BARBIELAND: The Unauthorized History, by Tarpley Hitt
The 2023 film “Barbie” begins with a parodic homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We open on a prehistoric desert landscape. Little girls in fusty dresses tend to a fleet of baby dolls. One wearily pushes hers in a creaky pram. Then a larger-than-life Barbie materializes, à la the monolith, in her original stiletto slides and strapless swimsuit. The girls are moved to rebellious action. They rip off their aprons and smash their baby dolls’ heads in.
This is just the most recent and stylish retelling of Mattel’s central lore, which maintains that toy companies exclusively sold babyish dolls until the Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler dreamed up Barbie, freeing girls to center their imaginative play on an actual woman — as if it took this brilliant inventor to unlock their natural (and yet also progressive, sophisticated, even feminist) desire for a doll with breasts.
It’s a gripping pitch, though little of it is true. The real story of Barbie’s origins is much messier, and more interesting — especially as told in “Barbieland,” Tarpley Hitt’s rollicking tale of how Mattel spied, copied and stole its way to market dominance, then fought with military intensity to compel us to buy more and more.
“Barbieland” is a book written from outside Barbieland’s high-security gates; we meet Hitt — an editor and contributor with The Drift magazine — as she’s being escorted off the premises of Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. Her book proceeds in a somewhat paranoid style, which is justified by its content. This is less an account of how Mattel made Barbie than an investigation of how Mattel wants us to believe it made Barbie, and the lengths to which it has gone to enforce this version of events.
As Hitt digs into legal records and traces a conspiratorial LinkedIn comment, she rips off layer after layer of Mattel’s mythos to reveal the corporate espionage, employee surveillance and histrionic corporate memo-writing underneath. Along the way, Hitt illuminates the intertwined histories of motivational research and intellectual property, labor and plastics.
Handler likely did not, as she claimed, conceive of Barbie while observing her daughter, Barbara, playing with paper fashion dolls. She spied a German doll called Lilli — probably, Hitt discovers, at a high-end toy importer near the Handler home in Beverly Hills — then set about copying it and scheming to bury the foreign competition. And Lilli, for her part, was based not on the unarticulated desires of girls but on an exhaustively replicated male fantasy: The Lilli character was an illustrated comic pinup girl drawn to sell copies of Bild, a newspaper owned by the German publisher Axel Springer.
Parts of this story have been told before, as journalists and historians have worked, decade after decade, at disentangling Mattel’s regenerating promotional web. But Hitt has a special skill for enlivening the archive, and its gaps. She builds a propulsive story with players who double-delete their emails and burn confidential correspondence. She has an eye for the absurd detail, and she transforms toy executives into indelible characters whose lives are consumed by the cartoonish drama of competitive children’s entertainment.
She introduces us to Jack Ryan, a womanizing Raytheon engineer turned head of Barbie research and development who once took a shipment of Barbie prototypes with “delineated nipples” and “filed off her areolas by hand,” she writes. The Austrian psychologist Ernest Dichter enters her story to apply Freudian theory to Mattel’s target consumers, delivering supposed insights into the libidinal instincts of kids. When Mattel introduced Ken, it called Dichter to consult on the dimensions of his genital bulge.
Then there is Handler. In the film, she takes the form of Rhea Perlman, a goddess mommy type who transforms Barbie, Pinocchio-style, into a living woman. In Hitt’s book, Handler is funny, cutthroat, reckless, vengeful and obsessed. It’s in these pages that she gets to become an actual human being. When a manufacturer shrank Ken’s aforementioned bulge to save one and a half cents of plastic per doll, Handler never let it go. Colleagues called her “Ruthless.”
And though the movie’s Handler congratulates Barbie for smashing the patriarchy in Barbieland, the actual Handler worked to ensure that the women’s movement did not breach the Mattel campus. She stuffed her C-suite with men and advised the Nixon administration against supporting federal maternity leave. “Women had always bored me,” she once said. Reading “Barbieland,” I began to wonder if it was perhaps Handler’s dislike of women, more than her special attention to them, that influenced Barbie’s final form.
I finished the book at a play space near my apartment, while my two boys played wildly with a Barbie Dreamhouse, manipulating the often-nude bodies of Barbies and Kens in their little hands. It is striking how little of Mattel’s storied shenanigans have to do with the lives and minds of actual children. Barbie, Malibu Barbie, Doctor Barbie, President Barbie, the “Barbie” movie, the Barbie x Stanley tumbler — it is the company, and its shareholders, whose urges are satisfied by this relentless cycle of production.
And yet, somehow she is always around, this molded plastic doll who is molding all of us. After the marketing blitz of the “Barbie” movie, I thought I couldn’t stand to hear her name ever again, but I was wrong. “Barbieland” is for anyone who liked the movie — or did not — and is ready for the human version.
BARBIELAND: The Unauthorized History | By Tarpley Hitt | Atria/One Signal | 343 pp. | $30
Amanda Hess is a writer at large for The Times.
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