Lady Business: Exile from Barbieland

Why can't Hollywood—or capitalism—let its heroines return to their utopias?

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 149th issue, published August 6, 2023.

Wonder Women

An icon of 20th-century womanhood is, finally, the star of her own Hollywood blockbuster. Our story opens with the heroine in her native land—an idyllic matriarchy populated (mostly/entirely) by women—but soon, our naive protagonist must leave this feminist utopia to navigate the misogyny and toxic masculinity of our “real” world.

Six years before Barbie soared to box-office supremacy on that premise, Wonder Woman gave us the same basic setup. The similarities didn’t end there, in or out of universe: Both movies marked rare high-profile opportunities for female directors, who both had to fight to keep in certain key scenes that are among the best in their respective movies, and who ultimately delivered business and pop-culture triumphs. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has now sold $1 billion worth of tickets, and this week surpassed the previous record set by Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman as the highest-grossing movie directed by a woman.

I liked both movies, though I give Wonder Woman a slight edge. (At least the first one; the less said about the atrocious WW sequel, the better.) Barbie was fun—I’ve seen it twice now, and enjoyed it both times!—and it definitely pulled off the pop-culture Trojan Horse of getting Feminist 101 vocabulary and concepts into a silly summer blockbuster. I do wish the movie had been as much about Barbie as it was, ultimately, about Ken—she leaves Barbieland and hits certain beats of the hero’s journey, but he’s the one who gets the emotional soul-searching–and I could have done with 75% less time spent on Will Ferrell and the Mattel executives. (We all know, by now, what Mattel let Gerwig keep in the movie. The meandering Mattel scenes made me wonder: What did it make her cut?)

But I do admire Gerwig’s commercial savvy in making a movie that was as much about straight men as it was about women. That decision has obviously paid off, in ticket sales to a broad audience: My opening-night screening was populated by some men who were not obviously plus-ones or visibly Barbie fans, and part of the communal joy was watching the two bros in front of me, dressed in t-shirts and baseball caps, nearly falling out of their chairs laughing at the Snyder Cut joke. (Speaking of Wonder Woman!)

Yet as my friend Monika pointed out afterwards, Gerwig’s Barbie and Jenkins’ Wonder Woman both attracted those broad crowds by sacrificing their feminist utopias–or at least their heroines’ ability to live there. Instead, both movies permanently exile each protagonist from her loving, mutually supportive community of other women.

It all has weird Garden of Eden vibes: Why can’t Barbie or Diana Prince find lasting happiness in the communities that made them into heroines worth building stories around? Is it a lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers? A lack of belief that audiences will buy into such utopias? Or a pure commercial fear that men won’t pay for tickets to a movie where women live happily ever without them?

I don't know if it's that simple. There is a commercially successful path to some on-screen utopias, as we saw with the Wakanda of Black Panther–another superhero movie by and about people who traditionally don’t have much power in Hollywood. The parallels aren’t exact, of course; but in Black Panther, while the heroes have to fight external threats to their utopia and confront the racism of the "real" world, they ultimately get to stay in Wakanda.

Of course, none of these movies are just stories. They’re for-profit corporate franchises, launched and funded and prolonged in the capitalist hopes of selling more stuff, for Marvel and DC and Mattel and the movie studios behind it all. Which makes the invisible hand clench some awkward folds into the filmmakers’ narratives.

Take last year’s Wakanda Forever, which had to reckon with the tragic death of star Chadwick Boseman. His first Black Panther movie had earned him the superhero mantle and set him up for seemingly many Marvel adventures. Then the sequel had to acknowledge and mourn Boseman’s real-life death–while also rushing to introduce a new Black Panther, a new superhero story, and a whole “normal” Marvel blockbuster alongside the on-screen and off-screen grief. Guess which of those wound up short-changed.

Which brings me back to Barbieland. Watching Barbie again this week, I was struck by how explicitly it discusses death–not just in that one record-scratching joke in all of the trailers, but as an inevitable consequence of life. Barbie ultimately chooses to leave her utopia to become human, and mortal–acknowledging that her story will thus end in death. And Gerwig has said that she’s not currently planning for any sequels.

Mattel, of course, is a much different story. ($1 billion in ticket sales and counting!) So Barbie can become human after she starts thinking about death. She can choose exile, with all of its inevitable misogyny and ultimate mortality, at the end of Gerwig’s story. But as long as Barbie can make money, she can never really die.

Lady Bits

–"Nothing is fixed." Speaking of Hollywood blockbusters and fictional utopias, I so enjoyed interviewing Maureen Ryan about the entertainment industry’s current strikes; the myth of “dream jobs”; reporting on workplace misconduct in a post-#MeToo era; and her terrific new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.

–Is the Ozempic era really “the end of dieting”? (Could we be so lucky?) I had a lot of fun talking to NPR’s All Things Considered and CBC’s As It Happens about my recent Fortune feature on why WeightWatchers and Noom are embracing the new weight-loss drugs. 

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