BARBIE
The best part of Barbie was how everyone got to be a Barbie for a month.
In the lead up to the premiere of Barbie (2023), for a brief moment in time, all of us were admitted into a rarified cool girl squad.
The marketing team of the movie understood the assignment, of course: The campaign centered on the Barbie crew. They did photo shoots together. They did interviews together. They each got their “This Barbie is …” poster.
It all centered on this group of attractive, happy women (and some peripheral men) who are SO HAPPY to include you in their circle of friends.
And as a consumer, we got boatloads of opportunities to be included. They gave us collab on top of collab – clothing, makeup, luggage, wine glasses and eyeglasses, pop up bars and skating rinks, notebooks and pens, couches and rugs, and just a general slew of Barbie-themed lines to make us feel like we were a part of the movement.
But you didn’t need all that in order to be a part of it.
Anyone could wear pink. Anyone could feel beautiful and feminine and light. And it united us – our excitement for the movie, our anticipation.
It was fun!
It was like the opposite of Taylor Swift’s squad in 2015, because no amount of Swift worship made us one of them.
But the Barbie movie let us all be Barbies!
Throughout my adolescence and college years, I was often friends with one or two people from separate friend groups. This meant a lot of lunch dates and theater dates and bookstore dates, each one arranged with the people who would enjoy it most. But parties could get a bit awkward, with everyone coming together into a group that wasn’t entirely cohesive.
Then, for a brief 18-month sting in my mid-twenties, my roommate and I met each other’s friends and it was nice and suddenly we had a little group that could go places and take up space. We had in-jokes and theme nights. We were important. We were invincible.
And that’s a little of what the Barbie movie gave all of us.
It gave us a sense of belonging. All you had to do was wear an item of clothing that was pink. All you had to do was be a feminist. All you had to do was be optimistic about the future. And many of us were already trying to do those things, so it really was no skin off our backs to go along with the program and be able to shout “Hi, Barbie!” at every other member we recognized.
For what it’s worth, for the silver lining that it isn’t, this is also a little of what’s it been like to be a Jew lately.
(Except for my brothers lol.)
For the first time in our generation – let’s not forget that it’s in response to our first experience of evil at this scale in our generation – it really feels like being a Jew is a uniter. No one cares if you have peyos or a yarmulke or cover your hair or wear pants or keep Shabbos or support Trump or eat dairy out or wear open-toed shoes or learn or earn or have a Chanukah bush or speak Hebrew or marry another Jew or stay quiet or shout from the rooftops. If you’re Jewish, you’re like other Jews. It’s very like being American in the wake of 9/11 – unifying, banded together despite our differences.
For this brief moment in time, it’s a balm to know that there are others like us, even when they are not quite like us.