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Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. 82 minutes. 2003. El Rio Productions LLC. 3275 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94110-5212; www.bernalbeach.com. DVD $19.95.
In the 1950s, Ruth Handler, one of the founders of Mattel Toys, was watching her daughter dress a paper doll in the fashions of the day when she recognized an untapped niche in the toy market. Baby dolls and companion dolls filled the girls' aisles of 1950s toy stores, but Handler realized there were no three-dimensional adult dolls available for young girls to play out their fantasies of an adult, non-mother, female life. And so, Barbie was born. Fifty years later, feminist writer and reporter Susan Stern's four-year-old daughter wanted to play "jealous Barbie" with her mom. Stern shared this incident with friends and she discovered other stories of unauthorized Barbie "play." And so, the film Barbie Nation was born.
From a child's doll to an American icon, in Barbie Nation director Susan Stern explores the multiple interpretations given to a piece of material culture. Stern sets up a postmodern wandering through the stories of people who collect and/or play with Barbie interspersed with clips from an interview with Ruth Handler, who died in 2002. Stern chooses to let the Barbie "players" speak for themselves, so as a tool for teaching sociology this video would need considerable contextualization to embed these stories in a theoretical or methodological framework. However, Barbie Nation is worth the effort.
Most striking about this video is the breadth of interpretations given to this American popular culture icon. For a sociology...