Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour (review)

Susan Stern's film takes as its subject matter a doll whose shoes will not stay on her for five minutes, "yet ideologies adhere to her with great tenacity." The doll is, of course, the Barbie doll. Her look at Barbie was prompted by the creation of a game called "Jealous Barbie" by her five-year-old daughter, Nora. Stern ex-plains: "My Barbie Doll had to be jealous of her Barbie doll for hours on end. Her Barbie had better hair, a better car, a better guy. Horrified, I sat Nora down and explained in my best feminist manner that women don't have to be jealous of other women. Nora listened patiently and then said: 'Okay, Mom. First let's play "Jealous Barbie" and then we can play what you want to play.' "

Stern told this story to friends, who in turn told her their Barbie stories, all of which provided the impetus for her to make her award-winning film, Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. In the film, Stern, who is also the narrator, acknowledges that Mattel's marketing of the doll is brilliant, but argues that its efforts would have failed if there had not been "a million stories in America waiting to be acted out; within each buyer was a fantasy life yearning to be made plastic. Barbie was the perfect vehicle." The film traces some of these fantasies as they are enacted by children, Barbie fans and collectors, gays, artists, and groups of adults that Stern calls "Barbie players" who create fantasy lives for their dolls. "Everybody has a Barbie story," Stern says, "and the stories are about us." In the process of documenting some of these stories, she films the San Francisco Barbie Doll Club; an anti-breast implant demonstration outside of the Barbie Hall of Fame in Palo Alto, California; the National Barbie Convention in Birmingham, Alabama; and Mattel's 35th anniversary Barbie Festival held at Disney World in Florida. She also includes clips from Barbie ads; a Philadelphia TV news story with the lead-in question, "Is deep frying a Barbie part of a Satanic ritual?"; and a contemporary musical video in which Barbie is barbecued.

One of the stories that Stern tells is the remarkable one of Barbie's creator and one of Mattel's founders, Ruth Handler. Handler's life story and personal experience narratives about being a woman in corporate America are fascinating and complex. Her creation of the Barbie doll—which was named after her own daughter (the Ken doll was named after her son)—was inspired both by seeing a German sex doll after World War II and by the adult paper dolls with which her daughter and friends played. Outside of these paper dolls, no adult dolls for children were on the market in the 1950s. Handler says she felt an adult doll could help girls deal with physical changes, such as developing breasts, as they grew up and went through puberty. She was initially told by the men at Mattel that there was no way they could make a doll with breasts. However, make a doll with breasts they did: in 1959, Barbie made her appearance, selling for three dollars. At the time, parents hated Barbie but kids adored her, and Mattel marketed directly to kids through television advertisements. Its marketing strategies over the years have paid; presently, two Barbies are sold every second somewhere in the world.

Handler's life experiences narrated in the film also include accounts of her tremendous difficulties in the 1970s. She lost a breast to cancer; was indicted for falsifying financial records; and, despite the huge and continuous success of Barbie, was forced out of Mattel. However, she then went on to found Nearly Me, the first company to make customized breast prostheses that are available in department stores.

Along with the stories about the creation and marketing of Barbie, Stern also documents the stories of those who buy...