Back to the Doll House: ‘Weird Barbie’ Has Always Been a Big Part of her Story

By Liam Lacey

Long before director Greta Gerwig’s $100-million feature film with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, currently in the theatres, Mattel’s best-selling doll has starred in several dozen animated movies, specials, and web series.

Beyond that, Barbie has figured in a handful of serious films exploring the symbolism and influence of the multi-generational popular girl’s toy,

 The “sex doll” Bild Lilli at the Barbie Museum in Prague 

What these movies suggest is that the improbably proportioned, blonde adult doll named Barbie Millicent Roberts, with her many careers and accoutrements, has always been a multi-problematic creation, often even stranger than Kate McKinnon’s mutilated “Weird Barbie” character. Consider these:

Black Barbie: A Documentary (2023)

Filmmaker Lagueria Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, spent 45-years working at Mattel and helped with the 1980 release of the first Black Barbie doll.

This personal film explores the impact of the doll and the significance of the “social mirror” of representation - including the “doll test” of the 1940s, which studied the effects of segregation on Black children, and which influenced the desegregation ruling of Brown Vs. The Board of Education.

The film, which was part of this year’s Hot Docs festival, is still on the festival circuit before release.

Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie (2018)

Andrea Blaugrund Nevins’ documentary examines the attempt at the Project Dawn updated relaunch of Barbie in 2016 with three new body shapes.  The film recounts the ever-controversial history of the doll, with commentary from feminist thinkers Gloria Steinem, Roxanne Gay, Peggy Orenstein, as well as various Barbie historians. It’s currently available on Apple TV and the Cineplex Store. 

Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour (1998)

Susan Stern’s 25-year-old documentary, released on VOD last month, chronicles the weirder side of Barbie, looking at collectors, conventions, anti-Barbie demonstrations, fetishists, Barbie drag queens and art shows. The latter includes bloodied and crucified Barbies, an Andy Warhol portrait and interviews with the late Ruth Handler herself, the woman who created Barbie.

The film gets at the kink aspect that was always latent in Barbie, adapted as she was from a German adult doll, Bild Lili, which, according to The Washington Post, “was considered a sex toy, or a gag gift for men.” Available on Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1986)

In this exemplary cult film, Todd Haynes — still in art school at the time — used Barbie as symbolic of pathological perfectionism in his 43-minute biography of pop singer Karen Carpenter.

Beginning with her mother’s discovery of Carpenter’s body, the film follows the singer from the time of her discovery in 1966, her rise to stardom, and death by cardiac arrest at age 32 in 1983, caused by anorexia nervosa.

Almost all the parts are played by modified Barbie dolls, voiced by human actors. Doll-sized sets were used — even doll-sized boxes of laxatives — and Haynes whittled the face and arms of a doll to show Carpenter’s increasing thinness.

Partly a parody of a melodramatic documentary, and a commentary on how the rebellious rock  and roll ‘60s became the easy-listening ‘70s, the film is both cruel and sympathetic in revealing Carpenter’s tragic decline.

An introductory title card, announces “an extremely graphic picture of the internal experience of contemporary femininity. We will see how Karen’s visibility as a popular singer only intensified certain difficulties many women experience in relation to their bodies.”

The film was withdrawn from circulation when Haynes lost a lawsuit for musical copyright infringement, launched by Karen’s brother, Richard Carpenter. But the film lives on, in a blurry but still disturbing provocative video, available on YouTube.