Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job

Gerwig brims with references and influences, many of which she gathered to make the film “authentically artificial,” with everything “fake, but Really fake” — imaginary and yet palpable, palpable, like playing with a real toy. He called Peter Weir, the director of “The Truman Show,” to ask how to “perform something that’s both artificial and emotional at the same time.” He’s tried to channel musicals like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” which he says do the same. Many of the special effects were based on the analog techniques of 1959, a year chosen because that’s when Barbie debuted. The mermaid Barbies we see splashing behind Jeff Koons-esque plastic waves are lifted from a seesaw-like platform. The blue expanse hovering over Barbieland is not green screen. it is a vast backdrop of painted sky.

“Barbie” has a larger scope, budget and potential audience than any of Gerwig’s previous work. That was part of its appeal: Gerwig scales, deliberately. And yet it remains focused on the characters’ babies reaching adulthood. (Her next project is a Netflix adaptation of the Narnia universe.) The leads she played in “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” — collaborations with Baumbach — would probably make comments about a Barbie IP blockbuster, but it was also understanding who they were. So were the heroines of Gerwig’s directorial debut, “Lady Bird,” loosely inspired by her childhood in Sacramento, and the sequel, “Little Women,” based on her beloved children’s book.

“Barbie,” too, is a coming-of-age story. the figure that comes of age happens to be a fully grown piece of plastic. “Little Women” would be a good alternate title for this. Same with “Mothers & Daughters,” a working title for “Lady Bird.” For Barbie, as in the other two films, growing up is a matriarchal affair. It’s something you do with your mother, your sisters, your aunts. Or, in the case of Barbie, with women covered by your product history.

At the beginning, it was Ruth Handler, eavesdropping on her daughter, Barbara, playing with paper dolls. As little Barbie Handler and a friend dressed the cutouts in different outfits, they imagined their careers and personalities. Her mother’s rather feminist-sounding idea was that there were no three-dimensional dolls to allow girls to explore being adult women, only baby dolls that encouraged them to practice motherhood.

Handler and her husband, Elliot, already ran Mattel, a toy company they founded in their California garage in 1945. She ran the business and he came up with the toys. Her proposal for a non-baby doll stalled until, while traveling in Switzerland, she found a possible prototype. The Bild Lilli was an innovative toy, modeled on a blonde vixen from a West German comic book, that could be used to customize an adult’s car, like Playboy silhouette mud flaps. Handler brought some home as a proof of concept. Manufacturers, retailers and even Mattel weren’t sure mothers would buy their daughters a toy with such va-va-voom figures, but the company was told by a famous Freudian marketing consultant that moms could be overpowered if they thought Barbie was teaching correctly. behavior. They may not like her sexual precocity, but they would put up with it to model dominant femininity.