We saw Barbie and want(ed) to talk about it all summer!

German version

The Oscar nominations have been announced - but without nominations for Greta Gerwig for Best Director and Margot Robbie for Best Actress - which is reason enough for us to translate and republish our summer 2023 conversation about Barbie in English.

Julia Bee: It's great that you're all participating in this conversation. Not everyone knows each other, so we'll do a short round of introductions.

Caroline Pitzen: I'm Caroline, a filmmaker and artist, but I'm also active in teaching, working as an artistic researcher in the film department at the University of Art and Design (HfG) in Offenbach, and as a lecturer in the Media Practice module with a focus on film at Leuphana University Lüneburg. My own films are very far from the aspiration of one day landing in Hollywood. Nevertheless, I have great sympathy for Greta Gerwig, her work and her path to Hollywood.

Julia: Do you make coming-of-age movies like Barbie?

Caroline: Unconventional coming-of-age, perhaps, in my feature-length debut FREIZEIT oder: das gegenteil von nichtstun. Have any of you seen the film?

Elisa Linseisen: I love your movie. It touched me deeply.

Caroline: I'm glad to hear that. I work on completely different things than the industry in Hollywood and locate myself in the field of artistic film. Nevertheless, I find “big” cinema, and in this case forays into the mainstream, interesting and fascinating. Even if, as I said, my personal goal in life is not making it in Hollywood.

Elisa: I'm Elisa and I work at the Institute for Media and Communication at the University of Hamburg. My research focuses on digital images, queer feminist computer theory and post-cinema. Currently, I am writing about queer computing and thinking about conceptions of informatics and computers beyond functionality and solutionism, that is, beyond problem-solving perspectives. I am interested in the Barbie film from the perspective of feminist film studies.

Jennifer Eickelmann: I'm Jennifer and since last year I've been a junior professor for digital transformation in culture and society at the FernUni in Hagen at the research cluster digitale_kultur. I've done some work on digital games and subjection and de-subjection, but not yet explicitly on toys or dolls in the narrower sense. I’ve had a desire to do so for years, probably also because I was a passionate doll player as a child (laughs). I played less with Barbie and more with classic dolls—so the horror at the beginning of the film: just playing to be a mother. In this respect, I'm happy about this exchange with you.

Jiré Emine Gözen: My name is Jiré and I am a professor of media and cultural theory in Berlin. Thank you for meeting so early, because I am in Tokyo right now and there is this huge time difference. I'm docked to a research cluster here and we're organizing a workshop next week on the discursive and material dimensions of digital transformation. This brings me to one of my research interests, which is around narrative and artistic speculation of the future and technology. I have lived in Japan for a longer period of time and worked here at the Mori Art Museum, among other places. I am very interested in what “non-Western” narratives and perspectives there are on the world, the future, history and knowledge, and how they work. Another focus is visual culture. I am interested in how certain figurations and aesthetic codes of “subversive” masculinity have developed out of a left-liberal context and are now carried forward or reinterpreted by right-wing and terrorist movements (one starting point is Playboy magazine). From this perspective, Barbie was also interesting for me and I definitely want to write a text on Playboy and Barbie soon.

Julia: That's what I thought when I saw the movie. When I saw the Barbie house, I was reminded of a reverse Playboy Mansion and Preciado's work on it.

I work in Siegen and am interested in civic education and gender media studies. Which popular possibilities do we have available in digital platforms? Which cooperations with institutions out of the university are necessary? How important is the role of queer, gender and trans formats for political or civic education, and where can one tie in. I understood Barbie very much against the conservative gender rollback and as a position against the alt-right and men's movements in the US. Caroline insisted that I see the film. At first I was full of prejudices—unfortunately, I have to say, self-critically. Caroline told me that Ben Shapiro burned a Barbie doll on YouTube. I thought, “Then I'll have to see the film.” That made me curious, because witches interest me a lot and the fate of many witches, as is well known, is to be burned by Ben Shapiros in conservative visual media.

Elisa: Yes, Caroline, the effect was like a wave. Julia didn't want to see the movie, but you obviously thought she should see it.

Jennifer: I intended to watch the movie on Netflix. I wanted to adhere to this plan but realized that I was falling behind, as everyone was discussing this film. So, it was an untenable situation (laughs). When Julia wrote, “No way, we must discuss the film,” I had to head to the cinema, just three days ago. Elisa, you watched it yesterday, right?

Elisa: I had seen the movie before. So a total of two times so far.

Barbie on the big screen 2. ©Jiré Emine Gözen

“I don't want to do anything else for the rest of the summer but watch this movie every day. I don't want to watch anything else.”

Jiré: Clips of the film had been flooding in for weeks via various social media channels like Instagram. I thought the film looked promising and funny. That's why I went to the theater the very first week the film was released. I could relate very much to your affects, Julia. When you said at the beginning that you were excited to talk about the movie again, I remembered thinking in the middle of the movie, “I don't want to do anything else for the rest of the summer but watch this movie every day. I don't want to watch anything else. I never want to watch another movie. This movie is so good and so much fun” (laughs). But I would be interested to know what discussions you had after the film? Because one thing is the moment when you sit in front of the film and enjoy it and simply think it's great. But it's something else again when you talk about it afterwards and reflect on things. In conversations after the film and reflecting on this film, I increasingly thought, “Some points are quite difficult.” However, the dance scenes are infinitely great.

Caroline: When the movie came out, I thought, “Ah, that's right, now it's this Barbie movie release. “ It wasn't really on my radar anymore, but of course I was aware that Greta Gerwig had made the film. I've been following Gerwig's work for a long time and have always appreciated it. I first encountered her as an actor in mumblecore films, then in Frances Ha in the dual role of screenplay co-writer/actor and then with Lady Bird as director. It was clear that I would definitely watch the film due to the fact that she made it. I then saw the trailer and thought, “Oh my, what is this?” Following that, I saw the teaser, and yes, it shows the opening scene of the film, and that's when I thought, “I can feel her—that's very Greta Gerwig.” I was curious to see what would come and she did not disappoint me.

“I've been overtaken by the discourse phenomenon.”

Elisa: For me, the movie began long before its actual reception, with the press release, the trailer and the “He's just Ken” and Barbie posters, but also with the immediate adaptation of this marketing campaign in social media, for example through memes. For me, the movie and the discourse that preceded it also inscribes itself in the current cultural and critical reclaiming of “the chick” and the female identity of being girly, being a chick, which is happening a lot at the moment, for example by Jovana Reisinger. I was really looking forward to the movie and wanted to see it unconditionally. As the euphoria grew, I realized: “Wow, the phenomenon of discourse is overtaking me a bit.” In fact, I went to the theater very late, in mid-August, and apart from Maren Haffke's wise critique on Barbenheimer, I also isolated myself from the first reviews. I did not treat the movie as an event, I rather watched it almost secretly. But I had a lot of fun with it. And at the same time, I was a little sad. I feel ambivalent about the movie. On the one hand, it gave me a lot of joy. I love glitter! Still, I wasn't dressed in pink, which is not so easy for me because I have a lot of pink stuff. But like I said, I didn't want to succumb to the movie as an event. After the movie, I got caught up in all the questions and positive and critical voices about the movie. I loved and still love listening to so many incredibly smart FLINTAs share their thoughts about Barbie. I am looking forward to doing the same for the rest of the summer.

