TIFFANY SHLAIN

REBOOTING BARBIE

18 Years After It's Sundance Premiere, My Thoughts on The Tribe

 

By Tiffany Shlain

I’m a blonde blue-eyed Jew named Tiffany and I’m married to a blond blue-eyed Jew named Ken. So perhaps it makes sense that eighteen years ago, I directed a film called The Tribe, an unauthorized, unorthodox history of the Jewish people and the Barbie doll. My husband and I co-wrote the film, which in many ways, was a distillation of all of our conversations about being Jewish in an assimilated culture. As someone who was always told I didn’t “look Jewish” I always thought it was one of the great ironies of the 21st century that the world's most famous WASP, Barbie, was created by a Jewish woman.  

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As a young girl, I enjoyed playing with and dismantling Barbie, but my real interest in Barbie (and in exploring contemporary Judaism) began in 2002. I attended the first convening of Reboot in Utah, an experimental gathering of young Jewish filmmakers, writers and culture makers who were not Jewishly affiliated (aka we didn’t go to temple or traditional Jewish gatherings.) We all exploded with conversation- finally having an outlet to explore what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century.   

 

By complete coincidence, Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, passed away that very weekend. At breakfast that Sunday of the gathering, I read her obituary in the NY Times. Way down in the article they casually mentioned that she was Jewish. Now that we are fully in the midst of Barbiemania in the lead-up to the new Barbie film, many people are talking about her creator’s Jewishness, but in 2001, it was fresh news. I had an “AHA” moment. Exploring Barbie’s creation story could open up a new conversation about assimilation and what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. I would make a film and a discussion kit to spark the similar conversation I was having at Reboot.

 

Ken and I started working on the script shortly after. We had often discussed our own Jewish identities. Both of our families are from Odessa, Ukraine, we both lost family members in the Holocaust, and we both went to large public high schools where 99% of the students were not Jewish. We both love Jewish culture but don’t connect much with prayer or religion. Reflecting on our experiences, we came up with lines like:  “Jews always felt like outsiders, maybe that’s why they created a bread with only an outside” (a bagel). Or about how Ruth Handler had a double mastectomy, and created one of the first prosthetic breast companies:  “Ruth Handler made two fortunes from plastic boobs.” The one line that Ken and I spent the most time in the film was the line about Israel: “Just as you can believe in America and may not agree with all of its politics, you can believe in Israel and not agree with all of its politics.” It is still exactly how we feel today. 

 

Making the film had many memorable moments. While in production on the film I remember going to ToysRUs and putting around 50 Barbie dolls in my shopping cart for the film shoot. There was a woman behind me looking at my cart, aghast. I turned and said, “They’re for my son.” 

 

Other issues were a little more scary. A week before the premiere, I heard that Mattel was sending five lawyers. I panicked. Mattel was notorious for suing artists. I imagined being taken away in handcuffs from the screening. After a sleepless night, I found a lawyer who’d successfully defended an artist against Mattel and he said he would come to the premiere ready for anything. Amichai Lau-Lavie MC’d the premiere in drag as “Hadassah Gross” and the vibrant audience of 1,000 was fantastic. They cheered. I didn’t get sued. It was a great night. A couple of months later it had its official festival premiere at Sundance and after each screening, we invited people back to a house we had rented for matzo ball soup and conversation. We had packed discussions each night.