The pink explosion has arrived. There are no innocent or guilty colors. For years we have attributed the color pink to girls and blue to boys. They have been socially established clichés to mark the gender difference (masculine or feminine, with no other alternatives). An acquaintance of mine decided to start a war against pink. She was pregnant with a girl and forbade her to be given any clothes of this shade. He censored a color. He didn’t do it because he didn’t like it, but because of what it represented. He renounced it as a symbol that broke patriarchal stereotypes.
Now pink has become fashionable. I went to see Barbie, the movie about the doll who is the queen of this color. People queuing to enter the cinema were dressed in the favorite color of Barbie, who has always lived in a pink universe. T-shirts, skirts, shorts and dresses filled the room.
The film, directed by Greta Gerwig, stars Margot Robbie in the role of “stereotypical Barbie”, that is, the blonde Barbie of life, and Ryan Gosling, in the role of Ken. The result is a comedy that mixes humor and criticism.
In Barbieland, live all the Barbies that the Mattel company has put on the market. There are many ethnicities, perfect professionals, successful. They appear strong and empowered, but they are toys. In his parallel world, nothing is real. There is no effort, no pain, no problems. Life is a succession of days of success and fun.
In literature, the construction of parallel worlds that have nothing to do with reality is common. We remember Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, when the protagonist escapes from the norms of Victorian society, chasing a white rabbit until she reaches a parallel universe, where everything is surreal and can be questioned. who am i Alicia asks.
We also remember The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, with the real world and the Kingdom of Fantasy, the magical place. The protagonist of Ende, Bastian, a child without affection and who is the victim of bullying, manages to cross the border to be part of two worlds. He is hero and anti-hero at the same time.
Barbie, in the film, also has to leave her comfort zone. It happens when you start asking yourself questions, and when the immediacy is transformed. The shape of his feet, made for wearing heels and tiptoeing, touches the ground. It is an image of transformation: the doll touches the real world. Then, her face becomes sad and she has the first serious reflection in the entire history of the Barbies: she wonders about death.
The play seems skillful to me. Only humans are aware of our finitude. We know we have an expiration date and we ask ourselves questions. From the moment Barbie thinks about death, a human life begins. But the path will not be simple, it will be full of questions, as Billie Eilish’s magnificent song says, composed for a very beautiful scene, which expresses a transformative capacity to feel.
Barbie reminds me of Carlo Collodi’s character, Pinocchio, representative par excellence of the human maturation process. Pinocchio is a simple piece of wood at the beginning of his story. Geppetto will make a lying puppet out of him. After numerous mistakes and adventures, he will transform into a real boy. Similarly, Barbie, the plastic doll with an eternal smile, will discover that she is capable of sadness, of feeling real emotions.
The film that fills the cinemas is not only a claim of the empowered woman or the discovery of Ken as a flat, abused character who exists under the gaze of Barbie: Ken has no job and no home. This is not criticism of Mattel’s world of lies, which plays at creating replicas of plastic women from the offices of all-male executives.
The theme of the movie Barbie is humanization. It claims the metamorphosis of the plastic doll without a vagina in a woman visiting a gynecologist for the first time. A woman who asks herself questions, who expresses emotions, apologizes and amends her life.
Pinocchio was a tree boy who became a child of flesh and blood. Barbie is the plastic doll that learns to feel. What I was made for? is the question of Eilish’s song that is heard. In the film, we find the answer.
