Interview in Women's Studies Quarterly

Total TV 21 review

Women’s Studies Quarterly Volume III Numbers 1 & 2 Spring/Summer 2002

Looking Across the Lens: Women’s Studies and Film

Remembering Barbie Nation
An Interview with Susan Stern

Susan Stern with Wendy Kolmar

After a twenty year career in journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area, Susan Stern was inspired to begin work on her first film when her daughter, Nora, invented the game "Jealous Barbie." In this interview, Stern tells the story of the genesis, production, and marketing of Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour, a film that documents the American (and world) obsession with the Barbie doll and its iconic version of femininity.

How did you come to make Barbie Nation?

I didn't think much about Barbie until my daughter, Nora, was three years old. Nora was given her first Barbie for her birthday by her four-year-old cousin, Katie, and all I remember thinking was, Isn't it a bit young? - as if this was a rite with a specific time in life, like menstruation. But, of course, it was the 1990s. Nora was in the prime contemporary Barbie demographic, much younger than in 1959 when Barbie debuted, and I, at age six, first zipped the zipper of her gold brocade gown.

So were you also thinking about your own Barbie experiences when you started on the film?

Barbie was always tactile and sexual for me. There were only two types of people in the world, I would decide later: Barbie glorifiers and Barbie defilers. And I am both of them. But I didn't think about my own past when my daughter got her first Barbie. That didn't happen until she invented the game "Jealous Barbie."

By this time, Nora had several Barbies we played with. In Jealous Barbie, Nora insisted we play that her Barbie had everything better than mine - better hair, better boyfriend, better imaginary car - and my Barbie was jealous. My Barbie was jealous for hours on end. Amused and intrigued, I gave Nora what I have come to call "Feminist Lecture #205: Women Don't Have to Be Jealous of Other Women." Nora listened to me patiently. "Okay, Mom," she finally said. "How about we first play Jealous Barbie - and then we can play what you want to play?" When I told this story to other people I was surprised to find out that virtually everyone - men as well as women - had a story to tell involving Barbie. And each "Barbie story," as I came to call them, revealed a facet of life between 1959 and the present. I was, at the time, an ex-newspaper reporter who had gone back to City College to learn video production. I was also writing television news for a CBS affiliate and didn't like it. I knew I had the subject for my first film.

I began to film Barbie people and events, gathered artifacts from the hidden history of Barbie, and gained the cooperation (but not control) of Mattel Inc. And Barbie creator Ruth Handler. Eventually, I filmed some of the many X-rated Barbie stories we had heard. As the film progressed, I learned more and more. I learned how Mattel was suing or threatening people who satirized Barbie. I learned how Barbies are made by Third World girls sometimes in sweatshop conditions. I saw how Barbie could be an instrument to express creativity. And though I didn't succeed in exploring all the issues I had discovered - for instance, the issue of race and beauty is missing - I tried to get as much of it in as I could.

Who did you see as the audience for the film? Who were you making the film for?

I thought I had a film with wide appeal. I knew my core audience was girls, women, and gay men - the people who had either played Barbie, refused to play Barbie, or been refused Barbies. I thought these people, like me, would be entertained by the campy, glitsy parts of the Barbie world, and also appreciate the insights into gender roles, body image, and sexuality afforded by Barbie stories and play. My research also showed me that heterosexual men had Barbie stories - usually as brothers or fathers of Barbie players. When I screened early clips of Barbie Nation heterosexual men, along with women and gay men, were interested in what Barbie Nation revealed about sexuality, gender roles, male violence against women, nostalgia for the 1950s, and American cultural and business history.

Was it difficult to get funding for the film? Where did you find funding to complete it?

The most difficult part of independent filmmaking is raising money. In 1994, when I began Barbie Nation, I was optimistic. Though I did get a few small grants (including one from the Women in Film Foundation), I knew that I'd have to go elsewhere for the big money that filmmaking requires. I hoped to get a presale to cable television, which, in the early 1990s, was expanding. The History Channel, the Learning Channel, HBO, Showtime, Lifetime (for women!), A & E, and Bravo: there was the promise that more channels would allow for more viewpoints and in-depth programming.

So, in 1994-95, I shopped around a fourteen-minute sample reel of Barbie Nation. At that point it was relatively PG. The film did not yet include its lesbian Barbie players with their fabulous S&M creations, or the infamous X-ray of Barbie heads in a patient's descending colon. The project did have two gay male Barbie players, a recovering anorexic Barbie artist and college student, and Ruth Handler.

I was excited when the Learning Channel said they would like to buy Barbie Nation - giving me the money to finish the documentary. But when it came time to close the deal, it became clear I had been naïve.

