“Hey, Barbie, I like your style,” goes “Pink,” one of the songs on the soundtrack for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. “If that really was a mirror, you’d see a perfect smile.” Emphasis on the If: In the Dreamhouse, Barbie’s furniture and accessories are merely three-dimensional symbols. The mirror in question is not a reflective surface; it is a piece of plastic with a silver sticker attached. But it might not be so simple. The lyric points at one persistent difficulty in addressing Barbie’s universe: Where does real life end, and where does Barbie begin? As a cypher, Barbie and her accompanying fantasies—of feminism, of single girlhood, of homeownership—are a laboratory for the endless production and reproduction of fantastical American lifestyles. Barbie’s Dreamhouse is a twisted knot of artifice and actuality, a tangle so complete—and so threateningly aware of its multiplicity—that the Dreamhouse’s ideological and representational confusion has become its defining feature. This is a house that talks back: for each argument made about the Dreamhouse’s societal role, an equa…
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