Why I Wore Black to See Barbie

I wasn’t allowed to play with Barbie as a child. My mom felt the doll’s image restricted women, and she was counting on me to break the mold. Of course, her injunction had the reverse effect – causing me to covet Barbie all the more. I remember furtively playing with a cousin’s Barbie and Ken dolls, yet somehow my joy was muted by rule-breaking guilt.

Fast-forward forty years, and when my teenage daughter asked to see the movie – stunningly decked for opening weekend in pink Daisy Dukes and knee-high boots – I found myself fumbling through my closet with a strange impulse to wear head-to-toe black. With a light pink purse as my only nod to the phenomenon, I showed up at the cinema looking quite the antithesis of an opening-weekend Barbie moviegoer.

Despite myself, laughter rose up from my belly almost immediately after the movie started. When I wasn’t cackling (which was often), I was contemplating its nuances with furrowed brows, my head cocked to one side. Barbie is the best kind of comedy: one that gets you thinking. “Maybe give me insight between black and white,” as promised by its revived theme song, “Closer to Fine.”

Barbie’s musings on womanhood took me back three decades to the pale-yellow building in Cambridge that housed Harvard’s Women’s Studies department. In this old building –
relegated to the campus’s geographic margin – I studied non-binary gender identity before it was a thing, defended my thesis, and showed up a whole semester wearing Pepto Bismol pink.

Having spent “four years prostrate to the higher mind,” I thought I had Women’s Studies down. Except that I hadn’t yet lived as an adult woman in the real world. Like Barbie, I had to cross-over to corporate boardrooms and dive into domestic politics to experience first-hand the dichotomies and double-standards rattled off in Gloria’s big monologue (beautifully executed by America Ferrera). It turns out that modern life – juggling motherhood, marriage, career, and caring for aging parents – is the real Women’s Studies education. Barbie spotlighted (in bright pink!) the tightrope walks we perform every day, and on every stage of our lives.

Apparently, some find the movie troubling and inappropriate. This is especially interesting to me, having been denied Barbie doll ownership in the first place. I saw Stereotypical Barbie as a 3D manifestation of the cognitive biases, or mental shortcuts, used by our brains to crunch data and make choices, and I think it’s good to press pause every so often to ask why we put ourselves, and others, in boxes. In that same vein, I wonder why we default to one-dimensional interpretations of art – an apt question for this renaissance book-banning era in which we find ourselves. Thank goodness for “Closer to Fine’s refrain, reminding us that “there’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line.”

In retrospect, I see that my black outfit was born of exhaustion more than anything else, hence my joy at sitting back, looking upon it, and laughing out loud for a few hours. It’s uncanny how the lyrics of “Closer to Fine” ring true: “And the best thing you’ve ever done for me, is to help me take my life less seriously”.

Yes, I showed up to Barbie in black, but I left feeling positively pink – or at least closer to fine.