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| Barbie Nation |
Still pretty in pink at 64-years-old, and on the verge of appearing in her first ever live action film, Barbie has never been bigger – but did you know that there’s more than one Barbie film out there? First released 25 years ago and now available in an anniversary collectors’ edition, Barbie Nation is the no-holds-barred documentary which goes where other takes on the legendary doll cannot, revealing the sleazy secrets of her hidden past, exploring the various moral panics in which she has participated and looking at her reinvention in both official merchandise and unofficial art, over and over again through the decades. Its director, Susan Stern, remains a fan, and when we got together to discuss it, she told me how the whole thing started.
“I can blame it on my daughter, Nora, who's in Barbie Nation,” she says. “It was when she was playing dolls as a little girl and one Barbie was being jealous of the other Barbie. And I said to her, ‘Nora, women don't have to be jealous of other women. Come on, we're feminists here.’ And she just looked at me and said ‘Mom, can we first play what I want to play and then we can play what you want to play?’ So I told people that story and it turned out everybody had a Barbie story. It went from there.
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| Ruth Handler |
Did she experience any pushback from Mattel?
“I called Mattel first off, and they said ‘We're not making a film about Barbie, and neither are you.’ But I talked to a lawyer and he said ‘You can go ahead and film people with their Barbies. They can't stop you.’ Then I went to one of these incredible conventions that Barbie fans do, that is apart from Mattel, and I met Mattel people at the convention and we just hit it off, and they decided to give me access. They let me have all the old Barbie commercials. I got access to Ruth Handler, and once I met with her it just went from there. And she invited me into her penthouse apartment and introduced me to her family. It was incredible.
“Right before I interviewed her, she had come out with her autobiography. I didn't think I was going to get the interview with her because they weren't going to give me an interview because she was too busy at the convention talking to really big media people. I said ‘Can I just follow you around and film you when you go from one interview to another?’ and they said ‘Okay,’ and then somebody cancelled so I got the interview. I stayed up all night reading the book about her and really got to see how incredible her story was.”
There’s also some material in the film which it’s harder to imagine Mattel being cool with, from bdsm Barbie dungeons to a Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan Barbie playset. I ask her about that material, and she admits that its inclusion made her nervous.
“As you know, Barbie Nation documents that period in the late Nineties when Mattel was suing everybody that was satirising them, or threatening to sue people. I knew I had everything in writing. They gave me written releases. I promised them I would let them know when the film was going to air for the first time. But I was so afraid that I waited until after 5pm on the night it was going to air and then I emailed them and let them know. I figured ‘The courts are closed,’ you know? ‘They can't get a restraining order against me now.’”
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| Barbie Nation |
I tell her about the stories which hit tabloid newspapers in Scotland when Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister, and how they tried to create outrage around allegations that she once cut the hair off her sister’s Barbie.
She laughs, delighted. “Thank you for telling me that! I had not heard that, and that is so great, because there really are only two types of people in the world. There's Barbie glorifiers and Barbie defilers, and I was a Barbie defiler. I had my first Barbie when I was six years old and I cut the hair off. Back in those days the hair was only rooted at the edges of the scalp so all the hair fell down and she was bald – which was, you know, traumatising. But yeah, my heart goes out to her. A lot of people want to do violence to Barbie, which is a very interesting thing.”
I mention that when I was doing research ahead of the film, one of my friends told me that she had had a Growing Up Skipper (Barbie’s friend), who got taller and grew breasts when twisted, but was taken off the market.
She laughs again. “Thank you for reminding me about that. I had forgotten all about that. That is really bizarre, but I bet it's worth a lot of money now.”
Alas, I say, I believe that the family dog ate her. But issues of violence aside, the original point of Barbie was that she was supposed to be somebody growing girls could relate to.
“Right, right. I mean, Ruth thought she was someone girls could identify with, which is sort of misguided because Ruth didn't really look like that. And of course, nobody could look like that. But people have subverted that, that's the great thing. That's what I like about my film Barbie Nation – it shows how people have been able to subvert it.”
