In a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie opens on an apparently primordial desert landscape, where a few bored-looking girls play with porcelain babies as a narrator describes the history of dolls in voice-over. A shadow falls upon the children when Margot Robbie—as a larger-than-life version of the original 1959 doll—enters the scene, pulling her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and winking at the girls. Against the desolate natural landscape, Robbie’s glamorous Barbie embodies the allure of consumption: the girls on the ground act accordingly, promptly smashing their baby dolls against the desert rocks in a show of devotion to the plastic woman.
This opening scene conveys the massive impact that Mattel’s Barbie doll had on children when it was introduced: 300,000 dolls were sold in its first year. Instead of playing with baby dolls in what can be read as practice for motherhood, Barbie attempted to offer young girls an enticing aspirational model for their futures as women, especially as laborers (she has had more than 250 careers and famously “went to the moon” before Neil Armstrong). While this cultural turn to Barbie can be viewed in part as reflective of a new era of women’s perceived independence from domesticity as well as an early hint of the “girlboss feminism” to come, the beginning of Barbie can also be viewed as symbolic of another great shift relevant to this project’s investigation into the Analog Anthropocene: the mass-production of plastic.
Originally invented in the nineteenth century as a means of increasing efficiency in commodity production, plastic was both cheaper and more convenient than the natural materials that manufacturers relied upon previously. Unlike those substances, which were decreasing in supply and location-specific, plastic was practically limitless in amount and could inexpensively be produced anywhere, so it wasn’t long before it replaced the raw materials used in commodity production prior to its invention. Innovation in plastic production processes in the early twentieth century enabled mass-production at unprecedented levels, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that strategic marketing campaigns helped plastic infiltrate the everyday lives of average Americans with products such as Saran Wrap and Tupperware. Plastic was firmly cemented as an integral component of American existence by the time Barbie came upon the scene in 1959, and its mass-production has only increased in the decades since.
Barbie is produced with a combination of synthetic plastics: she is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), and hard vinyl, along with additional plasticizers and chemicals. These materials—especially PVC, which is a known carcinogen—are often noted for their ability to negatively impact human health and have been linked to diseases such as cancer. Of course, plastic is also reputed for its detrimental environmental effect: largely manufactured with petroleum, the production of plastic not only requires a profusion of energy but releases enormous amounts of pollution into the air, water, and soil. Indeed, at the same time that plastic production contributes to the increasingly urgent climate crisis, some scientists speculate that plastics such as PVC could be the stratigraphic markers of our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Stratigraphic markers, or physical evidence of planetary change found within layers of rock, have for previous epochs included such natural phenomena as fossilized creatures and asteroid remains—however, as its name suggests, the Anthropocene is different in that it is characterized by human influence. With approximately 100 Barbie dolls being sold every minute and Barbie as a brand only comprising a miniscule portion of the plastic industry as a whole, the possibility of plastic as a stratigraphic marker for the Anthropocene seems a hauntingly real one. Gerwig’s Barbie itself has ramped up plastic production via its rejuvenation of Barbie’s relevance as a brand as well as Mattel’s introduction of a popular new line of dolls based on the film’s characters—Robbie’s Barbie, for instance, reached the top of Amazon’s doll charts the day it was released.
In Gerwig’s film, the plasticized universe of Barbie Land stands in stark contrast to the Real World’s grittiness, but the reality is that contemporary American life is also largely comprised of plastic. Robbie’s initial appearance in Barbie seems suggestive of this: as her 1959 iteration looms large over both the children and the natural landscape, she appears to foreshadow the enormous influence that she—and the ever-increasing mass-production of plastic more broadly—are to have on us and our planet. In this light, her stature becomes menacing, suggestive of humanity’s plastic legacy on Earth. The years ahead may very well reveal that this legacy has imprinted itself into the geological fabric of the planet, officially marking the beginning of the Anthropocene.
References
Harper, Tyler Austin. “‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ Tell the Same Terrifying Story.” Published July 19, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/19/barbie-oppenheimer-movies-anthropocene/.
Holland, Brynn. “Barbie Through the Ages.” Last modified July 14, 2023. https://www.history.com/news/barbie-through-the-ages.
Plastic Pollution Coalition. “In Our Real World, Barbie’s Plastic Is Not So Fantastic.” Published July 21, 2023. https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2023/7/21/in-our-real-world-barbies-plastic-is-not-so-fantastic#:~:text=Barbie%20(and%20all%20of%20her,hard%20vinyl%E2%80%94plus%20additive%20chemicals.
Rogers, Heather. “A Brief History of Plastic.” Published May 2005. https://brooklynrail.org/2005/05/express/a-brief-history-of-plastic.
