Barbie (2023) As The Cure For Existential Dread
Or, on the paradox of being human.
(This essay contains spoilers for Barbie (2023))
When I was in high school, I loved Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Walking Around’. There are a lot of English translations, but I always translated that famous first line as ‘It turns out I’m tired of being a person.” Because, to be frank, I was. I was exhausted by the constant dread that followed me, the fear, the fact that I was growing up and would have to take care of myself in what I then saw as a dying world. I didn’t want to die with it, but I was tired of it all. Sixteen and existentially overwhelmed.
Never in a million years would that sixteen year old think that I would love the corporate advertisement of pink that is Barbie (2023). And yet, I do. Because it addresses the same fears that I had then, that I still have, but with a level of warmth and nuance that frames being a person not as something to be afraid of, or even something to aspire to, but as something you get to be.
The first moment when Barbie really got to me is when she’s sitting at a bus stop. She’s just experienced the memories of a mother and daughter playing with her, and she’s looking out at the world. She sees couples. She sees people fighting and laughing and crying alone. She sees here the same world that’s in ‘Walking Around’. But she doesn’t fight it or hate it like Neruda does. She’s not tired of it. In the old lady next to her at the bus stop, she sees beauty. Like a child, she can’t help but to comment on it. And instead of dismissing her, the woman responds “I know it.”
This Barbie thought about death before she was even able to experience it. But until that moment, she hadn’t thought about life. But she sees the beauty of it. And she gets it.
Barbie sees the angst of being a human. The paradox of womanhood that follows even the most privileged of us around. And still, she chooses it. She chooses to be human not because she has any grand ideas or to do good, or to save us from sexism, but because she wants to experience life as a person, rather than an idea.
Barbie stops being a doll when she learns nuance. The other Barbies stop being under the patriarchy when they understand the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under it. The Barbie who has seen the outside world’s dissonance goes further: it’s between being a person and an idea, a woman and an object, an adult and a child. Barbie’s teenagehood is an impossibility.
But it’s the impossibility of being alive. Even as her chest rises and falls with her first breaths of womanhood, she still contains object-ness. To Ruth Handler, she is a daughter, an idea, a woman. Even in the real world, she cannot escape this objectification. But now her objectification is something she can create, rather than let passively be placed on her. Barbie puts on her own womanhood one pant leg at a time, and that’s what makes her human.
After Barbie sees the human world, she can’t go back to the childlike ignorance of Barbieland, no matter how much she initially wanted to. She has to face the fact that she is a woman, an adult, a human. And yet despite the fear and sadness that lie in this path, these imperfections, and the fact that has no other choice to make, she doesn’t passively go along with it. She chooses it. She wants it. She asks for it. And although the movie makes it clear that this is something she’s always had the power to be, and that it doesn’t have to be given, Barbie’s witnessing of humanity in Ruth’s warning proves that this is still a choice that she makes to become one. It is so easy to take being a person for granted — what else would we be? — but Barbie’s first breaths as one remind me how lucky I feel to be alive. And maybe I can also choose to be a person rather than just go along with it.
