The making of a female Messiah
Do you or someone you love experience irrepressible thoughts of death? Are your friends disgusted by the flatness of your feet? Struggling with cellulite? Well, I have just the right movie for you, and her name is Barbie!
Director Greta Gerwig’s pop art masterpiece offers a fresh retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave but with a feminist twist. The movie follows “Stereotypical Barbie” played by Margot Robbie as her once-perfect life in the semi-imaginary “Barbieland” begins to fall apart. Her high heels fall flat, her thighs begin to wrinkle, and anxious thoughts keep her up at night.
To save Barbieland from complete ruin, Stereotypical Barbie must enter the Real World (Along with a stow-away Ken played by Ryan Gosling) to help the troubled girl who is playing with her. But as she rollerblades through streets of gawking bystanders and catcalling construction workers, Barbie realizes the real world is nothing like the female-empowered world of Barbieland and must come to grips with the complicated reality she finds herself in.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I left this movie with tears streaking down my bearded face. Barbie is an emotional rollercoaster that will leave you laughing so hard you cry, and crying so hard you laugh, not unlike Barbie’s own response to experiencing the real world for the first time.
As a Franciscan Friar, I tend to read religion into everything and anything. But there’s a moment toward the end of the film where Barbie literally talks one-on-one with her creator. No, not God per se, but a woman named Ruth Handler, the real-life creator of Barbie.
In this scene, Barbie doesn’t feel like a Barbie anymore. Her journey to the real world and her relationships with real women changed her irreversibly. She wants to be one of these real women, not just the idea of one.
Ruth warns Barbie that being human can be pretty uncomfortable. “Humans only have one end. Ideas live forever, humans not so much.” We all have struggles, we lie to deal with our pain, and then we die!
But it’s at this moment that Barbie gets it. Something clicks.
“I want to be part of the people that make meaning,” she says, “not the thing that’s made. I want to do the imagining, I don’t want to be the idea.” When Barbie was in the real world, she went through a full spectrum of human experiences ranging from the extremely ordinary, like drinking water and getting wet for the first time, to grappling with deep issues of sexism and male chauvinism. In a few short hours, she experiences happiness, joy, sorrow, helplessness, fear, anxiety, anger, and laughter. The real world wasn’t perfect like Barbieland; not even close. But it was real.
“Stereotypical” Barbie recognized the extraordinary in the ordinary, the magical in the mundane - the miracle of the moment. That was her gift. No matter how painful or how backward the real world seemed, Barbie embraced it in solidarity with all women, even to the point of accepting her own death.
No, not death on a cross, but death all the same… Do you see what I’m getting at?
Barbie is a feminine Messiah figure. She doesn’t simply value the female experience from afar, she claims it as her own, as painful and joy-filled as it might be. Barbie is no stereotype. She's not an idea of a woman often conjured up by men, but a woman herself.
Obviously, there is much that could be said about this film, but it was Barbie’s devotion to and desire for the imperfect human experience that I most admired.
Barbie learned that “being human is not something I need to ask for, or even want, it’s just something that I discover I am.” And so too with all of us. We find ourselves in this mysterious and oftentimes painful existence, unsure of what to do with ourselves or where to go. But what makes us truly human is our persistence to make meaning out of hurt and imagine new ways of relating more justly to one another.
If there was a movie about a female Jesus, Barbie would be it. Barbie forsakes the ideal and perfect life in Barbieland to embrace the joys of skin wrinkles and gynecology appointments! This is the stuff life is made of, and in this stuff, God is here too.
I mean, generally speaking, there is no such thing as a "female Messiah figure." And given that Christ was not imperfect, Barbie's desire to be "imperfect" really doesn't connect with the Incarnation in the slightest.
This is great - thank you for writing it!