Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [37]
IF I HAD TO LOCATE THE POINT AT WHICH I BEGAN TO SEE the ancient archetype within the modern toy, it would be at the home of Robin Swicord, a Santa Monica-based screenwriter whom Mattel commissioned in the 1980s to write the book for a Broadway musical about the doll.
Swicord is not a New Age nut; she's a writer. And even after mega-wrangles with Mattel's management—the musical was sketched out but never produced—she is still a fan of the doll. "Barbie," she said, "is bigger than all those executives. She has lasted through many regimes. She's lasted through neglect. She's survived the feminist backlash. In countries where they don't even sell makeup or have anything like our dating rituals, they play with Barbie. Barbie embodies not a cultural view of femininity but the essence of woman."
Over the course of two interviews with Swicord, her young daughters played with their Barbies. I watched one wrap her tiny fist around the doll's legs and move it forward by hopping. It looked as if she were plunging the doll into the earth—or, in any event, into the bedroom floor. And while I handle words like "empowering" with tongs, it's a good description of her daughters' Barbie play. The girls do not live in a matriarchal household. Their father, Swicord's husband, Nicholas Kazan, who wrote the screenplay for Reversal of Fortune, is very much a presence in their lives. Still, the girls play in a female-run universe, where women are queens and men are drones. The ratio of Barbies to Kens is about eight to one. Barbie works, drives, owns the house, and occasionally exploits Ken for sex. But even that is infrequent: In one scenario, Ken was so inconsequential that the girls made him a valet parking attendant. His entire role was to bring the cars around for the Barbies.
In other informal interviews with children, I began to notice a pattern: Clever kids are unpredictable; they don't cut their creativity to fit the fashions of Mattel. One girl who wanted to be a doctor didn't demand a toy hospital; she turned Barbie's hot pink kitchen into an operating room. Others made furniture—sometimes whole apartment complexes—out of Kleenex boxes and packing cartons. And one summer afternoon in Amagansett, New York, I watched a girl and her older brother act out a fairy tale that fractured gender conventions. While hiking in the mountains, a group of ineffectual Kens was abducted by an evil dragon who ate all but one. He remained trapped until a posse of half-naked Barbies—knights in shining spandex—swaggered across the lawn and bludgeoned the dragon to death with their hairbrushes.
When the dragon devoured the Kens, the brother dismembered them. "More boys would buy Barbies if you could put them together yourself," he told me, adding that he enjoys combining the body parts in original ways. "That was the beginning of the downfall of Barbie in our house," his mother told me. "Once we saw one with three legs and two heads, it was hard to just let her be herself."
I also learned to ask children what their doll scenarios meant to them, rather than to make assumptions. Last summer, for example, I was playing on my living-room floor with a six-year-old, under the watchful eye of her parents—he a black television executive, she a white magazine writer. The girl had brought her own blond Barbie, and the doll—like the girl—was quite a coquette. Her "play" consisted of going on dates with five of my male dolls: a blond Ken, a G.I. Joe, and three members of Hasbro's Barbie-scaled New Kids on the Block. She completely ignored Jamal, a black male doll made by Mattel, leaving him sprawled facedown on the rug—troublingly evocative of William Holden at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard.
I was not, it soon became evident, the only one who was troubled. When Jamal had been neglected for what seemed like eons, the