This article contains major spoilers for Barbie.
Last weekend, I went into Barbie certain that my favorite character would be Weird Barbie. I was floored when, coming out of the theater, I found that instead I’d fallen in love with Gloria (America Ferrera), the Mattel employee whose pathos breaks down the barrier between Barbie Land and the real world.
Partly, I love Gloria because of America Ferrera’s excellent performance. But mainly, Gloria was just so relatable.
To recap: Gloria, brokenhearted over the estrangement she’s going through with her daughter, starts designing new Barbie dolls, like Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie. These concepts bleed into Barbie Land, forcing Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie to go find Gloria and make things right.
Once she’s in Barbie Land, Gloria figures out how to snap all the Barbies out of the brainwashing they’ve suffered at the hands of the Kens: she gives an impassioned speech about how impossible it is to be a woman under patriarchy. Every expectation society has of women is contradicted by another expectation, and every path to a successful, fulfilling life is undercut by those contradictions. Everything Gloria says is truth, but one line stuck out to me in particular:
“You have to be thin, but you can’t say you want to be thin. Instead, you have to say you want to be healthy.”
Once, I knew someone on Facebook who would periodically announce that she would unfriend anyone who talked about their weight. Not anyone who talked about their weight directly to her—anyone who talked about their weight on their own feeds. It was good ol’ fashioned body shaming disguised as fat positivity, and it really rankled me as I hit middle age, gained some weight, and began to have complicated feelings about my body. I’m trying to love my body as it is, and I also miss the way I looked in my twenties, and surely there must be some space for that? But out of everyone on Earth, I’m apparently the only person who isn’t allowed to speak honestly about my own experience. Funny how it always works out that way for marginalized people!
But Gloria’s experience with weight isn’t the only thing about her that I love. Like me, she’s the mother of a tween girl. It’s a profound and bittersweet experience to watch my older daughter grow up and start to find her own way in the world—especially since it’s still such a messed-up, misogynistic world.
Anyway. Gloria frees all the Barbies, and then, when the Mattel executives arrive, she pitches a genius idea: Ordinary Barbie. Ordinary Barbie isn’t the president, or an astronaut, or a supermodel—she just, as Gloria puts it, “wants a flattering top, and to get through the day feeling kind of good about herself.”
My god. When I was young I wanted to win a Pulitzer, but now, the experience Gloria’s describing sounds like a perfect day.
To my knowledge, Ordinary Barbie doesn’t exist. In a way, though, she does. Gloria is that Barbie. (Literally—Mattel just came out with a Gloria doll.) We all are that Barbie. And suddenly, I’m able to relate to Barbie in a way I never could before.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
