‘Barbie’ is About Growing Up
It is messy but universally resonant.
There is a reason that the coming-of-age story is universally resonant across centuries and cultures. We were all young children at one point and have all shared the experience of growing up and entering the so-called “real world”.
The recently released Barbie movie has ignited such a firestorm of energy, excitement, and acceptance that has made it the movie event of this generation. And not just for its high-flying fun and rambunctious entertainment value but also for its emotional core.
I’ve heard many movie-goers express how this film moved them, and it moved me too. There are several key storylines that are anchored in the coming-of-age narrative that resonates emotionally with broad audiences.
Let’s explore two of these further.
Note: spoilers for Barbie ahead.
Barbie Reckons with Complex Emotions
Our primary protagonist, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie), begins the movie in Barbie Land. She is carefree, satisfied, and content. We also see how these are the result of thriving in a carefully constructed environment made for her and carefully curated for her needs.
In many ways, her childlike innocence is a product of her sheltered environment that protects her from exposure to rejection, complexity, and difficult experiences.
Soon, Barbie is drawn into a grand adventure, where she must go through the portal into the “real world,” reflective of our current human physical world today. As with many classic coming-of-age stories, there is a moment of being pushed out of your comfort zone where one is tested, faces challenges, and must grapple with one’s sense of identity that has been entirely shaken.
Barbie faces these experiences, including the complex emotions that come with these challenging hurdles. She experiences rejection, anxiety, and shame. Much like a child growing up and experiencing these new emotions for the first time, Barbie is ushered out of her safety and innocence into self-awareness and maturity.
Instead of Barbie following in the steps of thinly constructed Disney princesses of the past, she charts her own course. The story arc in Barbie has our protagonist truly wrestle with these difficult emotions, and it anchors the emotional core of the movie. She is incredibly relatable.
We, as the viewers, are able to feel connected to her because she is faced with these difficult coming-of-age experiences and chooses to faithfully engage with them.
Ken Realizes Self-Worth
In a similar vein, Ken’s (Ryan Gosling) story arc is a metaphorical representation of learning, recognizing, and then uprooting false senses of identity in order to fully realize your sense of self-worth.
Just like Barbie, Ken is brought out of the safety of Barbie Land and into the real world. Like a young child observing their surroundings, Ken also observes his new environment in the real world. He observes expressions of the patriarchal systems established and learned behaviors associated with hyper-masculinity.
Soon, he falsely begins to believe that these expressions of power give him a sense of identity, one that he never felt secure in during his time in Barbie Land because he was defined in relationship to Barbie.
Ken’s character growth is ignited when he is finally stripped of his hyper-masculine expressions of power and identity. By the end of the film, Barbie helps him recognize his desire for significance and articulate his establishment of identity outside of these false sources of self-worth.
It is a comical scene, but his new, fully realized truth, “I am Kenough,” which he proudly wears on his tie-dyed sweatshirt, is a declaration of his own self-actualization.
Once again, the audience is able to emotionally connect to Ken by seeing bits of ourselves in the journey of rooting our identity in something beyond our relationships, accomplishments, or power given by society or organizations. His winding journey to this redefinition of his identity and self-worth is universal, and it makes him human to us.
In both Barbie's and Ken’s stories, we are able to see ourselves in them. And this makes them more than just plastic dolls, but emotionally dynamic humans that are not so different from us. We, too, have experienced these same feelings and experiences growing up from childhood and still even now.
Barbie makes us feel seen and connected, encouraging us to lean into those complex emotions and that we are “Kenough,” too.
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