The producer for the Learning Channel said that Barbie Nation would be wonderful as "an art house film," but had to be changed to make it suitable for "Joe six-pack." Having two gay men wouldn't do. I could have one - but only if he didn't mention that he was gay. The anorexic had to go, the producer said, "because she's a downer." The story of the criminal conviction of Handler and the near-bankruptcy of Mattel would also have to be cut, the producer said. It was also "too depressing."

Of course, I put up a fight. But the producer wouldn't budge, though he did admit in a startling conference-call confession that he was gay and would himself enjoy the "art house" version of Barbie Nation. This did not, however, alter his conviction that Barbie Nation must be turned into, in his words, "mind candy" for the American public.

My partner, Trish Harrington, and I said we'd think about it. And think we did, sorely tempted by the prospect of finishing the film and getting it seen. I thought about making two versions: one "blanc" for the American market; and one "noir" for the more sophisticated European market.

That night my friend the author Susie Bright came to dinner. I told her my quandary, and she told me how she too had recently been offered money to do work she thought was compromised. She said that she couldn't do it - she had a reputation to preserve. But I had no fame. I could, she suggested, take the money and run this time - and fight the good fight the next time. Or I could believe that there was, hidden perhaps, but sizable, an alternative American audience.

After a difficult night, I made a decision. I can't say that I was sure there was any place that would ever show Barbie Nation. All I knew, as I turned down the Learning Channel, was that I was too old to be a hack.

So I borrowed the money to finish the movie. I thought it would cost $40,000 but it cost $130,000 - still cheap for a one-hour documentary. And I decided that since I had no assurance that anyone would ever see Barbie Nation, I would make the movie without compromise. I would make Barbie Nation only for me - and for Nora, who is the brunette five-year-old in Barbie Nation, and for Susie, and for the "two gay men" - Franklin and Allen - and Kerry, the "downer" anorexic, and all the others in the Barbie world who had trusted us and let us film them.

I hoped that when the film was finally finished, someone would be interested in it. Then Barbie Nation was rejected by the Sundance Film Festival and I was sunk in gloom: what if there wasn't an audience there? But within two months, Barbie Nation was bought by PBS's P.O.V. series and accepted to the first of many film festivals around the world.

Did you think of the film as intended for women’s studies classrooms when you made it? Did you think that it might be used in women’s studies?

I wish I could say that I thought about women's studies when I was making Barbie Nation, but I had forgotten about women's studies when I dreamed up Barbie Nation, just as I had forgotten about Barbie for years before I conceived of the film.

When I arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, it was the beginning of women's studies. I co-edited Libera, the campus feminist literary journal. As a reporter for the student newspaper, I covered the first statewide meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus. I joined the Berkeley Poet's Coop and went to poetry readings by Susan Griffith, Judy Grahn, and Alicia Ostriker. In the atmosphere of early 1970s campus feminism, I began to learn women' s history, began to practice feminist analysis, and found a community of likeminded friends.

And then I graduated. I spent twenty years as a journalist, and I didn't think too much about women's studies, until I had to pay the bills for Barbie Nation. After the film was sold to P.O.V., I decided to distribute it to colleges and universities through New Day Films, the thirty-year-old filmmakers' co-op distributing feminist and progressive independent film to the educational market. That's what has paid the bills for the film - sales to women's studies programs and showings in courses on sociology of gender, psychology of women, women's history, and business courses in more than four hundred U.S. colleges and universities.

Because of women's studies, I've had the confidence and income this year to write my first screenplay, for a fiction film I hope to make about a woman who challenges sexual conventions. And I'm far from the only feminist filmmaker who owes thanks to women's studies. As a volunteer promotion director this year for the New Day Films cooperative, I can see that women's studies is one of the leading users of film and video in college and university education. Women' studies has, as the dot-comers like to say, "aggregated an audience" that makes feminist film possible. As the history of New Day Films shows, feminist film and women's studies have developed together.

Julie Reichert and Jim Klein, who made the classic films Union Maids and Seeing Red, founded New Day in 1971. "The whole idea of distribution was to help the women's movement grow," said Reichert. "We could watch the women's movement spread across the country just by who was ordering our films."

So you think of yourself as a feminist filmmaker? Is Barbie Nation a feminist film?

I have been a feminist and a writer since I was a child. Looking back on it now, these things seem related. I think that I first realized I was a feminist during family dinner-table debates in the mid-1960s when I was about thirteen. My father was-is-a big, smart, aggressive, egotistical man. Ultimately he taught me a strong sense of my own power - and undercut it. My father made an argument that was common at that time. That the proof of the fact that women were inferior to men in every important sphere was that men were more famous. "Where," he argued, "was the woman Shakespeare?"