Julia: I thought it was great to see the film in the cinema. It was a very communal situation, there was a lot of laughter, and on the way out people gave each other these looks—“Yes, I understand, you know it too....” I had tears of laughter in my eyes at the beginning of the scene with the 2001 Barbie. That didn't go away for 115 minutes. Thinking about all the contradictions and the potential of the film is great fun for me. But I admittedly found it scary that I never owned a Barbie as a kid but wanted one after the movie (laughs). In that respect, Mattel has achieved its goal. The new Barbie phenomenon claiming Barbie as a feminist character or narrative worked for me. I looked up what Barbies were available and what they looked like, but without buying them. I see this interest as a problem. But it would be boring to just say, “This is just a consumerist ideology and feminism is being sold to capitalism here,” or “The two are being played off one another.” I thought, “It can be both—criticism of rollback traditionalism and Mattel's capitalist attempt to save Barbie.”

“How can you place certain content? How can you take things that are important in Greta Gerwig's work to another level?”

Caroline: I want to respond to what you said, Julia. For me, the interesting thing about the film was not making Barbie a feminist character, because I'm not sure if this is even possible, but rather the questions: How can you place certain content? How can you place it for the masses? And how can you take things that are important to me in my own making, or that have been important in Greta Gerwig's making since, and take them to another level? As an auteur filmmaker, she has not had such enormous outreach with her other work as she has with this film. When she was asked if she could imagine writing a screenplay for the Barbie film, which is financed by Mattel, she was certainly aware that the corporation had an interest in making something else out of this character. This was probably intended, among other things, to do the much-described pink-washing.

But I was actually much more interested in the director’s perspective. People want to reach other people with their own work and perhaps also have an outreach. In the U.S. it's a special situation because indie films are financed differently than in Europe. It's all more complex and more difficult, there are much fewer public funding opportunities, and my impression is that indie filmmakers often desire to go one step further with their next film and become bigger, to escape the economic pressure, and at the same time to have a larger outreach and a different budget with which “more” can be realized. So how can you think differently about content that is important to you, but will only have a certain audience in the format of the classic auteur film, and maybe even place it differently in the so-called “industry”? The moment you get a request to write a Barbie screenplay, of course, it's a possibility and an absurd, but at the same time perhaps appealing, favor. Initially, I think, the request from Warner Brothers/Mattel to Gerwig was only about screenwriting and not about directing. That request in itself brings up a contradiction. Do you want to do it or not? I personally found it interesting that Greta Gerwig actually says, “Yes, I'm writing a Barbie screenplay.” And then later finds this screenplay so good that she also wants to direct it herself, exactly as she wrote it. Ten years ago, that would probably not have been possible in this form. As a young female director, to jump on such a high budget with your third or fourth film as a director, with a screenplay that you wrote yourself, of which you say: “Exactly as I wrote it, I want to shoot it. Without any changes to the content and without any input from the people who commissioned it.” I find it interesting that we are at a point, or capitalism is at a point, where this is possible and is happening. There's a big contradiction in that from the beginning, that a corporation like Mattel gets involved in this or even has to do this, and that a successful indie filmmaker really takes this step. Because, unfortunately, only by going mainstream will you get this kind of outreach.

The radical thing about this film for me is: the film, or better Greta Gerwig, has managed to squeeze content that is important to her into the corset of the mainstream, and in doing so, to blow up the mainstream. Hacking the system. She has created a work that has been seen by countless people around the world. Because of Barbie. And it has also been seen by people who are not familiar with certain discourses until the moment they see this film. So, that was a digression before we talk about laughter.

“It's not necessarily a Barbie movie. It's much more about the real world, about the things that continue to go wrong in our world.”

And another thing: It's not necessarily a Barbie movie, I think. It's much more about the real world, about the things that continue to go wrong in our world. Although we sometimes think it's not (anymore) that way. Especially when it comes to gender equality. This is also visible and clear in Greta Gerwig's other works. This is the theme that drives Greta Gerwig. And already the Barbie dolls are burning in the right-wing video formats.

Jiré: Julia, you talked about capitalism and the critique of capitalism and the relationship between these themes and Barbie. In this context, fascism, which is staged in the film, or how it is staged, is certainly fascinating. I found that very exciting and I confess: I was an absolute Barbie fan as a child. My mother despaired of it. We were a household that was very critical of capitalism, and Barbies didn't really fit in. Do you know the movie Momo by Michael Ende?

Julia: I know the book.

Jiré: It's about capitalism and how it leads to fascistoid or fascist structures and how these are connected to time, freedom and consumption. There are several scenes in which the children of this world, which until then had been portrayed as very innocent and free, are fed into the logic of capitalism and its temporality. And in this, dolls play an important role as a kind of seduction and a promise of salvation. These dolls are not real Barbie dolls, but they are dolls that closely resemble Barbie dolls, so they are actually Barbie dolls after all, and they are referred to as “perfect” several times. There is a scene with Momo where one of the dolls tries to seduce her into playing with it, thus introducing her to the logic of capitalism. In the process, the doll constantly repeats, “Play with me. I want more things!” Momo finds this doll exciting at first, then quite quickly boring and then really corrosive. As the heroine of the film, she manages to be almost the only character to resist the dolls and thus the promises of capitalism. This scene was shown to me again and again as a child by my mother as an educational measure (laughs). I liked Momo very much. That was my first confrontation with the fact that I had fallen for the promises of capitalism and thus its structures. I was seven or eight years old at the time and had to come to terms with what that meant. I then swore off Barbies with a heavy heart, because ideologically it wasn't right to like them. Very rarely, however, I still sometimes secretly brought them out to play with. So, it was an ambivalent and conflictual relationship. I found it very interesting to see the film knowing that with a filmmaker like Greta Gerwig and with what I saw in advance on social media, the film would flip the ideology critical engagement of the 80s that I learned about from Michael Ende. That has a lot to do with approaches, and highlighting the subversive potential that's in the concept of Barbie. Because this film stages Barbie, and by extension itself, as subversive. And that's also interesting if you contextualize Barbies historically: they were astronauts, doctors, and pilots in the 1960s, long before that was actually possible or even more widespread in reality.

However, once progressive ideas or practices often themselves become, over time, what subsequent generations perceive as conservative. For example, Gloria Steinem says in the 2018 documentary “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie” that Barbie is pretty much everything the feminist movement tried to get away from. Starting in the '70s, turned feminists decidedly opposed Barbie. Michael Ende stands in this tradition.

