PicoBlog

Hi friends! Here I am in your inbox again, bringing you the Fat Bubble, where we honour the contributions and resources of fat folks and fat culture. And yes, this week I'm sharing my thoughts on Barbie, the movie. 

When I saw Barbie last week, my thought was, 'I'm going to be talking about this a lot in sessions!'. Indeed, one dear client said to me this week, "When I was watching it, I thought 'did Vicky write this script?' - what a high honour! To confirm, I won't give any spoilers here, but I will speak to how the Barbie film deals with Barbie as perfection, as a central theme, and how fatness touches into the film at a couple of points.

This film has a lot of heavy lifting to do, but honestly I’ve been excited to see it from the get-go. In the trailer, the foot fall felt like such a smart detail to me. And, then, at the end of the trailer, to hear my beloved Cass Elliott singing out made me hope that Greta Gerwig was setting a real intention here. 

Well, I loved it. I laughed and I cried, and I thought it was smart and funny and camp, whilst also being interesting and thoughtful. From Cass Elliott in the trailer, an intersection of anti-fat hate awareness wasn’t abandoned and there are a few touch points through the film. 

Principally, I felt a huge embodied pride swell up in me whenever Sharon Rooney was on film! A fat Barbie just wasn’t even conceivably an option when I was a child and now, when bigger bodied Barbies are available and a fat Barbie is up there on the big screen, it felt really good. 

More than just representation, Barbie does also begin to reckon with how the doll has contributed to poor body image issues in our culture. In one scene, Stereotypical Barbie is confronted with this reality, and has to internalise how she has established, and continues to perpetuate, unrealistic beauty standards that have harmed people in the Real World. Later on, in America Ferrera’s wonderful monologue, there is even an effort to untangle weight from health, and how stealth that can be in our culture: 

‘You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin’.

This whole monologue is a real mistressclass (please help me in getting this term to takeoff - I've seen this film described as a masterclass so many times, without even a thought to how the patriarchy has woven its way into terms of excellence!) in what it is to get tangled in the oppressive demand to stand on the pinhead of perfection, and to hear them even begin to recognise the headfuckery of conflating health and weight was honestly music to my ears – for some, this is going to be the first time anyone has pointed out the difference between the two, and that’s a special thing. 

And central to the film is one of my favourite and most persistent therapeutic themes: learning how to be human. Barbie has to navigate the Real World, in a way that resonates with all of us. The desire to pick the high heel and stay in Barbieland is real in so many of us, because to be human is... just so much more complicated. Barbie’s process of learning about the Real World is a process that I recognise, therapeutically – tolerating what it is to be human, in a world that would rather we were dolls. 

Of course a capitalist Hollywood movie about a capitalist thin, white, blonde, cishet, non-disabled Barbie was never going to be able to reckon with all the issues and, from a non-perfection practice, I personally don’t need it to try. Barbie is never going to be able to provide a depth of insight into these issues, and it feels very ok to me that she isn’t going to be vaulted into a position of leadership on this! But I thought it was a great contribution to the conversation and, for some, an entryway to new ideas and concepts they might not otherwise have reckoned with. For many women and femmes, it resonates deeply as both a personal insight, and also gives the solidarity warmth of feeling like a universal connecting feeling. Because, tell me, which of us doesn’t have the experience of having to listen to a man play guitar at us for four hours straight... 😉 

Until next week, friends, wishing you safety and joy.

Vicky

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