Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: When introducing the Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award at the 2024 ceremony host Jimmy Kimmel joked this ‘is actually a controversial category this year because a lot of people want to know: At what age do you tell a screenplay it was adapted?’ The controversy Kimmel alluded to was the status of Barbie in the ‘Adapted’ rather than ‘Original’ screenplay category, which provoked criticism from some industry figures. Based on Mattel’s iconic fashion doll, the live-action feature film Barbie confounded expectations on its release. Not only did Barbie become the highest-grossing film of 2023, but it also received critical acclaim for its music, production design, performances, and social satire. This enthusiastic reception saw Barbie contending for many honours at end-of-year award ceremonies, acclaim that was unprecedented for a film based on a toy. Yet, despite efforts by some commentators to diminish the film’s status as an ‘adaptation’, it was by playing with 60 years of pink plastic that Barbie derived much of its impact. Live-action adaptations of Barbie had been proposed for years with stars like Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaway attached at various stages. However, it was only when Academy Award-nominated actor Margot Robbie agreed to star that the film progressed into production. In addition to playing Stereotypical Barbie—‘when someone says, “Think of a Barbie”. That’s me’—Robbie also produced the film through her company LuckyChap Entertainment. Even before Barbie LuckyChap had a reputation for original, women-led stories with films like I, Tonya (Gillespie 2017) and Promising Young Woman (Fennell 2020), so when indie-darling Greta Gerwig was hired to direct and co-write the adaptation it primed audiences and critics to expect more than a two-hour toy commercial. Beginning in ‘Barbieland’ the film follows Stereotypical Barbie as she undergoes an existential crisis that begins with flat feet and progresses to taking a trip to the ‘Real World’ to meet the CEO of Barbie’s manufacturer Mattel played by Will Ferrell. Along for the journey is the dim-witted ‘Beach Ken’ (Ryan Gosling) whose desire for the pair to be ‘girlfriend and boyfriend’ is not reciprocated by Barbie. When Mattel’s all-male board attempts to put Barbie back in her box, she is rescued by novice Barbie designer Gloria (America Ferrera) and her disaffected teenage daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt). Barbie brings Gloria and Sasha to the feminist haven of Barbieland only to find that in her absence Ken has reshaped the pink paradise in the image of the ‘Real World’ with beer-swilling, horse-loving men now in charge. Inspired by a speech from Gloria about the impossible standards women are expected to meet, the Barbies band together to reclaim Barbieland from the patriarchy. The film received eight Academy Award nominations, including for the film’s screenplay by director Greta Gerwig and her husband Noah Baumbach. But a decision by Oscar’s organizers, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), that Barbie competes in the ‘Adapted’ rather than ‘Original’ screenplay category provoked criticism. Leading Hollywood screenwriter Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) tweeted ‘It’s insulting to the writers to say they were working off of existing material’. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) classified Barbie as an original work for their awards. Such discord is not unusual; 2017’s eventual Best Picture winner Moonlight (Jenkins 2016) was based on an unproduced play prompting the WGA to consider the film ‘original’, while the Oscars shortlisted it for the Best Adapted Screenplay award, which it won. AMPAS’s decision regarding Barbie prompted discussion in the film industry about what should be considered an ‘adaptation’ that mirrors scholarly debate. In an early contribution to the study of adaptation, Dudley Andrew argued that while all films are based on some prior conception, adaptation ‘delimits representation by insisting on the cultural status of the model’ (97). Similarly, while Linda Hutcheon’s monograph A Theory of Adaptation encouraged scholars to think beyond the page-to-screen process, her definition of adaptation as ‘an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art’ (Hutcheon 2006, 170) still provides some useful limits. Applying these definitions, the coming-of-age drama Lady Bird (Gerwig 2017) that Barbie filmmaker Gerwig wrote and directed inspired by her teenage years would not be considered an adaptation as those experiences were not already ‘textualized’ (Andrew 97). Conversely, Gerwig’s 2019 version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is an unambiguous adaptation. Implicit in Apatow’s comments were ingrained biases against certain sources of adaptation. Apatow argued in his tweet that with Barbie ‘There was no existing material or story’, and therefore the film cannot be an adaptation. However, in an era in which diversified conglomerates like Disney and Comcast own Hollywood studios, an increasing number of films are based on franchise-ready intellectual property like comic books, videogames, and theme park attractions (Meikle). Adaptation studies scholars have widened their gaze to treat these franchise extensions as adaptations, a position shared by the Academy Awards. The Oscars consider films based on any pre-existing material such as sequels (Top Gun: Maverick), remakes (CODA), and movies with characters who have appeared in other media like TV’s Borat to be adaptations. The novelty of Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Barbie may also have been overstated by Apatow and others. Declining sales for Barbie dolls in the early twenty-first century prompted a makeover of the character in direct-to-video film adaptations that reworked classic literature by placing Barbie at the centre, such as Barbie in the Nutcracker (Hurley 2001), Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper (Lau 2004), and Barbie in A Christmas Carol (Lau 2009). Karen Orr Vered and Christèle Maizonniaux note how these animated movies, much like the later live-action film, ‘reflect an awareness of feminist criticism and seek to remediate Barbie’s particular femininity and the associated gender performance that has fallen into disfavor’ (198). Julie Still