Barbie and the Existential Crisis

I was not a child who enjoyed dolls. My sister spent hours building imaginative worlds with her stuffed animals, Playmobile figurines, and yes, Barbies. But I wasn’t a particularly imaginative child and preferred building forts with chairs then hiding away to read a Trixie Belden mystery. I did enjoy creating accessories for my sister’s Barbies out of manilla folders and scotch tape. I added a trunk to her pink Barbie car, painstakingly built a dresser for all her clothes, and occasionally was called into service to untangle a Barbie’s hair.

All that to say, I was not really expecting to want to go to the Barbie movie. As a (short, small-chested, brunette) child of the 90s I knew that Barbie was anti-feminist and promoted harmful body image. Spunky, freckled detective Trixie Belden was more my speed for a childhood hero. But from the moment I saw images of “weird Barbie” played by the brilliantly unhinged Kate McKinnon, I knew I wanted to see what Gerwig would do with this movie about an iconic toy. What I was not expecting was a movie filled with deep theological and ontological questions about what it means to be a person, specifically a woman, in a modern context.

The movie is bookended with themes of Creation. We open with an eerie scene referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the apes replaced with children in dull clothes dutifully, if not enthusiastically, playing with porcelain infant dolls. The original Barbie, now at least 15 feet tall, descends, an obelisk of a new way to play–created ex-nihilo for these girls to express identity beyond that of mother.

The penultimate scene of the movie is a tender conversation between Barbie and her creator (Read no further if you want to stay spoiler-free!).

In Gerwig’s everything-is-possible world, the ghost of the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, lives in a muted pink apartment in a remote part of the Mattel corporate building. She is delighted to meet up with “Stereotypical Barbie”, who is having a not-very-stereotypical identity crisis now that she has experienced a bit of the fullness of being human. Barbie is looking for permission to change, to choose something risky and life changing, and Ruth gives her warm advice which invites her to become her fullest self, risks and all.

Between these two scenes is a rollicking visual and narrative adventure in which Barbie reckons with what it means to created for a particular purpose, and then have the relationships that come out of that purpose change her irrevocably and threaten the perfect world that was built around her.

There are a few scenes when I found myself weeping (and one where the audience was crying, laughing, AND applauding simultaneously). Gerwig is able to pull out of each of her actors incredible performances that capture the full range of joy and pain of being a created person, a created woman, in a deeply broken world. And Gerwig does all of this without the solution ever being  Barbie falling in romantic love. 

Barbie falls in love—but it is platonic love, not with the child who played with her, but with the child’s mother. The mother, played by America Ferrera, has been mourning the loss of connection with her teenage daughter, and her grief and existential dread has somehow leaked into Barbie, creating her own existential crisis. While initially distraught by the unpleasant feelings that this connection generates in her, Barbie finds herself irresistibly drawn to both the mother and the rich human experience she is having, ultimately having to choose between her own “perfect” life and the very imperfect life of a human woman. (She also has to save Barbieland from a horse-themed coup of Kens, but that is for another article.)

While there is some adult humor, this movie is a wonderful starting place for conversations between tweens, teens and their parents or even in a youth group setting. This is not a movie only for women–my 12-year-old son thoroughly enjoyed it–and the movie is so explicitly about gender that it is a wonderful conversation starter about what it means to be constrained by and freed from gender expectations.  For suggested questions to ask your teens and tweens on the car-ride-home from the movies, check out these twenty from GenderSpecialist.com. 

Whether you played with Barbies as a child or not, this is a movie worth seeing and discussing!