With Barbie‘s release right around the corner, Eliza Janssen remembers Disney’s attempt at a live-action living doll film: Life-Size, a TV movie starring Tyra Banks as a messianic smizing miracle.
With its totalitarian mission to paint the world pink, easily-memed posters, and 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired teaser trailer, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie has been aiming for ~iconique~ status right from day dot. One shot from the film in particular cemented audience expectations for a live-action Barbie, showing Margot Robbie’s living doll stepping out of a pair of pink marabou heels, her arched foot remaining perfectly poised above the ground.
Robbie is of course ideally cast as the Western world’s utmost standard of marketed beauty, but around the turn of the millennium, supermodel Tyra Banks was a pretty big get, too. In the Disney-ABC coproduction Life-Size, the future America’s Next Top Model host sported doll feet that were instead branded on their soles with the company code of authenticity. Both movies prove that foot fetishists are humanity’s best chance at sorting life-size, glamorous doll-women from the real item.
Life-Size is 100% a low-budget TV movie, complete with fades to black for each ad break, so it’s surprising that its cast featured such an industry-dominating lead cast as Banks and Lindsay Lohan, fresh off 1998’s The Parent Trap. The movie asks waaaay less of the talented child star than that bravura twin pair of performances. Here she’s a sullen, un-engaging tomboy, to the point where I wonder if the plot was retooled from a more adult, Splash-esque story focusing on a fish-out-of-water (doll-out-of-the-box?) romance between Banks and Lohan’s grieving single father.
He’s your archetypal workaholic lawyer dad, so desperate to “make partner” he’s missing all of LiLo’s gridiron games. Her friends aren’t too impressed with her funereal vibe, either, bitchily observing that “ever since her mom died she’s like, totally ignored us. Get over it already!” They get their asshole wish when Lindsay turns tween necromancer (!!!) and accidentally brings unwanted fashion doll Eve back to life, rather than the mum she’s recently lost to cancer. “Zamba tarka ishtu nebiri”, the depressed kid chants—not very Disney-friendly! But the huge spiritual implications of a Satanic-sounding chant being able to legitimately raise the dead are quickly forgotten as soon as Eve gets animated.
Years before Banks would go on to terrorise generations of young women via reality TV beauty pageant (her name does literally fit into the word “tyrant”), she’s all smiles and giggles as the aspirational doll, who “believe[s] that that girls everywhere should know that all things are possible”. It’s unclear to me yet whether the Barbies and Kens of Gerwig and Mattel’s new film are aware that they’re dolls, as the other playthings in Toy Story besides Buzz Lightyear are capable of recognising.
Like Christ, Eve seems to immediately comprehend that she’s both of this world and beyond it, human and divine: here to spread a message of the importance of power-dressing, if not empowerment in itself. Asked what field of work she’s in now, after bragging about previous positions in “law enforcement, medicine, and office work”, Eve chirps back that it “depends on what outfit [she’s] wearing”.
The film’s central comic premise is that Eve does not understand that to err is human, leading to a memorable setpiece that rings true as a snapshot of workplace imposter syndrome. Grinning at her computer screen and wearing perfect Grown Working Adult drag, she blithely mashes away at her keyboard.
So that bit is great. There’s also a god-tier shopping montage set to bubblegum pop hit “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched. The fashion and tunes are solid in general, climaxing in a somewhat off-key performance of Eve’s ad jingle “Be A Star” at a stuffy office party. It’s also pretty cool that a Disney production cast a non-white actor as its beloved and popular epitome of beauty, way before copping nonsensical culture-war criticism over doing the same thing this year with its update of The Little Mermaid.
Although cute, Life-Size is a waste of Lohan’s talents and a half-assed attempt to cut to the big existential questions that Barbie is ready to play with: who is Ken without Barbie, do these dolls hold women to an impossible standard of beauty and accomplishment, and “do you guys ever think about dying?” Let’s not even mention the recent sequel and its hip-hop remix of “Be A Star”: get your friends, take a stand/High school crew, you need fam/Woke is woke, love is love/We both real, that’s what’s up. It’s definitely no “Barbie Girl”.