That's why the film was interesting to me. I wanted to see what's in the film and in Barbie, where parts of feminism want to go again today or in a different way. This question was also important for me: How can one deal with this? Especially in combination with a humorous and ironic staging of the men's rights movement and its fascistoid structures and ideas.

“Girls have learned to watch Marvel movies—this is a movie for them.”

Elisa: If you consider the mechanics of the market for these movies, it is no surprise that there are so many Marvel movies. They represent the largest intersection of the audience, and that is teenage males. Movies for teenage boys are also seen by girls. Although girls have special products for them, they have learned to adapt to all the other products. Because of the moving rating system, adults can watch teen movies, but not vice versa. If you take a movie that a few years ago would have been “just” a chick flick, that would not have been in the mainstream, but on the edge, and you declare it a pink girl movie, release it at the same time as the super-serious Oppenheimer movie, then that is something unique. Something that for a long time was only intended for a specific target group has become a global mass phenomenon with Barbie. And with that comes a certain ambivalence, a kind of wear and tear on certain feminisms. How do you position feminism for the broadest possible audience? To assert it with such vehemence, just with the slogan of the film. “If you don't like Barbie, this movie is for you. If you love Barbie, this movie is for you,” is extraordinary. This is claimed, used and put on a broad stage without compromise. Of course, it's about selling. They wanted a blockbuster, that's a given. But it's these subversive themes and questions, as Jenny said, that you make a big deal out of. It's obviously a provocation of a certain masculinity, which I think is impressive.

“Why are we laughing at this movie?”

Jennifer: Why do we laugh while watching this film? That's something I've been thinking about all the time. I listen to you guys intently. What does the laughter refer to? I laughed for various reasons that I question in retrospect. At that moment, you laugh and ask yourself, “Why?” Those moments when you catch yourself. You laugh at yourself in the sense that you just know these situations. You recognize them, they're mirrored, and you say, “Yes, that's exactly how it is.” It's one of those moments. But there is this meta-level, a kind of hypermediality that evokes laughter. It's a double-edged sword. I laughed at the exhibition of those guys and the patriarchy, in whatever form it may take. Exhibiting this entire culture.  When Ken walks around with a stack of books about patriarchy, he's delighted because he has these thick books (laughs). All the cultural artifacts that encompass this are constantly on display all the time. It's a typical moment of distancing that evokes laughter. The same thing happens with Mattel within the capitalist framework of this whole scenario. These individuals working at Mattel are also showcased. On the other hand, laughter has an ambiguity. The question is, what or whom are we laughing at? From which perspective? It has to do with proximity and distance. With a look at whom I am in solidarity with. For example, I felt bad when I noticed that I was also conspiring with Mattel while I was supposedly laughing at Mattel from a distance. That is, at a joke that was authorized by Mattel. I thought to myself, “Darn, I laughed, and now what do I do?” That's a form that the film brilliantly employs. Towards the end I even thought, “Now the film is over, and I don’t know which position I'm in.” Because that's precisely what laughter engenders. But the ambivalence remains.

Caroline: The film is a comedy. It works with certain elements, like slapstick. So formally, it works with a certain genre and the script plays with very different kinds of humor. There is an enormous amount in the film that can pick up very different people in different places. There are jokes told that some people won't laugh at because they don't understand them. Other jokes everyone can laugh at. Maybe you don't laugh about this or that because you don't find it as funny as 80 percent of the other people next to you. And the other way around. This mechanism is inherent in all the dialogues and the script.

Jennifer: What is the relationship of humor, laughter or comedy to the political? This form of laughter is, “I know, I just told a sexist joke, haha.” You laugh, you might conspire, but a lot of times you distance yourself. What does that do now? How does that relate to the political? That's a question that can't be answered conclusively, because it's just as ambivalent as the question, “What's the relationship between the economy and the political?”

“Why can't we wake up in the morning and say, ‘Hey, Barbie,’ and in the evening, ‘Every night is a girl's night’?”

Julia: The film is also a political satire. It works with slapstick, exaggeration and irony. For example, it refers to the storming of the Capitol (and Barbieland) with the fur coat (in the storming of the Capitol it was a racoon fur hat with horns that became iconic in the storming as well as in Sylvester Stallone's public appearance in the 80s).

I think the film also thrives on its appeal to women and is directed at multiple generations. This is exemplified by the scene in the van when Gloria, played by America Ferrera, is “waking up” Barbies: “I just have to explain this to you and then you'll understand. You'll wake up and everything will be fine.” I had to laugh at that because it's that moment of despair you often have, when you feel you are saying, “I am talking to you as a sister of all genders. You don't understand me, and we're alienated by the structures of domination around us and within us.” One laughs at the dissolution of alienation in this utopia. The political analysis is razor sharp and precise. I was intellectually delighted by it. Barbie goes through “Real World” saying, “I'm uncomfortable. I'm being stared at all the time. Why are they devaluing me?” or a guy says to Ken, “You better not say you're a man because you won't get a job.” It is also this linking to an actual world of women and girls who know all this and experience it here in the mode of intensification through the medium of a fairy tale.

The other is this play with Barbie logic: I find this playful staging interesting, that no milk comes out of the milk carton and no water out of the shower. I found it a statement that this game world was implemented so lovingly. Not only because it's a terrific visual spectacle, but also because it's about filming play in a way that's not usually done, and in doing so, transitioning into a formal realism. The playful realism gives rise to the utopia of Barbieland. One also becomes melancholic, of course. Why can't we wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, Barbie,” and in the evening, “Every night is a girl's night”? That obviously doesn't work, as Stereotypical Barbie says to “And Ken” at the end of the film. Why not, actually? Maybe because this world is unsustainable, because no one dies, because no one ages, because there is no change. Then all of a sudden a confrontation happens with death, “cellulite” and all the things that come your way in life. You have to laugh about it, because it's also melancholic, growing up, becoming more vulnerable though age. At the end of the film, Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, might become a woman, with some kind of sexual organs. We'll have to talk about that, because it's completely unclear from my point of view. In any case, she has Birkenstocks (laughs). But she also becomes mortal. White Noise by Noah Baumbach (who co-wrote the screenplay for Barbie), with Greta Gerwig in one of the main roles, is about the theory that fascism always wants to overcome death and achieve eternal life. Given references to the shift to the right and climate catastrophe, Barbie is also about finitude. That's on display all the time—the mechanical and artificial versus the organic. It's crazy shifted into each other, because Barbie embodies something here with her world that Gerwig criticizes at the same time.

