The real business of Barbie

The 2023 film Barbie begins with a parodic homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

- AMANDA HESS

We open on a prehistoric desert landscape. Little girls in fusty dresses tend to a fleet of baby dolls. One wearily pushes hers in a creaky pram. Then a larger-than-life Barbie materialises, a lathe the monolith, in her original stiletto slides and strapless swimsuit. The girls are moved to rebellious action. They rip off their aprons and smash their baby dolls’ heads in.This is just the most recent retelling of Mattel’s central lore, which maintains that toy companies exclusively sold babyish dolls until the Mattel cofounder Ruth Handler dreamed up Barbie, freeing girls to centre their imaginative play on an actual woman — as if it took this brilliant inventor to unlock their natural (and yet also progressive, sophisticated, even feminist) desire for a doll with breasts.

It's a gripping pitch, though little of it is true. The real story of Barbie's origins is much messier, and more interesting — especially as told in Barbieland, Tarpley Hitt’s rollicking tale of how Mattel spied, copied and stole its way to market dominance, then fought with military intensity to compel us to buy more and more.