Barbie Vs X
Greta Gerwig and the thousands of people involved in making Barbie did a fantastic job. It was an excellent film. From the very first scene which had me laughing out loud to the end, the movie was conscious, reflective, and transparent. Mattel Corporation is seemingly trying to continue a long effort to rebrand Barbie. The last time I remember hearing about Barbie was in 1992 when Teen Barbie said, “Math class is tough” — which is appalling. Barbie appeared in the Toy Story movies and the character perpetuated a ditzy stereotype. Sales declined sharply in 2014.
Without giving away any plot points, Sasha, a high school-age kid meets the Barbie she used to play with. She sums up our attitudes towards Barbie by telling her: “You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented.” But later, Sasha’s mother, played brilliantly by America Ferrera, gives an eloquent speech about being a woman in an effort to rally the Barbies — again no spoilers. It was moving in its honesty and heart-wrenching to hear it aloud.
Mattel seems successful in the resurgence of Barbie in a rebrand worth noting. The movie itself is a money maker with 1B at the box office so far. According to sources too numerous to mention, Barbie product sales are surging (Toys R Us seeing a 30% increase) or expected to surge with the premier of the movie.
In contrast, Elon Musk is publicly destroying Twitter. Despite pundits pointing to the value of the globally recognized Twitter brand, he’s rebranding it as X. He’s doing so in a seemingly haphazard manner — first just swapping the bird on the main screen for his X, but leaving all other references, to tearing down the signage from the building in San Francisco without city approval, putting up a new, obnoxiously shiny X…only to remove it a few days later. Are advertisers flocking to the newly branded service? No. The absence of a communication plan, the choppy nature of the effort, and the purposeless nature of the change don’t seem to be bringing in revenue.
We know why Mattel initiated the rebrand. The movie essentially tells us. People have thought Barbie was awful for a long time, but Greta Gerwig has delved into the feminist origins of Barbie, invented by Ruth Handler in 1959, and rewritten the story in a way that changes our perceptions of Baribie for a modern sensibility. Willa Paskin writes about this eloquently in the NY Times Magazine article: Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job.
Why is Musk changing the Twitter brand? “I like the letter X,” he posted on Sunday.
Self-indulgent, rather than self-reflective wouldn’t you say?
