The “Barbie” Movie and Our Search for Meaning in Life

            When I first heard there was a “Barbie” movie coming this summer, I had zero interest in seeing it. But then I started reading reviews and heard positive reports from friends. My wife and I saw it yesterday.

We raised three daughters with a 13-year span between the oldest and the youngest.  We experienced different fads in toys: Beanie Babies, My Little Pony, and Cabbage Patch dolls among others.  Each of these had a season of popularity.  But one doll held pride of place over time: Barbie.  Our oldest daughter passed down her collection to the younger two, and they added to it.  We ended up with an extensive collection.  As our youngest went off to college, we stored the “Barbie Box” in the garage.  Several times we debated giving them away.  But hearing the news we were going to have a granddaughter led us to keep it.  

            When we got home from the theater, I went to the garage to retrieve the Barbie Box.  I brought it in, dusted it off, and opened it.  Then I arranged the full cast of characters for a group reunion portrait.  I sent it to our daughters — now 45, 36, and 33 years old.  A string of text messages sharing memories followed.

            While our girls enjoyed dressing the dolls, having Barbies was more than that. They would spend hours improvising stories involving the characters, and sometimes I would eavesdrop.  I was struck by how therapeutic it was. These plastic figures became actors in real-life situations.  They would say something like, “Barbie got mad at Ken and they divorced,” then pop Ken’s head off of his beach-ready body and toss it across the room. (“When I used to ask Dad to put Ken’s head back on his body, Dad would say, ‘Did Ken lose his head over Barbie again?’” one of our girls recalled.) One day I was doing yard work and unearthed a Ken-head beneath a hedge.  I took a picture and reunited him with his body and friends, much to the acclaim of his former caretakers.

            Which brings me back to the movie.

            I hope I’m not revealing too much to say it is about Barbies and Kens becoming aware that they are something more than their surface identities. They embark on a journey of enlightenment to discover who they really are.

            Watching the movie, I was struck with how its theme resonates with some daily meditations I happened to be reading this week from Richard Rohr’s The Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self:

“Various false selves (temporary costumes) are necessary to get us all started, and they show their limitations when they stay around too long. If a person keeps growing, their various false selves usually die in exposure to greater light.

Our false self, which we might also call our “small self” or “separate self,” is our launching pad: our body image, our job, our education, our clothes, our money, our car, our success, and so on. These are the functional trappings of ego that we all use to get through an ordinary day. They are largely projections of our self-image and our attachment to it.

When we are able to move beyond our separate or false self—as we are invited to do over the course of our lives – it will eventually feel as if we have lost nothing. In fact, it will feel like freedom and liberation. When we are connected to the Whole, we no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. We no longer need to compare and compete. We are now connected to something inexhaustible.”[i]

Can it be that Barbie has a spiritual message?

            A recent article about the movie and its creator, Greta Gerwig, ends with this:

It’s a testament to Gerwig’s singular earnestness — a level of sincerity unavailable to many of us — that using Barbie to affirm the worth of ordinary women feels, to her, quasi religious. She told me that when she was growing up, her Christian family’s closest friends were observant Jews; they vacationed together and constantly tore around each other’s homes. She would also eat with them on Friday nights for Shabbat dinner, where blessings were sung in Hebrew, including over the children at the table. May God bless you and protect you. May God show you favor and be gracious to you. May God show you kindness and grant you peace. Every Friday the family’s father would rest his hand on Gerwig’s head, just as he did on his own children’s, and bless her too.

“I remember feeling the sense of, ‘Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever you did or you didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,’” Gerwig told me. “‘You are a child of God. I put my hand over you, and I bless you as a child of God at this table. And that’s your value.” I remember feeling so safe in that and feeling so, like, enough.” She imagines people going to the temple of the movies to see “Barbie” on a hot summer day, sitting in the air-conditioned dark, feeling transported, laughing, maybe crying, and then coming out into the bright heat. “I want people to feel like I did at Shabbat dinner,” she said. “I want them to get blessed.”[ii]

Today I stood before our recently liberated collection of Barbies and Kens on our couch. I expressed gratitude for what they had endured.  I encourage all of us to find the blessing that arises from being connected to something “inexhaustible.”

---

[i] Richard Rohr, Letting Go of the False Self

[ii] Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job, New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2023