Liminality under fire, and how the Barbie movie took a design page out of the fascist playbook.
Barbie wants to be taken seriously. But not literally. Like all aspiring fascists.
It was a product of its time. Anno 1959 — commercial and aspirational. For the very young child, a doll. For the slightly older, an indulgence. It was a cute cliche, but the choice was yours — you either buy it, or not.
Later, the world of the 1970s turned more culturally complex, new models of the doll adapted: there was a male doll named Ken, and then more professional stereotypes: teacher Barbie, pencil-skirt lawyer Barbie, doctor Barbie, and astronaut Barbie. Still very much a product of its time. Not really feminist, but the idea of “work hard and party hard,” embraced for both sexes as the idea that the system worked if you got up in the morning and worked hard for it. Naive, but still aspirational.
But the world couldn’t stop getting more complicated. The absence of a Vietnam Barbie, a hot-looking Terrorist Barbie (Patty Hearst would have been the perfect real-world model, with a full-sized wanted poster for the bedroom wall), or Blacklisted Commie Writer Barbie, Stonewall Barbie, Homeless Barbie (tarp and tent is extra)… or Heroin Chic Barbie — or why not for gender equality, a Dictator Barbie (Women can do anything!): since the door to differences had opportunistically been opened without any deeper intention, Pandora turned insatiable.
But still, if we squinted our eyes, it was still possible to approach the whole enterprise as commercial nostalgia. Or, for the more industrious, we could rip the arms off, give it a Maoist mullet, and blow it up several times with cheap fireworks. The choice was ours. There was room for our own narrative. For imagination and the vastness of stories that were uniquely ours. It was a dialogue with Barbie, and with it, a liminal space opened that allowed us to shape our own relationship with it. You could play a part in the brand and its implicit narrative. Or you could criticize it, or put the doll on fire, and that was still fun too. You do you.
Soon Pandora was roaring with hunger and the new contemporary Barbie models that could be made and perhaps should be made: obese Barbie, handicapped Barbie or the really ugly ethnic Barbie, Proud Boys Ken (sold as outfit only, Ken is the same as always), Karen Barbie (pointing and yelling), hairy lesbian Barbie — not many of these inspired Barbie version were actually going to get made. For obvious reasons. But at this point, the innocent past was catching up with an impossible future demanding more than the core commercial construct could uphold for its shareholders. And by now, nostalgia was also tainted and ruled out. There was no longer a way to be a product of our times.
Even in June of 2024, as the New York Times reported on the launch of Blind Barbie and Down’s Syndrome Black Barbie, the pendulum had swung so far that neither felt any closer to real sincerity or meaningful zeitgeist. What does anything mean when there is no controversy or real cost to be taken — it’s just another philistine cliche that makes money like all the other ones.
But then — and even more to the point — the big-budget Barbie film happened.
A last Hail Mary miraculously did find a postmodern play to come say hello again on the silver screen. Not asking for relevancy, as any choice — even choosing to be meaningful — was a political minefield. Attention, the real currency, will do. So it made fun of itself and the narrative quicksand it found itself in. Everything got tossed in: the tax evading founder lady, independent female film directors (their version of the useful idiot), patriarchy, trucks, horses (brilliant!), male insecurity, the outdated and already shun role model for young girls, and the real problem with it all: corporate America. All this was cooked up, overproduced, and wrapped in a plot driven by the existential crises that Mattel Corporation felt. Not one that was ours. The snake was feasting on its own tail.
At first glance, a brand that makes fun of itself seems healthy. But in this case, it isn’t offering to take any of it to heart. Nor any willingness to actually change. Instead, Barbie is the kid on the middle school playground who joins the mean girls in making fun of her as she is stealing lunch money from all of them with both hands.
Worse yet, in its pandering for commercial relevancy, it has chosen a post truth, post shame — post anything — attitude. It’s not for its own legacy. But it’s also not against making fun of the legacy either. Offering anything new to replace the old? Sure, how about a full embrace of large scale pandering beckoning us to be complicit in choosing nothing because anything else is too layered and complex. Because nuance you can’t make money on, ha-ha. It’s a race to point out what is wrong and turn it into a caricature for self gain. Apex hypocrisy. It doesn’t stand for anything other than the hope that we somehow shrug off the self-serving contradictions and open our wallets. And in this sense, yes, Barbie has truly become a product of its time.
The real cost, of course, is that the dialogue that we used to have room for with Barbie is now gone. No matter how we choose to approach, or to distance ourselves from Barbie, we play neatly into their pandering commercial narrative: that we shouldn’t care so much about all that big stuff or what it means. So please enjoy the clowns and the spectacle while you can. This is Trump asking Greta Thunberg to chill out and go see a film instead (how perfect!).
Sincerity is the real enemy to this commercial narrative, and its first victim. Any space for genuine experiences — the promise of a liminal space where we can explore friction and juxtaposition at a distance to choose our very own conclusion, has been designed out entirely. Barbie is no longer supposed to make sense because the dictator is not looking for dialogue, but for manifestations of control and your submission. As the film greedily swallowed the last obvious foothold of common sense resistance, it exhausted us to accept what is always the inevitable and complete surrender under any totalitarian ambition as envisioned by Orwell in 1984: to admit that 2+2=5.
At least a liar has a relationship to the truth. He hides and he evades it. But Barbie’s complete lack of sincerity is a textbook fascist play that reaches beyond untruths for the post-post-truth marketplace. It’s the nightmare suggested by Gilles Deleuze in the Panopticon prison metaphor, where opposition can’t find a way to separate itself from omnipresent oppression. We are to take Barbie seriously as customers and part with very real fiat (follow the money!) But we are not to take it too literally, as it no longer stands for anything beyond marketing. All this of course echoes our current corporate and populist political landscape.
With her frozen smile and a shiny asexual figure molded by three different fossil fuel derivatives in China and shipped back to us in pretty pink boxes, Barbie shines bright as our epoch’s intellectual role model for aspiring dictators. Not just a product of our time, but an unimpeachable symbol of our existential future.
Johan Liedgren
Founder of think tank The Liminal Circle. Award-winning film-director, writer and consultant working with media and technology companies on liminal and narrative strategy for product design. www.liminalcircle.com / http://www.liedgren.com / https://medium.com/@johan_liedgren
Hello, I’m Barbie. Or whatever you want me to be. was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
