Unpacking the 2024 Olympics: Marianne, Barbie, and National Mythmaking

Exploring myth, pop culture, and spon at the Olympics with Whitney Mallett

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Note: Thanks to everyone who came to my event at Lesbian Herstory Archive this week! It was such a fun night, and I loved meeting so many great people (in person and online). I have a few more book events coming up, and would love to see you there!

The Olympics bring up a lot for people, whether it’s:

The politics of the opening ceremony pageantry (the tableau that upset conservatives, the Marie Antoinette headless performers during a metal sequence; Lady Gaga doing cosplay as a French girl, you name it!) 

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Generally complicated feelings about nationalism and patriotism 

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Truly out-of-pocket ads (If you have not seen this ad for Google Gemini (their AI product), put your life on hold. It’s insane) 

Or are people on the internet rightly asking the question on my lips: Where are the Olson twins, the cultural ambassadors we deserve? 

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I am all over the place trying to parse a public event that seems so grounded in its own mythos and pop culture (with some heavy sponsorship thrown in). My forever touchstone for the Olympics is the 1996 gymnastics Barbie I had as a child which iconically lets you wear and twirl her as a ring. I still have my doll, and continue to have so many questions as to how to make sense of this event. I’m so glad I could chat with writer and critic Whitney Mallett about all of this.  I first became aware of Whitney’s great survey of the Barbie Dreamhouse featured in Architecture Digest (you can watch the amazing and fun video here). Whitney Mallett is the founding editor of "The Whitney Review of New Writing" and the co-editor of "Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey." She also has a great substack. 

My conversation with Whitney Mallet

The Olympics always bring up a lot of myth and fantasy, whether it’s the nationalism baked into the opening ceremonies of every games or the build-up around different products. We had to know the Paris games would bring up a lot already, and I’m glad you could join me to get into it. 

Let’s start with the logo for the Paris games. Who is Marianne and why am I already scared to cross a woman with a flame and bob (also made of gold?) 

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The logo is designed like one of those illusions — do you see the duck or the rabbit? Is the dress white and gold or black and blue? It’s at once the flame of the olympic torch, a gold medal, and the silhouette of a woman whose defining feature is a layered bob. This woman is meant to be Marianne, an allegorical figure of the French Revolution. Throughout history women have often functioned allegorically as symbols of nationhood (Hellas, Hispania, Gallia, Germania, etc). But making her literally a haircut, and specifically a bob, offers a twee update to the 18th-century “goddess of liberty.” It’s Marianne via Amélie; allegorical nationhood through the filter of tourist shop Eiffel tower tchotchke keychains.

I love this skit that my friends Ruby McCollister and Jake Levy made starring Marianne-as-Olympics-logo and narrating a contract dispute between the logo and her boss. McCollister and Levy really ham up the memification of “French” — Marianne is a dramatic, suicidal woman with bob and neck scarf, smoking cigarettes. But they also underscore how it’s actually pretty fucked up to turn a symbol of liberty into a logo. Marianne is shown as indentured to serve her corporate masters signing autographs and making official appearances. “You’re working me to the bone,” she complains (thick frog accent). And as violent as this woman’s intense mood swings are (she is throwing daggers with her eyes, as the expression goes, wounding the guy’s face every time she sends him a look) she’s still ultimately controlled by this Olympics svengali. 

The intersection of femininity, nationhood, and capitalism the Marianne logo engages makes me think of one of my favorite books: The Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun. (The book is actually French! The original title Premiers Materiaux Pour Une Theorie De La Jeune Fille). And it was written in 1999 (then translated to English by Ariana Reines in 2012), but every year that goes by, it feels more and more relevant. Its basic premise is that the Young-Girl is consumer society’s model citizen. Like what is more Young-Girl than the Barbie movie? Actually maybe turning Marianne into a corporate logo!

Tiktok is full of Parisians who are already salty about hosting the games. Is Marianne representing that version of Paris, or is she meant to speak to the ways Americans (and others) outside France imagine a romanticized Paris? 

To me she feels like Paris for a U.S. or global audience, for sure. Marianne-as-logo makes me think of Emily in Paris  — which in retrospect I’ve wondered if that show was, in part, some kind of multi-year rollout for the Paris Olympics. And even if it’s not the same suits in a boardroom conspiring with a single strategy, film and TV tax incentives function similarly to a city’s bid to host the games. They are both marketing strategies designed for global exposure, to promote a region’s desirability. It’s wickedly expensive to host a games and often debated if this “investment” actually pays off for most cities. Whether all the infrastructure and modernization projects actually provide net value. There are a lot of direct negative consequences beyond tourists and traffic just being annoying for locals, especially for the most vulnerable populations. Displacement and gentrification are usually par for the course. They moved migrants out before Paris. They displaced Roma before the London games. There are already articles tracking what’s happening in LA in the lead up to 2028. Marianne as Young-Girl bobiana, Paris as the ultimate Art Nouveau destination, the Olympics as fostering international peace and unity between nation states (while there’s an ongoing genocide). It’s all romanticization on top of romanticization and feels very much a mass delusion happening more for the image matrix than for anything else.

