Dolls were in the house and in the neighbourhood when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, and I played with them as a way to play with other kids my age, and sometimes with older people too. I never thought the doll in my hand talking to the doll in Laura Holmes's hand (or her mother's) was me but a friend who must have come to me in a dream and given me permission to speak for him or her.
I saw the doll like Adorno did of the (modern) art object -- as autonomous. Barbie was an autonomous creation whose figure was exaggerated for a reason. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that in order for Barbie to go strapless she needed her double-Es to keep her gown up. Same applied to her tip-toed feet: to fit the same high-heeled shoes my mother's fashion forward feminist friends wore when arguing with their boards in favour of equal pay for equal work.
Just how and where it got into kids' heads that dolls can only be avatars whose bodies are the kind you aspire to is worthy of greater study. The only evidence we have of it in the current Barbie (2023) film is through the world of Weird Barbie and Margot Robbie's Existential Barbie's dream/discovery of a mother and daughter at odds (and not) with Barbie in their own way.
Like the dolls I held and helped to interact, it is the relationship between mother and daughter that is the better part of the Barbie movie -- the idea that a doll is not something we want to be but, in our relational moment, something to be in conversation with. Except for one thing: the rehabilitation of the rebellious Weird Barbie-making daughter has that daughter dropping her G.I. Jane action wear for a skirt, combed hair, etc. Not only that, as the movie moves forward, she grows quieter and quieter, has less and less to say. What is she thinking? What happened to her critique? Has it been staunched altogether? Or is she simply content with the way things are turning out?
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