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| Barbie Nation |
I’ve also encountered people who weren’t allowed Barbies because their parents were worried that she would give them an unhealthy body image.
“I've always been a talker,” says Susan. “I've always felt the thing to do – and obviously I raised one kid – is to talk to the kid about media, you know? That is so important. You can't keep kids away from things. You deny the Barbie doll, but what are you going to do about the cartoons or the advertising or anything? You have to teach your kids how to relate to the images that are fed via the media.”
There’s the counter-position that it’s important not to shame people for being feminine, and that Barbie sends the positive message that feminine-looking women can still be successful.
“That's another great argument. I agree with that as well. It's very important to feel that women can be beautiful and powerful – ‘beautiful’ in conventional ways.
“There are new Barbies every two minutes. There's every possible career. But the one thing that has been difficult for Mattel, like it's difficult for our society, is racial diversity. And one of the things that made me so happy about putting out the 25th anniversary edition – the collectors’ edition – of Barbie Nation, is that we were able to restore the black Barbie scene which I filmed in 1998. I got really into the whole history of black dolls, and it felt too big to fit into the movie. I considered for a while doing a film on black dolls myself until I realised that I was the wrong person to do that. But now there is a new film, just coming out, called Black Barbie, which I would heartily recommend. I've seen it and it tells that whole story.”
How much did she get sucked into the Barbie phenomenon on a personal level whilst making the film?
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| Barbie Nation |
“I got totally sucked into all that,” she says. “It is totally all consuming for me, on every level, like getting into the history of dolls, into all the Barbies, into the financial aspects of it. I became very interested – I still remain interested – in Mattel and how they're doing, and the role Barbie plays in their finances.
“Barbie Nation is also a great business story. It tells the story of Ruth and Elliott handler and Mattel. I wouldn't want to give it away, but the tragedy that occurs for Ruth Handler personally, and how that affects Mattel. And how Barbie saves Mattel.”
I note that we should probably also discuss Ken, who tends to be a footnote in these conversations.
“I was going to do a film about Ken for a while,” she reveals. “I got into Ken. I actually interviewed people. I was going to do a sequel about Ken which is a whole other story. And also there's a whole story about Ken the man. The Handlers named the dolls after their two children, Ken and Barbie, and there's just a whole lot there. But he does remain an accessory. It'll be interesting to see what Gerwig's film does with him.”
Accessories are obviously important to Barbie on every level, but there’s a tension between the official ones and people’s desire to create their own, isn’t there?
“It's a good question, because Barbie is the classic razor razor blade thing, right? You sell the razor, then people buy the blades. That's where the money is. No, I think in the beginning Mattel was a bit ambivalent about these collectors’ conventions but then saw how important they could be. Mattel has relatively new leadership and I think they are open more open, hence they're allowing this movie to be made, a Barbie a live action film, for the first time, which they said they would never allow.”
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| Barbie Nation poster |
What does she think of that film, from what she’s seen so far?
“I think it sounds great. I'm excited to see it. But as we've been saying about Barbie Nation, what Gerwig’s Barbie winks at, Barbie Nation doesn't blink at, and they're trying to do something different. Something very difficult. They've got a film that’s trying to appeal to children but they're ‘Wink wink wink’ with all these double entendres for adults in the wings. Barbie Nation is the perfect companion because we go down and we explore every dark niche that is suggested. People have loved it, generally. I think what I like about the film is there's a sweetness to it, a sweetness to people and what they create. And it's kind of hard to find that sweetness in today's world.”
So finally, what does she think about the way that Barbie has changed since Barbie Nation was first released?
“Barbie has of course become much more diverse. She continues to become diverse and was diverse when I made the film in terms of occupation, in terms of race, in terms of everything. Disability. But there's this weird core that remains the same, and I don't know what to make of that. And I think this experience of all this Barbiemania gives us an opportunity to look at that. What has remained that same over 25 years? What has changed? Where are we going?”