“We come from the world of a 'Mrs. Thomas Man.' Barbieland has 'Barbie and Ken.'“

Caroline: I thought it was funny that Greta Gerwig takes Barbieland seriously. We come from the world of a “Mrs. Thomas Mann.” In Barbieland, there's “Barbie and Ken.” This simple world, this milk box from which no milk comes out. The shower from which no water comes out. The basic setting is taken seriously and yet reinterpreted in terms of progress (laughs). The matriarchy in Barbieland versus the patriarchy in the Real World. But perhaps the point is to basically tell us something exclusively about the Real World. This basic idea is simple. But no one has talked about what's actually going on in Barbieland until this film? I grew up with parents who demonized Barbie. I didn't have Barbies. At some point, a friend's big sister gave me a Barbie that she had sorted out. I was allowed to keep it. My parents weren't that radical after all. The fact that Gerwig takes seriously what she finds and takes it seriously in a way that it has never been taken seriously. And one-by-one, she works through what it is and what it does or doesn't have to do with the “Real World.“ And of course, not every day can be “a perfect day.” Or can it be?

Jiré: I also found the element of water and the absence of liquids exciting. That leads me to my first criticism. If you think, for example, of theories like hydrofeminism in Astrida Neimanis where water is described as something that oscillates between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanist feminist phenomenology and new materialism. Many of us invoke figures of thought from this theorizing in the problems we grapple with when addressing racism, sexism or speciesism. And now water is not materially present in the Barbie world. It is not possible to dive into the water and thereby also create a change . Instead, one (especially Ken) is always bumping into the plastic that is supposed to represent water. And unlike water, it's impenetrable. I found that incredibly interesting.

“If Barbieland is indeed a utopian place and this utopia is perfect, then these Kens don't really make sense. Why isn't it a lesbian or queer utopia?”

In general, I had to laugh frequently at the various Ken characters. The precision and dimension of political and gender stereotypical behavior in everyday situations were just so well parodied. In a pointed way, this is clearly about the men's rights movement, its structures and explanatory models. What I also found interesting was that with the Kens, or specifically Ryan Gosling as the stereotypical Ken who idolizes the stereotypical Barbie, there is a decided desire. Whereas with the Barbies, there is not. Why is that? I ultimately found that to be problematic about the film.

If Barbieland is indeed a utopian place and this utopia is perfect, then these Kens don't really make sense. Why is it not a lesbian or queer utopia? In this context, I found it all the more significant that Kate McKinnon, of all people, plays “Weird Barbie” as a queer, lesbian icon. You go to her because she somehow has a better perspective and can accompany you through the difficulties of these worlds, but at the same time she is an outsider, about whom it is said several times: “Sorry, that we called you Weird Barbie behind your back and also to your face.“ In a way, this is an apt description of what people who live beyond a heteronormative matrix or who do not stand in the world (i.e., this world) as cis people experience on a daily basis. And that this was not resolved, but functionalized as a running gag, I found problematic. This also includes the end, where she goes to the gynecologist. I thought it was a great scene, because you thought she had a job or was going to a job interview. That would be the capitalist, neoliberal logic (laughs). But then it's about her (presumably) getting a sex, maybe a vagina. But what does that mean? Is that tied to something like becoming a subject and thus the ability to teach? I found that very problematic. But above all the point of desiring. Why do the Ken’s and the Barbies don’t? Is that difference feminism (Differenzfeminismus)? Or what is it that is actually reflected there?

Jennifer: That's a good question. I don't have a clear or definitive, conclusive answer. Ken wants to have a sleepover at Barbie's house. Barbie says, “What for?” (laughs)

Elisa: “Why?” (laughs)

Caroline: Ken wants to kiss Barbie. Barbie just looks at Ken.

Julia: And Ken says, “I don't know.”

Jennifer: This complete superfluity of this guy! I guess I see the problem of desire in this scene quite pragmatically. This superfluity and his desire, for what? In order to be able to stage the independence, the autonomy of Barbie, it makes sense to question exactly that again and again. In this way, it becomes clear that it cannot be called into question. It's also a means. Ken is always searching. He is nothing without her. That's why Ken is always attached to Barbie. He always has to be there. Ken is in the car, he has his skates with him. He can't do any better.

Jiré: I had the impression that the Kens' desire was the driving force behind all their actions. He wants to be seen, to establish a bond, if necessary, also to get someone through the establishment of corresponding power relations to bind to himself. The drive stems from a desire that Ken himself cannot properly name. But it is decidedly a desire and the subject is clearly present. For it knows that it wants to be seen. It KNOWS what it wants. Conversely, Barbie asks, “Why?” Barbie's becoming a subject is not accomplished until the end, then, when Barbie presumably becomes a woman. What does it mean?

“We have before us, much as Sarah-Mai Dang describes in her book, the form of affirmative and deconstructive female subjecthood in Barbie.”

Elisa: Earlier, Barbie apologized to Ken for not giving him the attention he needed. But Ken never apologizes to Barbie. I had a problem with the lack of desire and therefore hold a similar perception as Jiré. The idea of whatever, love, intimacy, romance, I think gives Ken some agency over Barbie. But I would not read that as an idea of autonomy. If we stay within the logic that we are always dealing with a game in which, for example, water has to be imagined, the question becomes: Who is playing Ken? This question can become more pronounced when a form of stereotyping or Barbie’s perfect day turns out to be different. I read Sarah-Mai Dang’s book Chick Flicks in preparation for our conversation. What we have with Barbie, much like Sarah describes in the book, is a form of affirmative and deconstructive female subjecthood, a form of becoming not being female. Barbie does not appear like Ken with his goals and moments of desire. I want to connect this to the question of play. Each of you said something at the beginning of our conversation about your own playful or non-playful experiences with Barbie. I would like to ask you more about this: How did you respond to a movie that might have been influenced by a memory of a childhood game? What experiences have you had with Barbie as a role model? I am interested in how playing with Barbie relates to a feminist film theory about a film experience that appropriates, recodes and rewrites the given film. I want to relate this to playing with Weird Barbie. Why does Weird Barbie deviate in Barbieland? Because in this playful interaction, or what happened to her, she seems to have offered other possibilities than “the perfect day.” She was played too hard.

Caroline: “Spice up your life.”

Elisa: Right, “Spice up your Life” by the Spice Girls is playing in the background. It's also a very physical scene, by the way. There's a lot of physical stuff going on with this plastic. I learned that playing is not an innocent and good-natured experience. Playing is always violent and always an exercise of power. To what extent do other potentials and structures of desire enter the perfect Barbie world through play? My Barbies were rarely innocent, because they negotiated desire. To what extent does the memory of this form of play shape the reception of the movie? Is it about playing the movie hard, straining, tugging? To what extent do potentials of desire become possible?

