"'Barbie was invented first,' she said. 'Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.'" - Greta Gerwig, Vouge 2023
My first thought when I watched Barbie (2023) was oh God. Only I am going to really enjoy this.
I don't think I really was the only one who enjoyed Barbie, but there was definitely a lot there that made it such a crazy girlblog moment for me. Only Gret would make a Barbie movie like this. LET'S TRY TO SUMMARIZE WHY
"We now live in a society that rapidly becoming all the more narcissistic. The libido is primarily invested in the idividual subjectivity. (...) The narcissistic subject cannot clearly distinguish its own boarders. In that way the line between it and the other blend toghether. For this subject, the world becomes but shadows of its own self." The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han (2012)
Barbie portrays a society devoid of erotic love. Not only for the obvious reasons, but also because there's nothing that isn't Barbie in Barbie-land. Just like Han discusses, narcissism isn't a turning inwards of the ego, it's a projection of it outwards so that everything is just an extention of it. Barbie lives in her Barbie™-house, and drives her Barbie™-car, and hangs out with her Barbie™-friends. Even Ken is just an extension of Barbie. The diversity that exists in Barbie-land is basically a void diversity ... considering that everyone is just Barbie. There's shades and sizes but there's no difference of essence.
It's just a plastic world. And it's portrayed as a utopia.
Not to be a cheesy romantic, but when we experience love it's kind of like traveling over this great abyss. It's the feeling that thanks to him, I've approached the line that seperates me from another human being, went so close to it that I at times thought myself having passed over it. It's something so strong that everything else just sort of dies. It's death and lack of control. It takes the worst and the best and drags it to one undivided point. It's true life. I hope Byung-Chul Han is incorrect when he says we're growing increasingly bad at it. It's also this celebration of an erosion of eros that Barbie-movie makes fun of.
Barbie-world is complete with all the symbols of an ideal eros-ridden society: Barbie is terrified of the smallest signs of aging (death), her boyfriend is yet to recieve person-status (true love and death are the same thing), she's really only good at having a job (girlbosses never die), and she has the wide range of two whole emotions: excitement and dance. When the other world starts cracking it's way in, Barbie's first thought is this otherness, this pitch-black darkness, this Unknown: "Do you guys ever think about dying?"
Barbie (2023) portrays a war-like backlash to a barbie-type brand of feminism - a war that was literally waging on outside the theatre as I was watching it (and though dying, is still waging on on some corners of youtube ... stay strong kings) and that is extremely tied to this modern lack of eros.
Literally every political sphere that didn't convert to the Andrew Tate-branch of Islam during a crack binge in 2023 has already explained the problems with the red pill-movement, but it's so interesting to me that a lot of stuff in the Barbie movie mirrors it perfectly, and how it kind of predicts (can you call it a prediction if it's happening as your movie is premiering?) the rise of a hyper-individualist man-movement in response to a hyper-individualist feminist-movement.
The problem the dolls have is of course that they fail to imagine anything other than a society completely void of eros, and they live in a world where love is basically impossible. Most red pill guys I've heard have said they would never get married, considering it's such a "risk" from the man's side. And while you could dwell in the fact that this is just what a woman would have said 50 years ago, it's also worth pointing out: of course it's a risk! It's a marriage! I really hope that this culture that's so focused on personal fulfillment that people will talk to death about how "the biggest risk is not taking any risk" career-wise, but aren't willing to take any risks for love, is on it's way out. And it will probably mean that both men and women realise that love is laying down power for the scary other; that it's a meeting with the other, which is always going to be a little bit like death. Only love and death changes all things after all. That's why the apocalypse is a catastrophe and a liberation at the same time.
I hope that you have now been Barbie-pilled and realised how Barbie is about death and love, about how our subjective world is built of contradictions that are really the same thing and the only way out is through loving or dying.
All of the points that I've gone over so far are really summed up in the quote at the start of this post. But that vougue-quote also shows the deliberate religious themes in Barbie.
All of the previous stuff is also really sort of religiously coded. But the religious element really cranks up when Barbie meets her creator and has a discussion with her about wanting to be a real human.
Maybe I am a crazy girlblogger who's lost my mind, but what made me sob when I watched this in the theatre for the first time was this sort of felix culpa narrative I felt Barbie played on. Barbie chooses death -- she chooses the life that Genesis teaches that the first humans chose. And it's messy and it's complicated but it's also kind of great, and it's our choice. Life has the love of a choice freely made pulsing through it. There's something ur-feminine about it. Another great thing about the scene is that it's also sort of contradictive. On one hand, it's an analogy on the first woman choosing death, and on the other hand, it's an analogy of a woman in a dead world choosing life. Fall and redemption is united in one choice in the step Barbie takes at the end of the scene. Anxiety throws humanity into sin, but the acceptance of that same anxiety and the persevering through it leads to salvation. If that isn't beautiful I don't know what is !!
Also, I don't even know what type of meta-humor it is to basically make the joke be that you put kirkegaardian theology into a Barbie movie. But I apprecitated it, and I also went insane I think.
...I watched it thrice in theatre.
Do u get it ... there's no mirrors because she lives in a world void of anything that isn't herself, void of anything that reflects her !! She lives in a world made up of herself like a pantheistic god !! Which means she's never experienced the love of being reflected i.e. of being seen !! Look at those empty eyes of someone who's a Barbie girl in a Barbie world !! ∎
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