Barbie and corporate self-deprecation
"We're actually doing it very well. We're just better at hiding it now."
Modern audiences are extremely reluctant to suspend their disbelief. (I’ve complained about this at length before.) We want to poke holes in the cinematic logic and call out inconsistencies, mistakes, and other Cinema Sins, proving that no movie has or could have ever gotten one over on us. One of the most successful tactics to override this audience default setting is called ‘lampshade hanging,’ or just ‘lampshading.’ Lampshading is when a script pauses to explicitly call attention to an implausible or cliched plot point, and then moves on. This lets the audience know that everyone involved is in on it, so the movie can be trusted. If you’ve seen any Ryan Reynolds movie from the past decade, you’ve seen this tactic in flagrant action.
(In too many cases—for my taste, anyway—lampshading substitutes for legitimate comedy. At this point, 87 percent* of the comedy in the MCU is just openly commenting on what’s happening, in the cadence of a joke. But in some cases, like in the flawless and peerless Game Night, some unexpected lampshading can be gut-busting.)
*Don’t fact-check this.
Lampshading is so effective because it flatters our vision of ourselves as smart, savvy consumers. We’re too sophisticated now to unquestioningly enjoy a traditional Disney princess narrative, but if the movie uses mild self-deprecation to wink at being subversive, we’re in. Disney is willing to laugh at itself, so it can’t be as bad as it used to be!
Enter Mattel. As a brand, Mattel’s relevance has been waning pretty steadily, with millennial nostalgia for American Girl dolls eclipsing that for Barbie. So it makes sense that the brand would be willing to use a movie to acknowledge its role in indoctrinating children into a capitalist patriarchy, thereby (hopefully) propelling itself out of that irrelevance. When was the last time people were this excited about Barbie? Or using the word “subversive” to describe a Mattel product?
Of course, one movie saying the word “patriarchy” a dozen times won’t actually hurt the patriarchy, just like it won’t actually change beauty standards to have the movie’s narrator point out that Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to believe that she suddenly feels ugly. And, of course part 2, whether Barbie is truly subversive, feminist, anti-capitalist, etc is really not the point. The point is that corporations being willing to poke a little harmless fun at themselves gives us savvy consumers the moral permission to buy whatever they’re selling. And with an opening weekend box office haul of over $150 million, I’d say this mission was accomplished.
Great post. Everything about that movie makes me want to throw up.