Caroline: I read the character Ken as a Gerwig reinterpretation because Mattel sells Barbie and Ken as “the perfect couple.” The Mattel version is of course totally sexualized, even without genitals. The whole binary setup brings this with it, has always been there and is totally problematic. Greta Gerwig wants to negate it—“the perfect couple”—and not have it as part of her film. That's why Barbie has no interest in Ken, in Ryan Gosling, the Hollywood heart-throb, and just leaves him to the side. I understand what you're saying, and in this form of thinking about it, it's problematic. But Greta Gerwig's agenda, in my opinion, is the reinterpretation or the appropriation of what she finds and the translation into her reading of the Barbie world. To see this Barbieland differently than what it actually is or how many people have perceived it so far and how it is extremely problematic with regard to countless factors, how it has shaped people and is still inscribed today, for example, in the image of “the perfect couple.” Gerwig wants to resist all that, not serve it. But this is how the problem of Barbie's lack of concern arises. Whereas by the end of the film, that is, through the humanization of Barbie, the desire and feeling perhaps does come back in?

Jiré: What does that mean? Does it mean that Ken is more of a human being beforehand when he has behavior?

Julia: Why do you think Barbie doesn't have desire? She does have desire. You have to see it through a broad concept of desire, according to Deleuze and Guattari. Desire does not occur out of a lack, and includes capitalist desire. Barbie also has many plans and many friends she desires, there is perhaps more and other than sexual desire. Just because she does not desire Ken, does she not have desire?

But there is also another dimension to it: It's a coming-of-age narrative for children and teenagers. On the one hand, I see this moment about exploring the genitals of dolls and the moment of one's sexuality being ambivalently embodied by the doll, which the film plays with when both characters don't know why Ken should stay over at Barbie's house. “The Toys That Made Us,” a Netflix documentary that Jennifer recommended, focuses in one episode on the design problem of how sexualized Barbie dolls could be, and how that was negotiated at Mattel so that Barbie had breasts but couldn't have a vagina. Ken needed something too, so they designed an abstraction for shaping pants. That's strange, and something that not only kids are interested in. People have always laughed at Barbie and Ken—across generations. I could already imagine that it is about letting the uncanny moment of desexualization flow back into the reception experience of the film. If we're talking about psychoanalysis, while the film certainly makes fun of the idea of no sex in Barbieland (or the prejudice that there is no sex in a matriarchy or the normative idea of desire), the point is not that Barbie has no desire. It is about the fact that a woman cannot have desire in a man's world if she does not have normative sexual desire. This is an exaggeration of the fact that Barbieland cannot really exist independently from “Real World”. Ideas and events of the 'real world' flow into it, since all the puppets are 'played' from there.

“This utopia cannot be a completely different world either, because it is not conceivable under the current circumstances in isolation from the Real World.”

To your other criticism, which I find very relevant: given the coming of age character of the movie, and perhaps also for global marketing reasons, certain one-sided “desexualizations” have been made, I think. That's something that can be criticized. It's a queer group in Barbieland, but not a lesbian utopia. This utopia can't be a completely different world either, because it's not conceivable under the current circumstances in isolation from the Real World. Greta Gerwig weaves this critique into the movie, because this is also a critique of capitalism. But “And Ken”, Ryan Gosling, is at least not in the end more human from my point of view. He doesn't develop, while the whole story is about Barbie developing, emancipating, becoming human. But I wouldn't say that she has female-read genitalia at the end—that was a criticism of the film, after all. Maybe she would like to have some, that would actually be interesting, because Barbie would then contain a completely different analogy: i.e., that the film is one transition. Just because she goes to the gynecologist, she may still end up with sex organs that are not necessarily interpreted as female. We don't know that. She's only just going. Let's see in part two what happens and whether it stays that way.

“There are a lot of great Barbies out there that could desire, and they just don't.”

Jiré: Exactly, but again to sexual desire. That there is, as you described, Julia, a different kind of desire and in it very great desires, that is clear and important. Nevertheless, I find it problematic that female desire lies exclusively THERE, instead of there also being a sexualized desire. That doesn't exist, especially in the perfect Barbie world, as if it's not needed there. This is my big point of criticism. Because in consequence it should actually say, because the Kens are so stupid, it's clear why you don't desire him/her. But there are many great Barbies who could desire each other and they just don't.

Julia: Quite pragmatically, someone invented Ken. There's Ken in this Mattel world. There's Alan and Earring Ken and others. Gerwig exhibits Pregnant Barbie, Skipper Barbie. The sometimes irritating ideas they had at Mattel, such as Barbie with a monitor in the back. That suggests that's been unresolved from the beginning. Barbie was supposed to be a friend, but at the same time she wasn't “allowed” to have a sexuality, which of course doesn't interfere with children's fantasies. It's more of a criticism of that than Gerwig celebrating it. But maybe it's also okay if Barbie has no sexuality, or no sexuality yet, in the normative sense.

Jennifer: What I still had in mind is: Who is playing Ken? In the fictional Barbie world, the storyline of the film could potentially open up everything. However, it cannot, because Barbieland is not fictional—and that's not a criticism—because Barbieland is also tethered to the real world. The entire movie works in the virtual space. What Barbie does or doesn't do is necessarily tied to the question: How do we or younger people play with these dolls? I think that's important and good, and for me it's a strength of the movie. The movie exhibits the virtual form of negotiation. In doing so, it accomplishes the same thing that digital or other virtual media do. The movie moves between reality and fiction and at all points in between there are hinge forms. “Did you have a Ken? How did you play with Ken? How can you play with Ken?” That's how I would pose the question, and less, “What fictional design for this guy do I have?” But rather: “How do I play with that?” I have Barbie and everything revolves around Barbie. And there's also a Ken. I didn't have one. You know him, but what do you do with him? That's what the film quotes. Of course, this somewhat limits the film, but in a very positive way because it never forgets that it's NOT about indulging in the boundless fictional, utopian realm. While I'm generally in favor of that, the film doesn't turn the problems into a matter of the symbolic, the fictional, the utopian. Rather, the film never does. Why? Because every action in Barbie's world is necessarily linked to reality. Barbie's world doesn't exist without reality. Barbieland is played (with), and in doing so, it opens up worlds and virtual possibilities that are inherently connected to the real world. Aside from issues of child protection, it wouldn't have worked if Barbie had sexual desire. So, I am a realist in that regard because when a five-year-old girl plays with Barbie and Ken, what is she up to? That's our question when we want to understand what's going on with Ken.

Kens on the cinema screen. @Jiré Emine Gözen

“What is the film trying to tell us? Even the guy who's just lying around and is just a Ken is conspiring.”

