Barbie and her boobs point to a future of toying with film

Gleefully dubbed “Barbenheimer” by the internet, July 21 is the day on which two of the biggest films of the year — Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer — arrive on global cinema screens. Which to see first may have been made easier in some countries by government intervention.

It’s not Nolan’s portrait of the moral torture and government hounding that afflicted the creator of the nuclear bomb that is causing outrage but the unexpected diplomatic faux pax of film star Margot Robbie’s blonde doll come to life.

That’s because a brief scene in the Barbie movie shows a map that’s the source of righteous indignation for countries that have been fighting China’s unilateral claims to territory in the South China Sea for almost eight decades. In particular, the “nine-dash-line” on the map has made the government of Vietnam so angry that it has banned Barbie from its screens.

The nine-dash line acknowledges China’s claims to long-disputed territories in the South China Sea, and even though its use on maps was deemed unlawful by an international arbitration ruling in The Hague in 2016, it seems that Barbie didn’t get the message, much to the ire of the Vietnamese and fellow contesters of the Chinese claim, the Philippines, which is also considering banning the film.

It’s not the first time that a film depicting the nine-dash-line has been banned in Vietnam. In 2019 it pulled the DreamWorks animation film Abominable and in 2022 the movie Unchartered for committing the same sin. While the government of the Philippines seems willing to accept a compromise, in which the offending map scene is removed from the version of the film distributed on its territory; the Vietnamese have made their decision and aren’t willing to budge — to the relief of Nolan and the Oppenheimer producers who won’t have to compete with Barbie for bums on seats in Hanoi and possibly Manila.

If you go online and look for the offending Barbie image, you’ll be surprised that it shows a colourful scribbled map which features as a background element. You can see it for less than a second in the film’s trailer where Barbie in response to the question, “What do I have to do?” is told, “You have to go to the real world. You can go back to your regular life or you can know the truth about the universe.” It seems that in the disputed geopolitical territories of the South China Sea, part of the truth about the universe is that maps matter and Vietnam won’t be part of “Barbieworld” anytime soon.

The much bigger worry for movie audiences is not Barbie’s insensitive geography but rather what new hell lays in wait should the film be the global supersmash many are predicting. Though the Barbie doll’s intellectual property owner Mattel has already seen solid movie profits from the movie adaptations of its Transformers range of toys, it’s betting big on the success of Gerwig’s film as an opening salvo in a plan to unleash a slew of toy-based film adaptations.

At present the company has announced plans for 17 film adaptations it hopes will make the company a film franchise giant in the vein of Marvel Comics Universe. These include an adaptation based on its Polly Pocket range of microdolls directed by Girls creator Lena Dunham; an “A-24 type existential horror” about beloved children’s character Barney the Dinosaur, produced by Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya; a live action Tom Hanks-starring adventure about Mattel’s little-known 1960s astronaut toy Major Matt Mason; an action heist story perplexingly inspired by the card game Uno and the realisation of an attempt 20 years in development to turn the popular Magic 8 Ball toy into a film, to be written by Cocaine Bear screenwriter Jimmy Warden as a horror comedy.

All of which definitely points to a cinematic future with an “outlook not so good”, which represents the biggest threat to original ideas since Robert Downey Jr jetted onto screens as Iron Man in 2008 and set the course of mainstream cinema towards rapacious profiteering from an always valuable commodity for Hollywood — audience awareness of what to expect from films based on things they know.

No-one could ever be prepared for the idea that a bit of harmless, cunning, back-stabbing family card-playing fun could soon be the basis for a film and perhaps we never should be. No matter how good or bad the Barbie film turns out to be, the army of Mattel films it’s hoped to be the vanguard hoped of are depressing enough to make you wish that they all include maps featuring the nine-dash line. That will make Vietnam not just a popular tourist destination but one where you can pretend the toy-based future of the movies is just a nightmare.