similarly notes that in this series of videos and specials, Barbie was presented as a ‘competent, emotionally mature young woman who does not need a man but might enjoy the company of one, provided it does not interfere with her own life and plans’ (160). While the Barbie filmmakers were rightly celebrated for turning a potential cash-in into an astute satire, the film’s jokes and commentary derive much of their incisiveness from the film’s relationship to the world’s most famous fashion doll and her past transmedia extensions. The consistent recognition of the source material in Barbie ranges from on-screen citations of Barbie’s vintage clothes—‘Ice Capades® Pretty Practice Suit & Dazzling Show Skirt’—to the narrator (Helen Mirren) explaining that Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge ‘was discontinued by Mattel because a pregnant doll is just too weird’. Thus, Barbie is, in Hutcheon’s terms an ‘extended’ and ‘deliberate’ revisitation of its source, or, to put it more concisely, an adaptation. The self-aware moments in Barbie push the film into a category of adaptation that Keith Cohen called ‘subversive adaptations’ as they ‘render implicit certain key contradictions implanted or glossed over in the original’ (245). For example, the film is openly sceptical about the feminist potential of Barbie’s seemingly limitless career aspirations, ‘Thanks to Barbie, all the problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved’, notes the narrator before sarcastically adding ‘. . . At least, that’s what the Barbies think’. The film’s self-awareness sought to disarm potential criticism of Barbie. In her research on the fashion doll Miriam Forman-Brunell describes Barbie as multivocal and notes debate has raged as to whether she is ‘a feminine ideal that is healthy or harmful for girls’ (305). The film attempted to leverage both sides of the argument in promotional materials including trailer taglines like: ‘If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you’. This criticism is further acknowledged in the film where Barbie meets a group of teenage girls modelled on the fashion doll Bratz that briefly challenged Barbie’s toy store supremacy in the early 2000s. Although Barbie expects the teenagers will be happy to see her, they retort, ‘You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism’. However, the marketing’s pre-emptive strike against criticism may have been unnecessary as the ‘nostalgia pendulum’ (Metzger) had swung back in Barbie’s favour and the film was met with an enthusiastic response. One of the ways the film activated such nostalgia was through its knowingly artificial aesthetic that recreated iconic toys like Barbie’s Dreamhouse, which, as the narrator explains, does not need stairs because ‘when you’re playing with Barbies […] you just pick them up and put them where you want them to go’. Like many adaptations, the film updated the source material to align with and articulate contemporary interests. For example, in keeping with the focus on empowerment and intersectionality in fourth-wave feminism, Robbie’s character is one of a large collection of laudable Barbies including President Barbie, Physicist Barbie, and Dr Barbie who are played by a diverse cast drawn from popular film and TV (Issa Rae, Emma Mackey, and Hari Nef). This is in keeping with other films and TV shows Robbie has produced where there is a celebration of women working together, such as DC Comics adaptation Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Yan 2020), which sees Robbie’s anti-hero Harley Quinn team-up with an all-women superhero team (Burke). Similarly, the film highlights how women’s creative work and genres of interest are often devaluated by male-led creative industries, but when they are successful there are attempts to claim this intellectual property. This theme was evident in Gerwig’s previous adaptation, Little Women, in a metatextual scene in which Jo March retains copyright of her novel despite her male publisher suggesting she should take an advance payment as ownership would only be worth something if the book was a success. This scene collapses the real-life experiences of author Louisa May Alcott with her protagonist Jo March as Alcott was able to hold onto ownership of her evergreen book. Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler was not as successful as Alcott, as tax evasion charges saw her forced to resign from Mattel in the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, a ghost-like Handler (Rhea Perlman) appears in the film as a character. Barbie discovers Handler in a hidden corner of Mattel’s corporate offices when the doll is on the run from the company’s executive board. When Barbie questions ‘So, a woman does work here?’, Handler counters ‘We do more than work here’. Much like the conclusion of Gerwig’s Little Women in which March’s publisher pressures her to give her protagonist a romantic ending, at the climax of Barbie Will Ferrell’s Mattel CEO claims that Barbie’s ending is ‘She’s in love with Ken’. However, Handler reappears to explain that ‘I created you so you wouldn’t have an ending’ and assures Barbie that she can make her own decisions without needing permission from Mattel or even her creator. This moment of self-realization serves as the film’s climax, with Barbie choosing ‘to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made’, an epiphany that is accompanied by Billie Eilish’s Academy Award-winning song ‘What Was I Made For?’. This celebration of female creativity and agency triumphing over corporate greed is somewhat dulled by the success of Barbie prompting Mattel to promise 45 different adaptations of their properties including Polly Pocket, Hot Wheels, Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots, Uno, and Magic 8 Ball (Arnold). Nonetheless, through its self-aware satire Barbie became one of the most broadly appealing rebuttals of misogyny and gendered disparities produced by popular culture in recent years. The film also challenged baked-in assumptions around what qualifies as an ‘adaptation’. The wave of Barbie imitators will further widen Hollywood’s definition of ‘film adaptation’ and it will also provide adaptation studies scholars with some new toys to play with.
Source: Adaptation
Author: Liam Burke
Institution: Swinburne University of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,048
OpenAlex ID: W4402284302