Caroline: At the same time, the film also tells us that Ken is the guy who lies in the corner and who doesn't exist without Barbie. The Ken variations are vying for Barbie. But in the end, I think the interesting thing about Ken—even though he sometimes is funnier and more of a subject in the film—is this concrete question: What is the film trying to tell us? The film tells us: even the guy lying in the corner, who is “just” a Ken, fraternizes. And turns Barbieland into a “Kendom” within a few days. Barbie isn’t there for just a moment, and it is already Kendom. And it takes the teenage girl, the young generation from the Real World, to say, just as they are about to leave Barbieland, “Mother, we're turning around. Be who you are and don't pretend all the time. You're right the way you are. And because there's Kendom down there now, we can't leave. We have to turn around to help Barbie. Even though Barbie is ‘a fascist’ and I don't actually like her. Kendom sucks!” That's what I find interesting about this Ken thing. This is the guy who's lying in the corner. He doesn't have a role, and what happens? Even in Barbieland—virtually without the patriarchy experience of the Real World—just through a mini-encounter with patriarchal structures through the excursion into the Real World, yes, a whole other kind of desire is immediately awakened: it's the guys who end up fraternizing and wanting to get to the top together.

Jennifer: Yes, not taking Ken seriously could be fatal. The game in which this doll lies around—a friend of mine had a Ken back then, but he never really played a significant role—could become a problem. That’s again this coupling or this ambivalence and also again a virtual space in-between. Ken is utterly useless and we can completely ignore him and toss him into the corner. It doesn't matter if he's there or not. If he plays a role, it's only to make Barbie look even more awesome. But beware, because that's not how it works. That's a great move of the movie. One must keep an eye on this boy. It's a very skillful way to handle these characters. That's why Ken is very important for the film, precisely with this note that he's superfluous. This note is itself brought to absurdity.

Elisa: As viewers, we don't learn how Ken convinces the other Kens to adopt patriarchy. Together with Barbie, mother and daughter, we arrive too late in an already inverted world. On the other hand, the movie shows how the Barbies convince each other: “Sisters of all genders, listen to me!” The fact that we don't see the tipping point into patriarchy is because I think the structure in Barbieland is always already patriarchal. The patriarchy is there. The reversal happens very quickly. It doesn't have to be worked out or acted out on the screen. It just takes two books and some horses and we have Kendom.

Caroline: I mean the scene with the battle. Men fight, and then men fraternize. How Kendom becomes the Kendom that Stereotypical Barbie finds after she returns from the Real World, we didn't catch. But that there is still a power struggle and we don't know if the Kens will keep it up, we do. After the fight, however, there is immediate fraternization.

“Here's why we can't see Kendom becoming Kendom in Barbieland. Because then we’d have to see that the Barbies and Kens have thirst and hunger, that there's water and real toast, that there's wage labor and production.”

Jennifer: It's not a coincidence that we didn't catch how Kendom came into being. If we can fundamentally agree that patriarchy has something to do with capitalism, it is clear that we cannot witness this transformation. That's one of the most central points, which is also the most sensitive point, because it's Hollywood and Mattel. In a first step towards Kendom, we should have seen Barbieland materialize. In the sense of historical materialism, there should have been something like wage labor in Barbieland. There should have been income or the necessity of income. Subsequently, Kendom unfolds. However, we do not see this, and that would be a valid critique of the film when considering the economic conditions of the movie. The movie manages to completely disregard the role of class. At one point, I had an awakening and thought, “Maybe it will address this.” The amusing scene where the two are out skating in their Malibu outfits. Barbie realizes it's somewhat awkward, with everyone staring. Ken thinks, “This is cool.” They resonate with the real world, but it's not yet a true INTERACTION. It's a resonance, but not a real interaction. What’s the first interaction? They understand that their outfits are drawing attention. They go into a store at the beach and pick out an equally extroverted but different outfit. They enter and then exit with the new outfit. There's a scene that I thought might be the turning point: the store clerk chases after them, waving and saying, “You have to pay for that!” That was a moment of awakening because that's the key issue that needs to be addressed. However, the film doesn't fully address it. Especially in the USA and Malibu, there could have been other scenes to highlight the underlying problem. But the movie doesn't do that. Hence, in Barbieland, we cannot see how Kendom comes into existence because we should have seen that the Barbies and Kens experience thirst and hunger, that there is water and real toast bread, and that there is wage labor and production.

Julia: What's your criticism now, that Barbie doesn't work for pay or that she steals? (Laughs.)

Jennifer: That capitalism as the basis of patriarchy is not the subject of the movie.

Julia: But patriarchy as the basis of capitalism very much is the subject of the film, if we consider the work of Silvia Federici. Here there is an unclear theorization on the part of the film. The film exposes the contradictions that capitalism and patriarchy entail. What can and must Barbie represent? Barbie can be anyone, it says at the beginning. You are Barbie, you are also Barbie. At one point it says, “Even if you just want to be a mother.” I had to gulp. “Just?” There's always a limit to what Barbie can be. There are also worlds that don't merge into plastic and there is no old Barbie. Apparently, Mattel claims to represent all women. The film also plays with this representation claim and its limitations.

“The film is an intervention in the massive gender rollback.”

Nevertheless, I think the film is an intervention in the fact that there is a massive gender rollback in the U.S. and also in Europe right now. In the film, we see Barbie having all these professions. That's been a vision of the '60s to empower kids, which then really took off in the conservative '80s with Barbie's many fields of action. But the play of the film is to go back to that because, as we know, feminism has not yet led to equality, especially an intersectional equality—that remains a constant struggle, and rights fought for can be lost or revoked in the face of retraditionalization. In that sense, we're dealing with an inverted vision of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. That's interesting because it takes up a lot of these issues again, brings us into a world where we're already in and say, “Why can Barbie only be emancipated in this materialistic way?” She has her own house and her own car. I would problematize the car for other reasons, fortunately she also has a bicycle. But why does she need these things like a big house and a car? Why must she be rich and successful in order to be emancipated? This is, on the one hand, related to the consumerism of Barbie features but on the other it is a class-forgetting empowerment feminism—it is also feminism under the conditions of capitalism—because it is about having one's own spaces and things and one's own money in the first place. The approach comes from a time when Barbie gave an image to this basic vision of independence. And we're not that far away from traditional roles becoming important again. Mom-influencers is a very successful genre on social media. I don't think it's so absurd to start a discussion, as Gerwig does, about the fact that self-determination rights over the body are declining, that we have massive gendered relations of exploitation, etc. But in the media, Gerwig, who is working within the constraints of the Hollywood genre, is accused of not having paid attention to everything—of not staging Barbie as a worker, for example.

“The film cannot do everything right.”

Caroline: The film can't be everything, and can't do everything right, that’s true. The very premise of having to partner with a corporation that will profit extremely from the cooperation makes this impossible. Greta Gerwig will also benefit artistically and economically, of course. But first the brand and the doll will profit. A new image will be created and new sales will be generated. But again: what does this film want? For me, this film wants to draw the attention of people who have never thought about certain things to what is going on in our world, for example, in terms of gender issues. That we are told all the time that patriarchy doesn't exist anymore. But patriarchy does exist. It's just better hidden, and not much has really changed. Even if we are no longer called “Mrs. Thomas Mann.” What did Greta Gerwig want with that? Maybe that's exactly what she wanted, to make a film that isn’t exclusively for an academicized indie film audience that deals with all these discourses anyway. Rather, she wanted to make a film for the masses and draw their attention to what, in her opinion, is the right thing to do. To what is going wrong in our world, and to some extent, specifically in the USA.

