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One of the scenes I loved filming and I love in the movie was one that Greta and I worked on, which was the scene in the Barbie convertible with the mother/daughter. That moment where Gloria's given up and it's Sasha who tells her that she has to fight for the thing that she believes in. We did spend a lot of time tweaking that scene to get to the place of, what is this for Gloria? In this moment, what is it that she's here for? What does she need to get from this journey? The new live-action film about the iconic doll, starring Margot Robbie and directed by Greta Gerwig, has leant right into Barbie's association with the colour, its set designers working with a palette of 100 different shades, and apparently contributing to a global shortage of pink paint. The movie's all-conquering marketing campaign has left a sea of pink wherever it goes, from billboards, buses and the cast's (pink) carpet outfits to a real-life Barbie Dreamhouse on Airbnb, more than 100 brand tie-ins and a Google takeover. In the film, too, pink is for everyone – including Ken. And although one movie – or one world-famous footballer wearing pink – is unlikely to singlehandedly change our perception of pink as a gendered colour, our fraught relationship with it might be shifting. "Shorthands and clichés are very powerful and it's difficult to escape them," says St Clair. "I think what is changing is there's a loosening of the idea that pink is a limiting colour and that pink means something lesser than blue. There's a power and a knowingness with the way that pink is used now. It's coming with a wink." You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. So, as Barbie makes the colour inescapable once again, what does it represent now? Director Greta Gerwig said she wanted to make "something anarchic and wild and completely bananas", and says "it most certainly is a feminist film... in a way that includes everyone." (Although Mattel themselves beg to differ). Actor America Ferrera was drawn to the film because it confronts Barbie's role in "shaping expectations for women" and her character Gloria – assistant to Mattel's CEO and mother of a teenage daughter – delivers a pivotal monologue that Margot Robbie says "captures the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under the patriarchy".
It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know. It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. I have my own prep and process as an actor on any day to drop in and be in an open place where I'm exploring and having fun. I think that part of it was — this was also based on Greta's direction — neither one of us went into it feeling like it's got to grow and crescendo to this big moment where you burst into tears or you're laughing so hard you cry. There were no targets to hit. It was much more a moment-to-moment drop in. Truly, every take was very different. There were takes that leaned into anger. There were takes that leaned into laughter. It really did, over the course of filming, find a shape. It was about just staying as present in the moment and just seeing really where the words would take it.
It wasn't always the way. As Kassia St Clair, a cultural historian and author of The Secret Lives of Colour, notes, the girl-pink/boy-blue divide didn't set in until the mid-20th Century. An 1893 article on baby clothes in The New York Times stated that you should "always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl." Pink was seen as the stronger colour – a relative of the passionate, aggressive red, while blue was the signature hue of the Virgin Mary. "My father was born in 1925, he's a military man and yet pink is his favourite colour and he doesn't see anything peculiar about that," St Clair tells BBC Culture. "But for me, growing up as a child of the 80s and 90s, of course, pink was very much a feminine colour, and I had it shoved down my throat. So for a long time, I completely avoided pink. I was fed up with it. I had a very complicated relationship with it." I think for me, when it came time to shoot it, my big question was, “okay, so how are we playing this? Am I playing this slightly humorously? Am I trying to deliver it in a tone that still fits into the tone of Barbie Land?” I was a bit surprised when Greta really pushed me to be as real and grounded as possible and not make it feel like it's the truth, but it's Barbie Land pink truth. It was interesting that I initially felt that we wouldn't just go as straightforward and real with it as we did, that I assumed that there might be a tone that maybe made it, I don't know, I guess easier for people to hear or to swallow. Greta really didn't want that. She wanted it to just sound like the truth. I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.” Barbie fans react to the monologueDoes it feel like you're looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles right now? You're not alone. If summer 2023 has a colour, then it is undoubtedly pink, and it's all down (mostly) to one woman: Barbie. The monologue, Ferrera told Vanity Fair, was " one of the first things Greta mentioned to me even before I read the script. She said, 'I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I've always imagined you saying this.' While that was flattering, it also felt like pressure in the nicest way. I read the monologue and it hit me as powerful and meaningful. It also felt like, wow, what a gift as an actor to get to deliver something that feels so cathartic and truthful. But it also felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn't want to mess up. There was a little bit of healthy pressure around it." Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. It's one of the first things Greta mentioned to me even before I read the script. She said, "I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I've always imagined you saying this." While that was flattering, it also felt like pressure in the nicest way. I read the monologue and it hit me as powerful and meaningful. It also felt like, wow, what a gift as an actor to get to deliver something that feels so cathartic and truthful. But it also felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn't want to mess up. There was a little bit of healthy pressure around it. It felt like 500. I'm sure it wasn't. It was probably 30 to 50 full runs of it, top to bottom. By the end, Ariana recited the monologue to me because she had memorized it because that's how many times I had said it.
If all this showed how powerful pink could be, some harnessed that power to their advantage. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi embraced pink suits – a way to subtly wield authority while also reassuring that they weren't a threat. This idea was explored in popular culture, too. In Legally Blonde, the pink-obsessed Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon) is dismissed as a dumb blonde – but lands a place at Harvard Law School ( "What, like it's hard?") and graduates top of her class. Around this time, pink also emerged as a symbol of celebration, self-identification and pride in the LGBTQ+ community – who in the 1970s reclaimed the colour from its dark past in Nazi Germany, when pink triangles were used to identify gay prisoners in concentration camps. In the 1980s, the pink triangle became a sign of resistance, featuring on posters during the Aids crisis, and remains a powerful symbol in the queer community. One of the highlights of Greta Gerwig's Barbie comes in the second half of the film, when Gloria (America Ferrera) delivers a monologue on the impossible double standards of being a woman. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault. During her performance, Gerwig tells The Atlantic, "When America was giving her beautiful speech, I was just sobbing, and then I looked around, and I realized everybody’s crying on the set. The men are crying too, because they have their own speech they feel they can’t ever give, you know? And they have their twin tightrope, which is also painful." Read Gloria's full monologue from Barbie (2023):It took them two days to shoot the scene, and Ferrera says she probably did "30 to 50 full runs of it, top to bottom." Her favorite line, she says, is the "always be grateful" line, which she worked on together with Gerwig.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.The past decade has been another complicated one for the colour. Millennials even had their own shade of pink – but this watered-down hue was an almost apologetic version. "The kind of pinks that have done really well in the past few years and transcended girliness have been yellow and grey-based pinks, instead of the blue-based pinks, like Barbie pink and Legally Blonde pink," says St Clair.
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