splits."

            

Finally, an observation on the lumping together of Barbie and Openheimer as a (double admission, of course) “double feature.” That is an insult to both films. Each is worth — indeed requires — its own absorption and intensive consideration on its own. Both are profound, rich experiences not to be reduced to a modish matinee marathon,