Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [72]
Of course Barbie Fashion is considerably tamer than Angel Love. Barbie has not yet had to counsel Midge through the anguish of an abortion or coax Ken into rehab before his septum collapses. But Slate feels that the benefits of Barbie's name recognition dramatically outweigh the occasional drawbacks of writing for a character who cannot make mistakes. This is because girls aren't encouraged to read comic books. Given the traditional maleness of the comic-book market, the real wonder of Wonder Woman is that a female superhero has had any success at all. Without a brand-name attraction like Barbie, comic artists might as well write off reaching girls. "If they can't do it with Barbie, they can't do it with anybody," Slate said.
To be sure, the Barbie comic books have only a fraction of Barbie magazine's 600,000 subscribers, but girls are buying them. They are also being distributed in untraditional outlets, such as the Barbie section of FAO Schwarz. This is not a bad thing. Ever since Art Spiegelman's Maus, which dealt in pictures with the Holocaust, critics have taken a fresh look at comic books and started calling the ones they like "graphic novels." Which leads to another paradox in Barbie's ever contradictory career: Barbie, who epitomizes all that is stereotypically "feminine," is helping to masculinize—or, in any event, androgynize—the reading habits of young women.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BARBIE LIKE ME
The teenage doll that Ruth Handler invented had a lot in common with the teenage "dolls" created by the movie industry. But when people said the original Barbie looked like a star, they didn't mean Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo or Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. They meant Donna Reed or Sandra Dee—actresses from whom conspicuous ethnicity had been purged; who weren't even Presbyterian or Methodist, but generic Protestant; who embodied a phantasmic, impossible "American" ideal.
In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler tells how the studio moguls—all immigrants and outsiders—created an "America" that was more "American" than the country ever could be. They formed a "cluster of images and ideas—so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination." And Americans, aping those images, ultimately became them. "As a result, the paradox—that the movies were quintessentially American while the men who made them were not— doubled back on itself," Gabler writes. "By creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction."
To look at Mattel as a relative of the Hollywood studios is to make sense of some of its contradictions. The daughter of a Polish Jewish immigrant, Ruth Handler coded with her fashion dolls the same sort of phantasmic "America" that Louis B. Mayer had coded in his movies. Barbie was, in fact, better suited than a human actress to exemplify an impossible ideal. There was no tribal taint in her plastic flesh, no baggage to betray an immigrant past. She had no navel; no parents; no heritage.
Yet even as Mattel grew rich off play sets that reflected white, middle-class values, its management was far from backward-thinking about race. This incongruity between public products and private politics is not without precedent in Hollywood. True, the studio moguls rejected Democratic politics in favor of a bland Republicanism that harmonized with their invented "America," but most screenwriters didn't. And Elliot Handler, who headed not only Mattel but also its creative team, can be said to have had a screenwriter's social conscience.
As early as the 1940s, Mattel integrated its assembly line and hired a black foreman. "It was unheard of in those days to put a black production worker next to a white production worker and have them all share toilet facilities," Ruth Handler told me. And in recognition of its policies, Mattel