Which is exactly why the Barbie movie’s ending is so delightfully subversive.Īnyone, and certainly any woman-whether cis, trans, or otherwise-or non-binary person, will tell you that genitals mean a great deal to a great number of people, regardless of whether or not they should. Barbie herself has remained smooth and ageless and, importantly, without reproductive organs of any kind for the entirety of her 64 years on Mattel’s factory line. As narrator Helen Mirren informs audiences in the opening scenes of Barbie, Midge was discontinued for being “too weird,” apparently too difficult to reconcile with childhood imagination. Barbie was never meant to be a mother the pregnant doll Mattel invented as a proxy for Barbie was Happy Family Midge, whose removable-baby belly was condemned for “promoting” teen pregnancy. Barbie the movie, director Greta Gerwig’s record-breaking box-office hit, takes this contradiction seriously, in so far as any film combining corporate branding, cellulite, Matchbox Twenty, and death can take itself seriously. Barbie is not a mother, unless you count the millions of young girls she’s shaped in her image-whom, of course, you must count.
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