#the Good Guy Mattel CEO who is in the business because he cares about the dreams of little girls not money lmao lmao okay sure | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

layingeggs · 5 months

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Watched the Barbie film. Then I watched that Lisa vs Malibu Stacy, as some online had said that it does the same job but better.

At their heart, these are two very different stories. Lisa vs Malibu Stacy is a deliberate and conscious story of feminism. Barbie is not.

Barbie is a story about self and reflection through media. Namely, the way that little girls see themselves and see others around them, such as boys or their mothers, eventually becoming mothers and how they see their daughters.

Not 'Barbie is a girl and I am a girl so I am Barbie', but rather Barbie as a space in which multiple conflicting ideas can coexist and be worked through and processed in a way they might never be outside of Barbie.

It's crucial that at the center of the film is a mother and daughter who cannot communicate with each other and only begin to communicate with each other once they start playing with dolls together. The doll is not simply the image of the self mirrored back to you, the doll is the self changed and distorted and amplified such that you yourself can change.

Lisa vs Malibu Stacy has nothing on this. We have some interesting mother daughter interactions but it's mostly focusing on Lisa's alienation. They never reconcile their difference and Lisa's feminism is never understood by her friends or family.

The one point though where these two works do come together, and where Lisa vs Malibu Stacy is the clear and undeniable winner, I think it has to be the use of mattel.

Both of them have the legacy of Barbie taking on new meaning in the lives of girls and so spinning out of the corporate control. Both of them have the corporate executives becoming aware of this and conspiring to crush the spirit of girls and sieze control of dolls and maintain their profit margins. Both of them are shown to be ineffectual for the sake of comedy, but then you have that crucial difference.

Barbie's mattel ultimately don't actually care about the corporation or the conspiracy. There's literally a line where the CEO says he 'didn't get into this business for the bottom line,' he 'did it for the little girls'. In the climax of the film, the corporate characters aren't even written to be consistent from this defanged narrow perspective. They just let Barbie do whatever she wants.

Whereas Malibu Stacy's mattel have a bit of floundering at first for the sake of comedy, but ultimately they are the bad guys of the story and can't just be handwaved away. Especially crucial that they win out in the end with a still ineffectual and daft strategy, but a strategy that works nonetheless precisely because of its use of consumerism. That the hype machine and advertising of any widely known brand or franchise is always going to stamp out any valid or good criticism in the end.

Truthfully I cried at both of these works. I cried a lot. But Lisa vs Malibu Stacy wins out in the end for me. Partly because of a more coherent feminist message but also partly just my own preferences.

Barbie ends on the big happy ending. Everyone gets what they want. And bizarrely mattel want Barbie to have what Barbie wants.

Lisa vs Malibu Stacy has the more human and flawed ending, which I am always going to prefer to a happy ending. Just my preference! That mattel are able to crush her feminist criticism of Malibu Stacy. But at the end of the episode we see that one solitary little girl buying the alternative doll. And Lisa saying maybe it was all worth it if we got through to her.

You know, Barbie almost has that! There's one bit where Barbie has a meltdown and the mother character, hold on, what are their names? I think Sasha is the daughter. Let me look this up.

Okay. Gloria and Sasha. Right, so Barbie is having a meltdown, and Gloria has decided to give up on her and just head back to the real world and let Barbieland be as it may. But her daughter Sasha then tells her no. You have to fight for girls. You have to at least try.

But then we get the happy ending, don't we? She tries to fight for girls, and it works! And everyone gets what they want. Contrast with Lisa vs Malibu Stacy where Lisa tries to fight for girls and is defeated. But there's those little victories along the way. That it's still worthwhile even if it doesn't work out. That girls and women are still worth fighting for even if you don't win.

I don't know. I always prefer those endings! I don't want to hear about people who got everything. That annoys me. LOL I want to hear about people who were left behind, people who didn't make it, but still kept on living anyway. That's what matters to me.

Quick comments on other obvious comparisons. Bart and Ken. Both can be said to represent insecure boys who cannot stand girls having just one little thing for themselves. Ken eventually works through his insecurities and overcomes adversity. Bart shrinks and transforms into a corncob.

I think the Bart storyline is a suitable blunt dismissal of a misogynistic thinking that a story about feminism/women and girls shouldn't need to address anyway.

But I also feel that the Ken storyline in Barbie works really well with the core concept of dolls as reflection of the self. Ken having the crisis of identity needs to be there as this is the girl working through her understanding of boys around her, perhaps even working through her own male self. I don't think the Ken storyline was as good as it could have been, but narratively I think it is important and that's what really matters here.

And then there's Ruth Handler and Stacy Lovell. I much much prefer Lisa vs Malibu Stacy actually involving Stacy Lovell in the feminist discourses and labours. Ruth Handler being a deus ex machina is just daft I feel. Having her be an actual woman who lives with misogyny in her life but still cares about inspiring little girls is I think much more interesting than having her be an immortal ghost haunting a corporation who in real life were horribly abusive towards her.

The comment about 'her story would have to be its own film', when the Simpsons just casually mixed that story in to a 20 minute tv episode.

But The Simpsons did have me researching Ruth Handler to find out if she was actually a treasonous communist if that was just a wild exaggeration.

As far as I can tell, Ruth Handler was not a communist, or at least not specifically collaborating with the Viet Cong. As far as I can tell, she was either innocent of tax evasion, or embroiled in tax evasion with others at mattel, and they turned her in to both protect themselves and also keep her feminist politics out of the company.

Again, the Barbie film goes some way to discussing that tension of feminist politics inside the company of mattel and the ways that capitalism will work to control and repress and assimilate that. But mostly it's subtext or just handwaved away with comedy. Whereas in The Simpsons it is very much front and center.

So that's my conclusion I think. Barbie has a lot more to say about girls and identity and relationships, but Lisa vs Malibu Stacy is the more coherent and honest feminist thesis.

#Barbie #Lisa vs Malibu Stacy

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