Except for Emily Dickinson, Carolyn Keene (Mildred Wirt), Louisa May Alcott, and Madeleine L'Engle, I'm sure I couldn't name many women writers then. But I had my own poems, and, like any child, I knew about secrets. I knew, fiercely and surely, that women were, had been, or could be great in all fields of endeavor. Their stories, therefore, must be hidden. It all fit: Being a writer, I knew the best stories were hidden ones; being a feminist, I knew women's stories were among the most hidden.

As for whether Barbie Nation is a feminist film, there are as many answers to that as there are types of feminism. I think Barbie Nation is a feminist film. I did get a review in Cineaste saying the film was insufficiently critical of Barbie's negative effect on girls. I disagree. I think Barbie Nation is critical, but not didactic. I think Barbie Nation is in the feminist tradition that is "sex positive" and recognizes people's power to subvert popular culture along with that culture's power to shape people.

How do you see the current situation and the future of feminist film and filmmakers?

As a filmmaker, it seems to me there are limited prospects for feminist and other progressive filmmakers in a world of increasing numbers of channels controlled by decreasing numbers of owners.

In August 2000, after seventeen years of distributing independent documentaries to television, Jane Balfour Films went into liquidation. Balfour blamed the proliferation of cable-television outfits driving down prices and making independent filmmaking and distribution economically impossible.

And Hollywood is no haven. In 1920, nearly half of all the films produced in the U.S. were written by women 1. That figure has declined. And though the number of U.S. women directors appears to have increased in the past few years, they seem to suffer from a strange invisibility.

I've been struck in the past year by the difference in the media attention paid to two filmmakers at the same stages in their careers: Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho; and Paul Thomas Anderson, director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Both have had critically acclaimed first features and bigger, even more controversial second features. But Harron has been virtually ignored, even as both her films have been critically acclaimed, while Anderson has been hailed as a "new talent bursting on the screen" even as his second feature has been panned.

NOTES

`. Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood, dir. Bridget Terry, based on the book of the same title by Cari Beauchamp, Turner Classic Movies, 2000.



Total TV 21 Dec 1997
We’re bonkers for Barbie: Newsworld’s Passionate Eye shows how profound the insanity has become (not that it’s a bad thing)
By Jonathan McDonald Television Writer

They line up to see the woman who made it all possible. Fat men, bleached blondes, grannies and children, all waiting patiently for the chance to meet Ruth Handler. For Handler, who created Barbie, the madness of a Mattel festival in Orlando, Fla., is almost too much to bear. "I am really almost in a state of shock observing these people at this festival," says Handler. "It's like a cult activity."

She's not joking. If tonight's Barbie Nation - the latest production from the acclaimed documentary series The Passionate Eye - tells you anything, it's probably that Barbie is indeed a cult.

Now, I don't mean that in a negative way - heck. Mattel's sued just about anyone and anything that's stood in Barbie's way - but people will do anything for the doll they love.

They'll bid $4,250 in an auction for an evening gown-clad Barbie. They'll put Barbie and friends in sado-masochistic scenes. They'll dress up as Barbie in San Francisco's annual Gay Pride Parade. They'll take Barbie apart so they can put her together again, perhaps with different hair. And they'll have an entire society of Barbies at home, with different names and relationships.

Insanity. That's what it is. But, of course, not necessarily insanity as a bad thing. Barbie Nation is brilliant television. It has controversy, music, commercials - Barbie, or course - and lots of action. The cast of characters is real and compelling. And, for the most part, it not-so-subtly introduces the viewer to the folks next door who aren't what they seem. "Deep down inside, I wish the world could be like it was when I was growing up," says Sandi, who runs a 1-800 business from her home and calls it The Barbie Attic. "Barbie was never liberated." "Barbie was a very wholesome type of individual that could never have had a drug or alcohol problem."

Indeed, you can't believe good wholesome family beliefs - or the shotgun that's mounted on the kitchen wall, barely out of the reach of Sandi's kids.

Believe it or not, guns have something to do with Barbie, too. After all, she'd been known to hang out with Ken.

And where there's Ken, there's that dastardly G.I. Joe.

"We took Barbie and Ken and put them in army trucks," recalled one leather-clad motorcycle dude. "With G.I. Joe watching, we'd put cherry bombs in the truck and blow Barbie up. Body parts flying, the head would come off. "Cherry bombs are pretty big stuff for Barbie; she's just not that tough."

Well, pal, she sure is rich. At sales of two dolls per second, Barbie has made zillions for Mattel - who, interestingly, is changing her proportions, a fact that probably didn't reach the producers of Barbie Nation in time. Not to worry. This is the belle of the ball tonight.