“The fantasy and utopia, all that we imagine and speculate, we should play with these political alternatives.”

Jennifer: I agree with this, and I would like to add that it's an empowering movie. How did you feel when you walked out of the cinema? The movie consists of this linkage of worlds. And Barbieland is like color therapy. It's funny and enjoyable, but the point is that Barbieland doesn't exist beyond the Real World. Barbieland is part of the Real World and needs to be protected. Imagination and utopia, everything we envision and speculate about, these political alternatives should be put into play. That means configuring all of it, not just leaving it in the realm of the symbolic and utopian. Barbie ventures into the real world. That, for me, is a very powerful move. We are Barbie, we are Barbieland. The question of what political strength thinking about Barbieland can bring to the real world is related to how we play. We play it seriously.

Caroline: Absolutely. It's said that Barbie trades in the plastic of Barbieland for the plastic of the Real World. And that's in Los Angeles, in the Barbie world of the Real World. How do you take that matriarchy into the plastic realm of the Real World?

Jennifer: At first I thought, “Is she nuts, why is she going into the real world?” But just the act of thinking, “Is she crazy?” what does that do to you? For her to become a political force, she has to venture into the real world. That's clear. But how is it that I sit here and think, “Is she insane? Why is she doing that?” That, in itself, means something.

Julia: I think your analysis that utopia is always part of this world is very convincing. This question that Jiré posed at the beginning has been on my mind, “Is this difference feminism?” It shouldn't be understood as essentializing or biologizing feminism. I never understood that before the film: that the Barbie world was a counterworld for you as kids. This pink and the glitter are also a counter aesthetics to the superhero spectacles today. That's played out very precisely. You still wonder, “Could it be read as different feminism to now stage a world other than the Marvel/DC world because it's explicitly (‘cliché’) girl’s and women's world?” I hope not. Viewing Barbie is kind of a play. And we need to understand this viewing-game as open to meaning and queering. But Barbieland cannot be completely disconnected from the Real World. At the same time, one could say that celebrating the feminine can be exclusionary under certain circumstances—besides, it clearly opens up a new target group. We know exclusion politically from certain feminisms. But the film opens Barbie up to different genders. Even as children, different genders play with Barbie, don't they? But it made sense to me in the context of this film, and it's not essentializing because Gerwig has consistently implemented a world that is otherwise only ever ridiculed and devalued. When you manage to combine that with a trans perspective, I think it's good. If it ends up being essentializing, it's problematic. But I also thought, in the face of all these demands on the film: “Does Barbie have to do everything on her own again, fulfill every demand? Mission Barbie: Do we have to solve it all again?”

Jennifer: No, she doesn't have to. That's why Polly Pocket is coming (laughs).

Julia: But with Polly Pocket, I'm skeptical. We experience an extraction from movies into characters that are put back into movies and become characters again. That also has something to do with reality, fiction and with buyability. This Pocket World, in which women are situated as the extension of things, is more problematic for me than Barbieland.

Jennifer: With Polly Pocket, there are WORLDS, not ONE country.

Julia: But there were also many worlds in Barbie, weren't there?

Jennifer: This is Barbieland.

Elisa: It depends on how you play.

Jennifer: Yeah. Exactly.

Julia: I think that's important.

Jiré: I would have found it more realistic if Barbieland was full of Weird Barbies. That would actually be the point, because we all played wild and hard with these Barbies.

Julia: It's also about internalized misogyny. First loved, then hated.

Jiré: It's about freeing them from that perfection. It would take a long time, but when you combed the hair, at some point it would become shaggy. I always thought that was beautiful (laughs).

Elisa: Then other things become possible.

Julia: Is that how you understand it? I understood that she was mistreated.

Jennifer: Yes, that too.

Julia: Because this balancing act is painful.

Caroline: But it's more appropriated. I understand it again as an appropriation. And in Barbieland that doesn't really work, because everyone has to look like this and like that from a Mattel perspective. They're not supposed to be in a balancing act. But that's reality.

“Do I think they are sacred? Are they in a display case?”

Elisa: Perhaps we should distinguish between utility and value, an attribution of value. There are collectible Barbies, which are valuable objects that cannot be played with or used. Barbies can be collected as an investment. For me as a child, having Barbies was also very much about my own pocket money. I saved money to buy Barbies that my parents wouldn't give me because they thought it was a toy that would limit my creativity. I had handmade dolls from my mother. Waldorf dolls, which had few facial features, so I could put a lot of creative potential into those toys. And I had wooden blocks (laughs). The question of value and commodification is so connected to Barbie, when children even play the game of commodification by buying Barbie products. I loved buying her clothes. That on the one hand, and then the question: “Do I think they're sacred? Should they be preserved and displayed in a glass case?” No, I played with them, even defaced them and appropriated them. My play was also at times violent and in a way a confrontation with the materiality of Barbies. It was also liberating.

Jennifer: Wasn't it the case that when you played with more or less good friends, it happened that the other's Barbie was defaced as an expression of a quiet conflict? That also happened, didn't it? That one had a conflict and maltreated the other's doll?

Jiré: I think that some of my dolls were maltreated like that (laughs).

Jennifer: Somehow I remember that. You would say to your friend, “Hey, give that back,” and then you’d tug on it, even pulling some of the hair out.

Jiré: Once the head came off, the Barbie was never the same afterwards (laughs).

Jennifer: Yes, this also relates to the question of, “How do we relate to each other?” Everyone greets each other nicely, saying, “Hi, Barbie.” Everyone is in solidarity and collaboratively figures out how to deal with the issue of Kendom. This also speaks to how we relate to each other and how we play with the dolls. These points of intersection between the Barbie world and the real world mirror the discourses that existed in the realm of digital media. The digital is something distinct, and then there's reality. We have long since entered the virtual realm and know that these intersections exist. The film navigates these elements incredibly well. The discussions about whether it's still a game or already something serious, whether it's still symbolic or already material, these are debates that have traversed various media histories. The film takes a political stance. The corresponding dimensions of reality do not exist independently of each other, and this can potentially become a political force. It depends. That's why it's interesting to see how the film is assessed. This is yet to be determined and is still evolving. The question is what effects this film yields in the real world. Therefore, the film must prompt us not only to see what happens in the film but also to observe what happens in the real world with the movie.

Caroline: I have a rather pessimistic impression: the left is hacking away at the film, the majority is against it. And the “real” Barbie fans are disappointed because they expected something different and don't get what they wanted from this movie. The Republicans chastise Barbies in their video formats in front of the camera and get worked up for 45 minutes about Barbie being a propaganda film that disparages men.

