A Plastic Doll‘s Hollow Revolution: A Critical Analysis of the Barbie Film Through the Lens of a Passionate Gamer
As a lifelong gamer, I‘ve always had a fascination with the limitless possibilities of fictional worldbuilding, where developers can push boundaries around identity and environment almost endlessly to transport players to astonishing visions far beyond reality‘s limits. Mattel‘s iconic Barbie doll has likewise long captured imaginations for spurring children’s fantasies, her infinitely outfittable figure promising the capacity to become anything little girls can dream.
So when the legendary toy company announced plans to bring Barbie to life in a live action Hollywood film, I couldn’t help but get my hopes up that she would finally unlock her shape-shifting potential and give girls a riveting role model as empowered in her adventures as even the mightiest woman video game protagonists I’ve controlled. Perhaps a plastic portal would transport her to a doll-sized open world as awe-inspiring as Aloy’s machine-strewn wilds in Horizon Zero Dawn, with an identity as multifaceted as customizable avatars in RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077.
Upon first glimpse, the film seems poised to revolutionize Barbie’s iconography as radically as many groundbreaking video games have done for representations of women. Yet despite flashes of subversive worldbuilding, Barbie ultimately plays it safe, foregoing any truly innovative transformation that could free Barbie from her commercial confines. Rather than rending open new frontiers for fashion doll adventuring, the film merely resprays old forms in progressive pink paint.
A Promisingly Plastic Open World
The film first won me over by cheekily honing in on Barbie’s intrinsic constructed artificiality, introducing the spirited heroine through a lens video gamers know all too well: worldbuilding. From iconic series like The Legend of Zelda to blockbusters like Elden Ring, games transport players to fantastical domains where developers can stretch the bounds of reality to create astonishing alien vistas or eras unfettered by history, leaning into imaginative environments reflective of players’ soaring minds more than any existing places.
Fictional lands like Hyrule or the Metaverse hold endless possibilities precisely due to their overt constructedness, with set pieces arranged less according to realism than thematic expression. The self-contained open world of Barbieland in the Barbie film adopts this proudly plastic tact for its setting, surrounding the free-spirited protagonist with towering dollhouses molded into plastic bricks swirled cotton candy colors, textures resembling fondant more than brick and trees sprouting giant lipstick fruits. Just as toys offer children miniature stages to live out imagined realities, we are immersed in the film through Barbie’s eyes into her own lifesize roleplay domain.
By unabashedly embracing its patently artificial look, the film playfully liberates itself from the constraints of realistic CGI that dominate modern franchise fare, echoing elements of avant garde games like Hideo Kojima’s postmodern Death Stranding in its almost Brechtian reveal of constructed sets and props. This overt stagecraft becomes part of the experience, heightening the reveal of Barbie’s society as deliberately manufactured by unseen creators to condition its denizens to conformity.
On the surface, the exaggeratedly buff, dim Ken and ever-perky, people-pleasing Barbie promote the same outdated gender tropes critiqued in games relying on the same old exploitative stereotypes. But as with dystopian games like Bioshock that expose the unseen societal programming underscoring environments and behaviors taken as innate, we come to realize Barbie’s world as one giant social experiment in gender conditioning, its inhabitants less embodiments of essential traits than artificially augmented products of carefully engineered environments designed by an invisible patriarchal corporate master.
Through this lens, the film’s visible fabricatedness becomes an asset highlighting oppressive systems demanding strict feminine behavioral conforming beginning in girlhood through profit-driven social architectures more extensive than any 8 bit simulation. The film exposes Barbie’s saccharine dreamhouses and domestic playsets as training grounds for female subordination, designed intentionally by toy executives to groom conformity through doll profiling practices as regimented as lab rat experiments.
liberation.seem poised to let girls finally imagine Barbie however they’d like, her destiny as boundless as custom designed RPG avatars.
The Radicalism Stops at the Dreamhouse Door
However just I began itching for Barbie to activate smash the controls and activate full agency, the film pulls its punches, foregoing upending her status quo in favor of superficial tweaks to her preprogrammed makeup and outfits. After exposing the artificial constraints imposed upon Barbie’s world, she simply steps outside the dreamhouse walls, throws off her heels and exacerbates tired tropes of pseudo-feminist liberation through gleeful displays of burping and dressing down considered subversive simply for deviating from traditional standards of feminine decency.
Yet while she may dirty her domestic goddess image, her bodily proportions remain as cartoonishly fetishistic as Lara Croft’s early days. As Ana Valens notes, Barbie’s final act embrace of her so-called “imperfect perfect self” ultimately reduces feminist liberation to self-confidence about one’s God-given beauty, ignoring systems that deem such immutable qualities measures of human worthiness.
Though she rejects expectations to smile and perform femininity, her existence remains centered around appearance, with no interrogations of her lack of reproductive autonomy evident in her permanently youthful physique, functioning as wish fulfillment more for Mattel executives than girls’ well-being. She may wear flats now, but Barbie remains crafted intentionally around capitalist standards of marketably objectified perfection rather than any girl’s realistic configuration.
Ultimately, Barbie merely gestures towards dismantling feminine expectations while leaving the pillars of female disenfranchisement standing, going no further than the pseudo-feminist parliamentarian politics mainstream games have long incorporated for surface sheen.
Resetting Barbie to Factory Conditions
As an avid gamer, I couldn’t help but leave the Barbie film disappointed by its failure to seize the limitless narrative possibilities afforded fictional fantasy worlds untethered to status quos. After teasing at subverting rigid societal coding processes, Barbie ultimately makes no moves against the corporate systems of feminine commodification, opting for low stakes skin-deep tweaks to her pink plastic coating that leave no impact on Mattel’s profits or cultural dominance.
Yet the mainstream video game industry has shown even multibillion dollar franchises can radically transform their politics in response to changing cultural conversations. Once notoriously misogynistic studios like Ubisoft have replaced exploitative tropes with powerful women warriors in games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, just as the Lara Croft Tomb Raider series shifted from emphasizing busty graphics to emotional narrative. Even Barbie’s arch doll competitor Bratz disrupted beauty ideals in the 2000s by introducing radically diverse styles defying white suburban uniformity.
So as a passionate gamer, I hold out hopes the Barbie license might still tap into its boundary-pushing potential and upset traditional formulas as profoundly as indie games like Celeste or Dys4ia that challenge conceptions of feminine identity and embrace fluid forms of self-expression far beyond the limits of binary doll dreams. Perhaps Barbie too could escape the corporate production lines that have kept her locked for decades, though it seems Mattel remains too invested in manufacturing outmoded fantasies to unleash Barbie’s true liberatory power.
Yet with immense imagination and plastic possibility intrinsically built into Barbie’s endlessly mutable form, she contains the untapped plastic portal capacities to transport girls to new frontiers of self-conception —if only her corporate masters would allow her adventures beyond destinations deemed sufficiently profitable.
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