Heartbreaking news from Hollywood: Lena Dunham is no longer involved in the forthcoming Polly Pocket movie. Speaking to the New Yorker, Dunham revealed she dropped out of the project because “I don’t think I have that in me.”
Clearly, there is a lot to unpack here. The first is, Christ, they’re going to make a Polly Pocket movie. People in Hollywood saw the success of Barbie and immediately started scouting around for other vaguely nostalgic toys that they could make a movie out of. And the fact that they initially chose Lena Dunham to write, direct and produce points to an even greater cynicism, as if some otherworldly algorithm had analysed Barbie and determined that the secret key to replicating its historic box office success was simply “toy plus feminism”.
But it looks like Lena Dunham isn’t having it. Expanding on her decision, she told the New Yorker “I wrote a script, and I was working on it for three years. But I remember someone once said to me about Nancy Meyers … that somehow her taste manages to intersect perfectly with what the world wants.”
She continued: “I don’t think I have that in me. I feel like the next movie I make needs to feel like a movie that I absolutely have to make. No one but me could make it. And I did think other people could make Polly Pocket.”
Although this probably hints at slightly more behind-the-scenes turmoil than she’s letting on – reading between the lines it sounds as if Mattel has spent the last few years flattening Dunham’s script into something blander than she initially wanted – it’s very gracious of her to realise that other people might be able to make a film about a fairly small plastic doll. Indeed, they already have. Just look at 2006’s animated PollyWorld, in which Polly Pocket realises that her potential new stepmother is selfish and cruel, and reacts by vowing to have the best weekend ever. Someone other than Lena Dunham made that.
However, PollyWorld existed in a pre-Barbie landscape, when it was enough to just take a toy and put it in a movie. Barbie changed all that. Now any movie about a toy has to primarily be an ironic exploration of the complicated legacy of the toy. Dunham’s Polly Pocket movie was never going to be set in the world of Polly Pocket, a vaguely defined mythology in which Polly was apparently sometimes the mayor of Pollyville.
Instead, it was going to be about a “young girl and a pocket-sized woman who form a friendship.” Like Barbie, it was going to be an actual toy who had to navigate the real world in all its horrible complexity. Maybe there would have been a scene where Polly Pocket witnesses violence, or unethical corporate behaviour, or vivisection. We just don’t know.
Still, good for Lena Dunham. She’s a talented, knotty writer who understands that she doesn’t have the mass appeal necessary to create what sounds an awful lot like the Mac and Me to Barbie’s ET The film she makes next will be uniquely hers, and not the sort of watered-down Greta Gerwig Xerox that producers seem to be after.
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This isn’t bad news for Polly Pocket, either. Don’t forget that the Barbie movie also went through a number of iterations before it landed on its final form. At one point Diablo Cody was writing it. At one point it was going to star Amy Schumer; at another Anne Hathaway was going to play Barbie. The same thing will almost certainly happen to Polly Pocket. It will bounce around creative teams for a while before landing on a writer and director so perfect that you’ll forget Lena Dunham was ever involved.
Who knows what the film will end up like. Perhaps it will move on from Barbie by focusing on a different sociopolitical ideology. Perhaps it will be an exploration of the growing threat of rightwing populism, or ethnic separatism or post-classical anarchy. Either way, the Polly Pocket movie will end up being the thing it was always destined to be: a film about a range of mass-produced toys that you vaguely remember owning as a child but have no deep emotional connection with. Who could ask for more?