On that note, do you see Emily in Paris doing an Olympic storyline? How do you imagine that world in conversation with the world of the Olympics? 

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The Marianne logo feels like something Emily would create at her marketing job. They’d tell her it was ringarde, and she doesn’t get it. But then the Cut article would come out (“Excuse me, do we have a Bobbiana in our midst? The answer is yes”). And the lightly mocking reactions all over the internet would be seen as a win. Emily went viral again. Just like when she tweeted “Le vagin n’est pas masculin.” It’s all very 2014 feminism. The French man who actually created the new Olympics’s visual identity, said he wanted it to send a feminist message. Choosing a female face for the emblem was meant to represent that 2024 is the first year there is gender parity amongst competing athletes: 50% are women and 50% are men. But it’s a man who designed it, not even the fictional avatar of an eating-disordered American nepo baby.

I grew up in the 90s, and the gymnastics Barbie lived large in my imagination. The 1996 doll for the Atlanta games wasn’t Barbie’s first foray into “sports” and wasn’t based on a real Olympian. Her appeal was the tumbling ring she came with that let kids twirl her in DIY acrobatics. Now, Barbie is made in the image of real Olympians. What do you make of Barbie and the Olympics whether the individual dolls and their evolution, or the overall attempt to insert Barbie and her mythology into a much bigger mythology?

I just watched the Simon Biles documentary and that offers a lot of context for how important that particular Olympics games was for USA Gymnastics. Atlanta was the first time ever that the United States won women’s gymnastics team gold. Gymnastics and Barbie both engage this idealized feminine archetype. Think about how much more significant it is who wins women’s gymnastics than men’s gymnastics! And then in the 1990s, you have this post-Cold War narrative going on. The USSR had previously dominated artistic gymnastics. Now it’s team USA that dominates. In 1996 the star of the team was Shannon Miller, who’s blonde and beautiful like Barbie. And Shannon is also the same beauty ideal as the blonde gymnastics stars who were coming out of the USSR and Romania the previous decades. Dominique Dawes and Amy Chow were also part of the “Magnificent Seven,” as the team was known, but more than half the team was blonde. So even though that 1996 Olympics Gymnastics Barbie was just Barbie and not in the image of a specific athlete, her image tracked with how that gymnastics team and their star looked. I also think it’s inextricable this idealized femininity and the importance of the sport for the image of American Empire. Like why it seems more important who wins all-around women’s gymnastics than, say, a sport like archery even though each medal is worth just as much to the medal count. And that feels related to why women are the allegorical symbols for nations.

Thinking about the evolution of Olympics dolls from 1996 to 2024 and the larger Barbie mythology, it also tracks that in 1996 they would choose one of the most conventionally feminine sports: gymnastics. When I studied the evolution of Barbie’s houses for Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey, I found that in the 1990s you saw some of the more regressive visions of domesticity. In this era, Barbie had pink rose wallpaper and frilly curtains and these Dreamhouses felt closer to Victorian dollhouses than the really Modernist playhouses you got in the 1960s and 70s. In 2016, Barbie has a rebrand. Mattel is way more attuned to diverse representation. And by the 2020s, the new Dreamhouses are way more active and sporty. She has a surfboard and DJ equipment. She has an elevator that accommodates a wheelchair. So the curation of Barbies for Paris feels really in line with this broader evolution. The dolls are in the image of athletes who box, swim, sprint, play tennis and soccer. One is a paratriathlete. Interestingly there are nine dolls, and the only sport represented twice is gymnastics! But neither of the gymnasts is blonde or American. One of the dolls is heavily tattooed. I actually couldn’t figure out which athlete she’s in the image of, but I looked up if this is the first tatted Barbie. There have been a couple before, including a Harley Davidson Barbie with angel wings inked on her back. However, the prior tattooed dolls were very controversial!

Check out Whitney’s work! 

Whitney Mallett is the founding editor of "The Whitney Review of New Writing" and the co-editor of "Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey." She also has a great substack. 

Let’s talk Olympics!

Me, waiting on you to comment and chat about the Olympics. . .

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I’d love to hear from you! Drop your thoughts in the comments to share with the Landline community, or reply to this email to contact me. You can also find me on Instagram, or email me. I don’t have a dedicated phone line yet (just like in my youth), but maybe someday I’ll achieve Claudia status and get a Landline.

Thanks for reading!

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You can also help me spread the word by sharing it with a friend who would love it. Thank you for being a friend!

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