This post was originally published on Tor.com, on August 28th, 2023.
Hi, Barbies.
So, the pinkest movie of the year is a box office hit and a cultural phenomenon, nabbing over $1 billion at the box office and securing the title of “biggest opening weekend ever for a non-superhero movie, sequel, or remake.” (And yeah, that’s a handful of qualifiers, but still.) Amid the slurry of boys-punching-type-films that mostly make up the superhero genre, the success of such a surpassingly girly movie feels refreshing—which, indeed, was one of the hooks of Barbie’s remarkably successful marketing campaign. The grand roll-out managed to pull off the coveted magic trick of making the film it promoted not just look fun but feel like obligatory viewing. For when a movie studio pulls into the public square and promises that mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig is about to set off a glitter cannon, who can afford to look away? Take my money! Take it twice!
Still, though Barbie’s success may feel unprecedented in our current cultural moment, the story of Barbie herself that Gerwig chooses to tell—that of a doll’s decision to become a real woman—actually has thousands of years of precedent in a story model that pervades multiple genres of film and literature, though is especially at home in tales of magical realism and science fiction: the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
Most famously transmitted to us by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (as a staggering number of myths are), the story is of a young prince of Cyprus and sculptor who so reviles all women’s “ample natural faults” that he prefers the company of a woman of ivory, a statue he has personally crafted. Through the power of the goddess Aphrodite, to whom the isle of Cyprus was of special importance, Pygmalion’s wish that his perfect statue be made flesh and brought to life is fulfilled, in which state we must assume she is able to provide Pygmalion with significantly better companionship.
Or is she?
While Ovid terminates his version on the simple note of a romance consummated, what appears to have animated this story’s longevity in subsequent adaptations is the suspicion that Pygmalion or a man like him would never be able to stay satisfied with any real woman, even one whom he had the privilege to literally design to his exacting specifications. Every girl eventually falls off the pedestal. Naturally, many retellings and adaptations explore not just how impossible a Pygmalion is to satisfy but how psychologically fraught that challenge is for the woman called upon to live up to an impossible standard.
And this is very much what Gerwig’s Barbie is about. Barbie, designed as a product to represent the feminine ideal but naive to the real world’s complexities—having only existed heretofore in Barbieland, a matriarchal society of ambiguous metaphysical connection to our own world—journeys to Los Angeles in search of answers as to who or what is causing her to experience “irrepressible thoughts of death” and cellulite. After the requisite series of misadventures, what she finds is Gloria, the adult woman who has been nostalgically playing with her daughter’s discarded doll, who articulates to Barbie, and by extension the rest of us, the cognitive dissonance of trying to be the “perfect woman,” the balancing act of being beautiful and accomplished while remaining non-threatening and humble, etc.
“And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then… I don’t even know,” Gloria concludes.
To be clear, I do not mean to argue that Gerwig is taking the Pygmalion myth as her primary paradigm in this movie—or even that she was thinking of it at all. The more direct influence for her Barbie’s choice to become Barbara Handler, a real woman, in spite of all the trials and discomforts and inevitable end of human life, is much more clearly influenced by Wim Wender’s 1987 Wings of Desire (one of the thirty-three films Gerwig lists as an inspiration for her work on this movie in an interview with Letterboxd). Still, regardless of the filmmakers’ intentions, any story of the crafted ideal woman meeting reality will always resonate with the Pygmalion type in how it comments, intentionally or implicitly, on those ideal feminine standards.
So, as an exercise in fun (and gaining some grounding in the conventions and variations we may see in the story of the designed woman), let’s take a brief walking tour of some examples of writing and film that adapt or employ the Pygmalion trope. Then we may return to Barbie with fresh, discerning eyes and compare her to the other girls.
Cognito Mode 