Growing Up, Barbie, and the Reclamation of Girlhood
A Review of the Film Barbie, Directed by Greta Gerwig
by Emma Russell
Any little girl who ever picked up a Barbie doll didn’t play at being God; she was God.
Directed by Greta Gerwig
Written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
2023, Warner Bros.
PG-13; 1 hour, 54 minutes
Official movie poster courtesy of Warner Bros.
Every woman was once a little girl, and any little girl who ever picked up a Barbie doll didn’t play at being God; she was God. From a very young age, girls named their dolls, giving them rich backstories, developing their relationships, and cultivating their lives. We have been planning the trajectory of our doll’s life for as long as we can remember.
In many religions and cultures, God has always been referred to as a man. Even the lower-case-g gods find themselves ruled by men (Zeus in Greek mythology, Horus in Egyptian stories, etc.). Christianity takes it even further, in that every being that holds power is portrayed as masculine: the angels, the apostles, even Satan.
Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie, presents a different kind of creation myth. In an interview with Insider, Gerwig stated that a lot of her inspiration for the movie stemmed from her Catholic school education and from these older story forms that resonated with her: “In the movie, like when it starts, she’s in a world where there’s no aging or death or pain or shame or self-consciousness, and then she suddenly becomes self-conscious — that’s a really old story, and we know that story.” Gerwig turns this familiar archetype on its head by telling the story of her own Barbie, using the cultural icon to explore themes of self-identity and what it means to be human.
The film’s main Barbie (sometimes referred to as Stereotypical Barbie), played by Margot Robbie, lives in Barbie Land and wakes up to the perfect day every day and never questions any of it. She magically finds herself dressed every morning, floats down to her car, and dances the night away with all the other Barbies to perfectly in-sync choreography they never rehearsed. It’s all perfect, until one night she is plagued with thoughts of death, and the next day experiences bad breath, falls off her roof, and finds her normally high-arched feet flat on the ground.
When her feet go flat and Barbie topples over, she says “I just fell. I’m so embarrassed.” Author Barbie replies “Barbie doesn’t get embarrassed.” For the first time, Barbie realizes that something is different; something is wrong.
Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie, presents a different kind of creation myth… [She] turns this familiar archetype on its head by telling the story of her own Barbie, using the cultural icon to explore themes of self-identity and what it means to be human.
Barbie, who has suddenly become self-aware, is sent to Weird Barbie for advice. Weird Barbie offers her the choice between a pink high heel and a Birkenstock sandal, and tells Barbie “You can go back to your regular life or you can know the truth about the universe.” Barbie chooses the heel, wanting to go back to her former perfectly pink plastic life. But she has already started to change, and once you gain understanding you can’t un-gain it. The Birkenstock becomes associated with Barbie’s loss of innocence, and even more, with her growing desire to embrace what it means to be human and conscious.
It’s important that these human traits were bleeding into Barbie before she was forced to pick between shoes. Gerwig seems to suggest that no one can stay complacent forever. Would Eve have ever plucked the apple from the tree had she not already had doubts and wonderings of her own? At least in this film, a serpent would only speed up the inevitable. You cannot whisper doubt into someone’s mind if there isn’t any there to begin with.
These feelings only worsen for Barbie when she enters the “real world.” While roller-skating with Ken, Barbie notices all the men who are staring at her. “I feel kinda ill at ease like… I don’t know the word for it but I’m conscious, but it’s my self that I’m conscious of.” This parallels not only Adam and Eve developing feelings of shame, but also the change all little girls go through as they grow older. One day you realize that, all of a sudden, it feels as if your body is not your own, and by extension, you feel as if you are not your own. Barbie perfectly embodies what it feels like to learn to fear the eyes of others.
Interestingly, Barbie takes on the role of Adam as well as Eve. The director herself has likened Barbie to Adam: “Barbie was invented first. Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie's position in our eyes and the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis,” Gerwig said in an interview with Vogue.
The Birkenstock becomes associated with Barbie’s loss of innocence, and even more, with her growing embrace of what it means to be human and conscious.
Ken was quite literally created as an accessory for Barbie. He is as interchangeable as one of her purses or her many pairs of heels. Nowadays Ken comes in a package with Barbie, nobody is buying just Ken. I never had a Ken, and I never wanted one, but I always wanted more Barbies; that is, until I started middle school. That was when I realized it wasn’t cool to be a girl. You shouldn’t like pink and frilly things, and you definitely should not be playing with Barbies. When Barbie finds Sasha, the girl who played with her when she was little, she and her friends all rag on Barbie, save for one. This girl says that she loved Barbie but is quickly silenced by the group and given judgmental glares. It’s not cool to like Barbie, Sasha explains, perhaps a bit harshly. “Everybody hates women,” she says, “Women hate women and men hate women, it’s the one thing we can all agree on.” And by extension, men and women are taught to hate the things women like. Sasha also claims that Barbie has been “making women feel bad about themselves since [Barbie was] invented.”
When I think back to my childhood, I don’t think Barbie ever made me feel bad about myself. It was people who made me feel bad about playing with Barbie. I only stopped playing with her because of people like Sasha who told me that I shouldn’t. I was at odds with who I wanted to be and who I was trying to be. I loved playing with dolls, but all of a sudden, as I got older, that was wrong. Pink was my favorite color when I was little, but as I got older, pink felt stupid. I loved wearing skirts and dresses, but the older I got, the harder it became to wear them because everyone had an opinion about the way I dressed and how much of my body was visible. I felt like Barbie: I felt like I wasn’t good enough for anything. I listened to others who bought into the idea that women should be disrespected. And not only did I start to hate Barbie, I hated myself.
In the film, Barbie already finds herself on the path to becoming human, even if she is unaware of the change. Slowly she becomes a little less perfect, a bit less Barbie. Her hair loses its volume, her makeup becomes simpler, and her outfits more casual. And as Barbie becomes more human, she realizes that she already is.
Barbie’s journey closely resembles that of the average girl’s transition to womanhood; it showcases the struggle with one’s self and what it means to be in a world that actively pushes you down.
In the end, Barbie, like all us little girls, grew up, but she did not completely abandon her girlhood. She chose the Birkenstock sandal, but she also made it pink.
Editorial Assistant Emma Russell is fairly new to the world of literary magazines. Armed with a Bachelor of Arts from Washington College, she's ready to dive into the "real world" and put her English and theater majors to good use (while hopefully finding a reason to get up off the couch and stop binge-watching Friends). With a focus on gender studies, Emma has had her work published in the Washington College Review, including essays on works by writers such as Jane Austen, Sappho, and Jahan Khatun. As the former Student Life Editor for Washington College's historic newspaper The Elm, Emma has also written many published articles. A literary geek, Emma loves to bury her nose in any book that crosses her path but has a soft spot for classic female authors including the Brontë sisters and the previously mentioned Jane Austen.
