The upcoming Barbie movie is the first movie that I’ve been excited about all year. (And Oppenheimer, but mostly because it’s always a pleasure to see Cillian Murphy looking gorgeously miserable in his special way). It’s been a long time coming, this movie–remember back in 2014, Amy Schumer was attached to the project? There was also a time when screenwriter Diablo Cody was involved. She wrote the screenplay for Juno and Jennifer’s Body, the former earning her an Oscar. People panned Jennifer’s Body initially but it’s become something of a cult classic now. But her attempt to write a script for the Barbie movie didn’t go well–she didn’t even turn in a draft. Diablo talked to GQ about the upcoming Barbie movie, and where she thinks it went wrong for her. A big factor is the change in the cultural conversation about hyper-femininity and embracing “bimbo culture.”
The bimbo is now a valid feminist archetype (on TikTok): “I think I know why I shit the bed,” she tells GQ over the phone from Los Angeles. “When I was first hired for this, I don’t think the culture had not embraced the femme or the bimbo as valid feminist archetypes yet. If you look up ‘Barbie’ on TikTok you’ll find this wonderful subculture that celebrates the feminine, but in 2014, taking this skinny blonde white doll and making her into a heroine was a tall order.”
The Amy Schumer Barbie would have been an ‘anti-Barbie’: The plan had been to package Cody’s affectionate and idiosyncratic take on the character with an unconventional leading actress—specifically Amy Schumer, whose crass, confessional work as a stand-up and sketch comic gave her a certain counterculture credibility. It was, in theory, a terrific idea, but Cody recalls that the concept was ultimately less liberating than it seemed. “That idea of an anti-Barbie made a lot of sense given the feminist rhetoric of ten years ago,” says Cody. “I didn’t really have the freedom then to write something that was faithful to the iconography; they wanted a girl-boss feminist twist on Barbie, and I couldn’t figure it out because that’s not what Barbie is.”
It was hard to walk a fine line between satire and positive branding: Cody notes that part of the problem was that The Lego Movie made for a daunting template, having managed so voraciously to have its cake and eat it too in terms of being both a satire and an act of brand extension. “I heard endless references to The Lego Movie in development,” she says, “and it created a problem for me because they had done it so well. Any time I came up with something meta, it was too much like what they had done. It was a roadblock for me, but now enough time has passed that they can just cast [The Lego Movie antagonist] Will Ferrell as the antagonist in a real-life Barbie movie and nobody cares.”
[From GQ]
Barbie is one of those cultural artifacts with so many possibly meanings–often contradictory meanings. To the children who play with them, Barbie dolls represent creativity and self-expression and imagination. Barbie has had almost every job, I think–even entomologist. And yet for all of the possibilities of Barbie–for all her jobs and outfits and make-believe story lines–she also continues to reinforce a narrow definition of beauty. So I see why Diablo got stuck. It’s hard to make that character into a “feminist girl-boss” and I’m glad they abandoned that approach altogether. And I wonder if Diablo’s style of dialogue would have worked. It has its own flaws, but I kind of like aspects of “bimbo culture”. So many of the interests that are coded as feminine–makeup, beauty, fashion, etc–are seldom taken as seriously in our culture as masculine-coded interests like sports and cars and things like that. I think that’s why so many people like Barbie, because she celebrates those “girlie” interests without a trace of irony.
