Ian Warden: No plastic at play in my boyhood

Excitement about the just-released Barbie movie (I feel the excitement myself, for Barbie and her fantastic, plastic world have always had an eerie allure) is generating a wealth of renewed discussion and debate about Barbie's influences on our lives and times.

For example, my daily feed from Hyperallergic, the ever-stimulating online arts magazine, has a ripper piece titled The Complicated Legacy of Barbie in Art, about the imaginative uses artists have made of her, often to the litigation-threatening horror of Mattel, Barbie's creator.

One feels a surge of patriotic pride upon being reminded by Hyperallergic of Australian artist Annette Thas's Wave 1 (2014), a towering, wave-shaped sculpture (imagine a wave about to break) made of more than 3000 actual Barbie dolls.

One of the several gasp-making things about the crazy and sinister Wave 1 is the way in which it makes a massed use of an iconic doll we are used to thinking of and handling (perhaps brushing her hair, perhaps chastely juxtaposing her with a Ken - her eunuch boyfriend destined never to have sex with her) as a unique dolly-individual. Wave 1 reminds us that Mattel's factories have churned out more than a billion Barbies since her first release in 1959.

That is how and why she is everywhere. Rummage in an op-shop bargain bin and however long she has been buried in other thrown-away things, up comes a luminously lovely Barbie, 19, her hair as lustrous, her perfect body (perfect for a male gazer) as pneumatically curvy as the day she was made.

In spite of myself (for I share most of the feminist reservations about Barbie's malignancy as a toy for girls) I find Barbie's agelessness bewitching. She is 64 now, but, uncannily, doesn't show it.

The Hyperallergic piece's lead illustration is Nancy Burson's once-seen-never-forgotten Polaroid portrait Aged Barbie (1994).

The notion of an aged Barbie, of a Barbie growing old, plays disturbingly with the mind.

"The doll," Hyperallergic observes admiringly of Burson's painstakingly plausible movement of Barbie along into middle age, "maintains her [Barbie's] expertly executed eyeliner ... her perfectly plucked eyebrows point into two wisely skeptical arches ... she has smile lines and crow's feet as well, universal traces of a life well lived".

Looking at Nancy Burson's portrait of a middle-aged Barbie stokes in me the amusing thought that since there are Barbie Career Dolls (they include Florist Barbie, Teacher Barbie and Scientist Barbie but one doubts there is or ever will be a Sex Worker Barbie) there could be a Liberal Opposition Front Bench Barbie. I know I would buy one.

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This Liberal Barbie would capture the essential stereotypical Liberal qualities (in Barbie the movie, Barbie rejoices about her being "stereotypical" for stereotypicality is the fulfilling state of grace all girl dolls dream of achieving) some of us think we see in such stereotypically appalling Liberal front benchers as Michaelia Cash and Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.

From my leftish political perspective there has always seemed to be a stereotypical Liberal Party woman (are the Liberal men all Kens? I'm not sure) as if, like the Mattel company making Barbies, the Liberal Party manufactures (perhaps on the character-forming assembly line of the Young Liberal movement) a Liberal Barbie. She, churned out, comes with a fixed insincere plastic smile and with, if she has a heart at all, a heart of plastic incapable of feeling any compassionate warmth for life's battlers.

Why have I, above, brought my venerable teddy bear into this discussion (I am 77 but he is older than me, my mother, pregnant with me, finding him washed ashore on an English beach)?

It is because in this suddenly Barbie-besotted moment the thinking man wonders how different his teddy-bear-enriched childhood might have been if his principal toy-playmate had instead been, as Barbie has been for teeming millions of girls, a plastic effigy of an idealised (though genitally-bereft) late-teen member of his sex.

Barbie represents, for little girls, someone (however misguidedly) to aspire to grow up to be, to (attractively) look like.

"How weird that would have been!" I confide to my aged teddy bear (made by the legendary Merry Thought company, he is probably highly collectable now but I could no more sell him than sell my soul).

"I always deeply, deeply loved you but I never for a moment thought of you as my role model in Life since, even if a boy human wanted to, he could never grow up to be a bear."

My bear, turning to look at me, seems to somehow nod in agreement that, yes, he always thought of himself as my knockabout best friend and closest confidant and never (in spite of being marginally older and wiser than me) as my idol.

At this, with a surge of gratitude for our life together, I pick him up and clutch my vintage friend to my own vintage bosom for the billionth time. I thank him for his dear, sweet, Barbielessness, for how the soft, warm, kapok-stuffed crunchiness of his mohair-hairy (but balding) body is so comforting in these otherwise plastic and comfortless times.

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