Margot Robbie's Empowered Barbie

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Barbie

, the film directed by

after the celebrated Lady Bird and Little Women, will not be released until July 21, 2023. But, for now, the trailer is all the rage.

It is not surprising that it was launched in the middle of the Christmas campaign, when girls from half the world are corresponding with Santa Claus, the Three Wise Men or the Child Jesus.

It is also a way to reassure parents, always in doubt if Barbie is the right thing to do or not, to educate her offspring.

If Barbie, like any successful woman, has been in the hurricane's eye, arousing envy and causing controversy, for 63 years now (a record longevity in the troubled world of toys), the trailer for the film starring

, who seems born to take on this challenge, and

-in the role of Ken, of course-, is in tune with Mattel's slogan in recent years: "you can be whatever you want to be".

Parody of the Paleolithic prelude of

(Stanley Kubrick, 1968), with Richard Strauss's Zaratrusta in the background so that there are no misunderstandings, the Barbie trailer reminds us that "since the beginning of time, since the The first girl existed, there have been dolls, but the dolls were always babies, until she arrived...".

And then, the silhouette of the queen of dolls cut out against the light appears, followed by the shot of endless legs, which have their crumb if we remember that Robbie won our hearts as

's girlfriend in

(Martin Scorsese, 2013), a film that was unanimously acclaimed, except for the suspicion that the blonde's legs had been digitally elongated.

And after the legs, Barbie appears, reincarnated as Robbie, just as she came into the world.

That is to say, clad in a zebra skin swimsuit, with matching glamorous sunglasses.

This is how

presented her in society during the New York fair, on March 9, 1959, a date that has remained her official birthday.

It is the birth of a myth, Barbie stands as a "colossus" of Rhodes, or rather, as Alberto Manguel wrote, "as the statue of Diana in Ephesus that (according to legend) had fallen from heaven, and presented the pose of someone willing to be adored."

in an image as brutal as it is liberating, is to destroy their porcelain babies wildly.

That was the revolutionary change that Barbie brought to the girls' room: they went from projecting themselves as mothers, to seeing themselves as independent women, or simply as people.

Then, in the trailer, the music changes to disco, the pink Barbie logo appears, and everything happens very quickly: Barbie saying goodbye to Barbieland, a Miami of pink mansions;

Ken and his friends with impossible outfits, and musical numbers.

In this film, which Gerwig has written together with his partner -the

, who has just released his version of Don DeLillo's

, Barbie has been expelled from her fuchsia paradise to be thrown into the real world, in search for a perfection that, naturally, does not exist.

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Barbie has always been criticized for defending an ideal of beauty that is unattainable, except for the presenters of Fox News.

Especially because of her extreme thinness, with dramatic consequences for adolescents.

But, in the 2015 Christmas campaign, she introduced some curves that landed her on the cover of

, with this headline:

Faced with the icy threat of the

, Amazons from the Disney empire that dominated the articulated doll market in the previous Christmas campaign, Mattel played the inclusive card: not only did it launch Barbies with wider hips, but also shorter, taller, bald Barbies and even those in a wheelchair, although the "curvy" is the one that has been lavished the most in the shop windows.

The so-called Fashionistas came out with up to seven different skin tones, although Barbie had already solved, in her own way, her problems with racial diversity as early as 1967, coinciding with the height of the civil rights movement: she first became Francie's friend, who was like her, but in dark plastic, and then the more African-American Christie, who also talked, and yelled things like "Let's go shopping with Barbie!".

Indeed, if Barbie freed girls from thinking of themselves as future mothers, it was to openly embrace consumerism: "buying Barbie a new dress with the weekly quota was earning an advance of future autonomy, a kind of dress rehearsal , an idea of ​​the future. Barbie was not a doll, it was an aspiration", wrote the Italian

in her exquisite

.

Initially, the ambition of

her full name, was to expand her closet, then she wanted a "dream house" and a pink convertible to go out to a party with her innumerable friends, or with Ken, her official boyfriend since 1961, among other such bulky accessories (because of her scale, 1/6) as expensive, which were not within the reach of all families, and undoubtedly helped to mark class differences.

Barbie was a model, a fashion designer, or simply her father's daughter, her thing was to consume to the fullest and go out to parties to the sound of

, because They know the mega-success of Aqua, whose clip also emulated the rosified world of the series and movies produced by Mattel.

although the jobs don't last long: he's amassed more than 200 professions in the last few decades, including a space mission.

And with each passing day she is more involved in the campaigns to motivate the professional ambitions of the girls, although she continues to worry the parents: You can be a mermaid, she read an announcement on the corresponding floor of the ECI.

Perhaps not the most ambitious career future for a Barbie-empowered girl.

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