The Carrier Bag of Barbie
Greta Gerwig's take on Barbie and the power of cultural devices
Culture began with a bone—a stick, a spear, a sword, the blade that cut to the bone.
A bone, found and used to kill. At least that’s how the story goes: the Hero’s Journey, the popular narrative, three acts, five acts; a beginning, a middle, and the end.
You can hear the score. Low drums build to a crescendo as we watch apes ascend to man. A bone flies through the air and we cut to a spaceship. Civilization. Technology. Evolution.
An homage to this iconic scene, from Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is how the Barbie movie opens. Except this time it’s a doll, not a bone, and instead of apes, there are girls. And pink. Lots and lots of pink.
Well, the pink comes later and it never leaves. On both sides of the Barbie screen, pink reigns supreme. In the bathroom after the screening, every woman in line wore items of pink. Including me.
That was one of the thoughts rolling around my head as I watched the film, this proud feminist flick where women rule and men are kind of dumb and shady… How deep can you go with your commentary on the patriarchy when the narrative remains hinged on consumer capitalism?
But I’m not here to tell you what’s good or bad, right or wrong, progressive or regressive about the Barbie movie. What I do think is worth noting, however, is that our association with pink is taught, sold to us by the marketing industry.
Most of you already know the history of pink for girls and blue for boys, and how it’s only in the past 100 years that we made this rule up. You’ve all seen old time-y photos of babies. They wore white! It wasn’t until the directive to sell more clothes came about that marketers made a decision and told consumers to stick to it—after decades of flip-flopping on which colour belongs to which gender.
"The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."
Ladies' Home Journal, June 1918
Pink and blue, as binary constructs of duality, are a good representation of our titular subject, but before we unpack Greta Gerwig’s Carrier Bag of Barbie… I have a gift for Ryan Gosling fans who didn’t grow up in Canada in the 90s.
Behold: Breaker Higher, a one season, 44 episode (!) television program about high school students living on a boat, traveling to a new port every week, in which Mr. Gosling starred. A pre-cursor to Ken, if you will.
Please enjoy the show’s intro below and, if you’re so inclined, fall down the early Ryan Gosling rabbit hole. If you land upon episodes of Young Hercules, I’m both sorry and you’re welcome.
Now, back to the bone—the metaphor for patriarchy. Literally: the phallus. Metaphorically: linear time, rationality; a beginning, a middle, and an end; conflict as inherent to storytelling. This is what Ursula K. Le Guin confronts and unravels in her 1986 essay, The Carrier Bag of Fiction—the evidence against the singular narrative of the bone.
Looking for proof of her humanity, searching for her place in the scheme of things, Le Guin found that she didn’t belong. To be human meant wielding a weapon—and killing with it. Story meant action, a Hero. It all started with a bone, they said.
That didn’t make sense to Le Guin. It felt incorrect. Certainly something else must have come first. Something different. “But no, this cannot be,” she writes—
Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story.
The new story—the old story—is the container, the bag, the chalice. That was the first cultural device: a bag, not a bone. And it makes sense. This is what separated humans from the apes: a carrier bag; something to collect our food with, to hold our wild oats, our berries, something to carry our children in.
The bone, the stick, the spear, the sword, the blade came later. After. It signalled a new kind of culture. Not better. But different.
Just like Barbie. Barbie changed the world. Doll as cultural device, though not just any doll; adult doll as cultural device. Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, invented her because she couldn’t find any adult dolls to buy for her daughter to play with. All the dolls for sale were representations of infants.
Ruth saw an opening in the market and just so happened to be married to one of the founders of the toy company Mattel. Apparently neither her husband nor Mattel’s directors initially saw sales potential in an adult doll, but she eventually convinced them and Barbie took over the world.
With their 2001: A Space Odyssey homage, Barbie’s director Greta Gerwig, and her co-writer and partner Noah Baumbach, acknowledge the power of Barbie’s arrival and its demarcation of a new kind of civilization. Barbie as blonde, lithe cultural device that shaped the trajectory of—well, that part isn’t as obvious—patriarchy? feminism?
I think it’s both.
Barbie left me with more questions than answers. She gave us the gift of envisioning our future in a new way, but within in a limited container. She helped us dream, but with those dreams came, well, nightmares. We grew or shrank because of her.
Whether Barbie, or the movie inspired by her, are good or bad things, I don’t know. Woke. Feminist. Right. Wrong. These are just words.
I think the message here is in understanding the power of cultural devices and their roots in duality—the red pill or the blue pill, the blade or the chalice, the bag or the bone, good or evil—when we know the truth lies in both and in balance.
Perhaps that’s what this new story of Barbie can offer us—an invitation to the space between red/pink and blue. Body as story. A bag of bones. The emergence of a new culture. Not better. But different.
📹 READ: The Carrier Bag of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Love this and that quote by le guin! I wholeheartedly loved the movie, but I can’t get enough of peoples thoughts about it. So much to talk about and learn from. 🩷
“Barbie left me with more questions than answers. She gave us the gift of envisioning our future in a new way, but within in a limited container. She helped us dream, but with those dreams came, well, nightmares. We grew or shrank because of her.”
👏👏👏