Jiré: That's why I want to keep listening to very smart FLINTAs talk about Barbie all summer.

Julia: For right-wingers and men’s rights activists, the commodification of women is normalized—they’re dolls. But when this happens to men, it's unbearable. Laughing at Ken is perceived as an attack. Barbie must be set on fire in revenge. It is a fairy tale or fable of the world, like Jirés example of Michael Ende with fascism in his book. I see that the left is critical, especially because of Hollywood’s production conditions. As we know, Mattel has invested the same amount in production as it has in marketing deals with other companies. Dozens of companies make products with Barbie. In other words, the Barbie craze is in full swing. We will see Barbie in everything—and maybe a pink world is also a stone in the stumbling block of an often male superhero film world? But that doesn’t prevent the film from demonstrating and analyzing many things very cleverly. For example, the loss of home and the disenfranchisement of the Barbies, as we experience it again and again. We see the criticism of inadequate representational policies and the plastic world that foists petro-based products on us. But it all still plays out the way Gerwig stages it, and she uses the medium of the fairy tale to convey it to young women: “Pay attention. You may not see it, but notice what's happening.” To do that, Gerwig finds a form that shies away from the indie film aesthetics that she usually employs in her films, and still asks the question, “How do you deal with no solidarity or female alienation among Barbies of all genders?” Indeed, Gerwig's films are always about female relationships. I'm thinking about Frances Ha, who gets dumped by her BFF. Thinking about questions of solidarity and friendship under conditions like the current ones, which Gerwig does, carries at least as much weight for me as these accusations of commercialization. By the way, this also happens with Batman. It's bound to happen again in the next 5,000 sideshow character films from Marvel and DC. It doesn't mean that people only watch Hollywood movies now. So why is it such a massive problem once Greta Gerwig does use popcorn film aesthetics? Because she's a woman, because people expect everything from her, and because maybe she's not supposed to have such a range.

Barbie is also expected to do everything: Mattel was doing badly before the movie. After the movie, Mattel is doing better financially. Mattel, as I said above with a wink, won me over as a target audience. All abhorrent, but in the end I thought, “You really need to watch these Kens.” In that respect, as Caroline said, it's not just the so-called masses, it's also me that the movie wakes up somehow.

Elisa: I laughed the most at the scene where Alan says, “We have to get out of here before they realize they have to build the wall horizontally.” (laughs) And then Alan fights with all the Kens. For me, another key scene is where the teenage girl says to her mother, “We have to go back and save Barbieland NOW.” That's an interesting plot development at the border between the two worlds.

Caroline: I had to laugh a lot at: “She thinks I'm a fascist? I don't control the railways and the flow of commerce.” I thought that was very funny.

Elisa: I had to think twice about what was being alluded to.

Jennifer: I'd like to get to the end of the movie, not the gynecology scene, but rather Ruth. I find her interesting. She appears to me to be quite paternalistic. This is cleverly done by Mattel. Mattel speaks as a corporation through Ruth to sagely advise what needs to be considered when making this transition. She employs a grandmotherly and paternalistic gesture. It's crucial that we use our voices, so that Ruth's is not the last word regarding this transition. Instead, it's about taking ownership of the transition. Mattel has set the chorus in the character of Ruth. You can have your own opinion about it, but the point is that other voices simply continue, expand, and play on the ending. That's what we're doing, and it's wonderful.

Caroline: Continuing to hijack the system!

Julia: Jiré, you were the most critical, but it may be that I missed the nuances. I think you deserve the final word for that.

Jiré: I would like to listen to many more young FLINTA talk about Barbie. And others, too. The closing word could be an invitation for further conversations about Barbie and comparable films.

Julia: Great, what we don't want to do as much is listen to Kens talk about Barbie.

Elisa: The mansplaining scene was very revealing.

Jennifer: I'd like to share something with you, a memory from 1992. I would like a picture—if you are agreeable, and if you also desire it, and are as deeply impressed by the picture as I am—to adorn our contribution. The story goes like this: I will send you the picture first, and then I'll provide the story behind it. It's a photo that was likely taken by the father of my best friend, Julia, back in the day. I'm searching for it.

Barbiemobil. ©privat

“It was the real thing. We sat in a real car. If the theme is the intersection of different dimensions of reality, that's the bottom line for me.”

Jennifer: When I knew we were going to have this talk, I asked my friend if she could send me a picture of this Trabant. Somehow, her father had acquired a decommissioned Trabant back then. So, this man transported, or had the Trabant transported, from the East to the West where it became the Barbie car. It was then parked in my friend Julia's garden. In the photo, she's playing in front of the Barbie car on the lawn with her Barbies, where I also played a lot and happily in the garden in West Germany, in Dortmund, in 1992. It's epic.

Elisa: Sublime!

Julia: Is that also problematic because of capitalist appropriation of Eastern symbols?

Jennifer: It's certainly ambivalent. But it was like that. That was the life of this Trabbi.

Julia: I can't stand that, I'm like trapped in Barbieland and can't stand contradictions (laughs).

Elisa: It's like Ferrari and petro-capitalism.

Jennifer: That was real play. We sat in a real car. If the theme is the intersection of different dimensions of reality, that, for me, is the essence.

Julia: Now that you mention the car, I have to think of the podcast Oh Witch Please that Elisa shared. I find petro-capitalism an important perspective on the film: not only does Barbie’s Barbiemobile run on gas (which is in fact electric in the film but is still referring to petro-based cars in the 1960s real world), but the doll is made of petrochemical products. Learning to love petro-products can be blamed on Mattel. Both industries are closely entangled and since the oil market is limited by resource availability, plastic industries are very attractive future markets. Plastic is a petro product. Moreover, the multifunctionality of plastic correlates precisely with the multiple images of Barbie advertised by Mattel: Barbie can be formed into anything. In their podcast, Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosmann therefore argue with McLuhan that the medium is the message here.

Elisa: They argue that there has been a misinformation policy regarding the recycling of these materials. That's a great observation.

“The word feminism comes up once at the very beginning—the word patriarchy all the time.”

Jiré: One last point is perhaps that the word feminism appears exactly once at the very beginning of the film. After that, no more. That is interesting as a setting or as a non-setting, that feminism is not formulated as an alternative to patriarchy.

Elisa: The word patriarchy comes up all the time.

After the interview, the craziest and funniest Barbie stories reached us—share yours and write us for the second part of the interview!

Preferred citation method: Bee, Julia; Gözen, Jiré Emine; Eickelmann, Jennifer; Linseisen, Elisa; Pitzen, Caroline: We have seen Barbie and want(ed) to talk about it all summer!.. Barbie - a conversation. In: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, ZfM Online, GAAAP_ The Blog, October 10, 2023, https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/online/wir-haben-barbie-gesehen-und-wollten-den-ganzen-sommer-darueber-reden.

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