Barbie, one of the few movies directly about Death Anxiety and Thanatophobia.
That was not a sentence I expected to write, but here we are.
If you haven’t already seen Barbie, I highly recommend it. It is a story about Existing, and what it means to Exist.
Barbie is an Idea. In this way, Barbie is strangely immortal, but she begins to have thoughts about Death, Mortality, and what Life Means. Her journey throughout the movie is to find out who she Is.
She wants to be Stereotypical Barbie. Pretty, blonde, partying every night, empowering women, and living her best pink life, day after day. She says it in the movie: she never wanted change.
We can see this just by looking at the way we’ve taken and reframed Grimm Fairytales, Ancient Greek Myths – hell, even the way we try to reframe and reinvent superheroes! Change is our only true constant, and so, change came from the Idea of Barbie.
At the end of the movie, Barbie is given a choice: stay an Idea Without End – or become Human.
This is a story that, perhaps, doesn’t celebrate death…but it certainly accepts it in an indirect fashion, because not only does Barbie pick to be human, she also makes one of her first actions as a human be a gynecological appointment.
I admit, I laughed my ass off at the ending line, because it was perfectly unexpected. Now that I’ve had time to sit with it, it’s also perfectly poignant.
Barbie’s first act is accepting her mortality and her change, by going to make sure she is healthy, by taking the steps to deal with the reality that she is now Mortal, and that means having parts of her that can get diseased.
Barbie’s first positive human interaction in this movie, is also notable. She has a lot of interactions with men who look at her lecherously, or when she tries to steal, but the first notable good one, is with an aged woman, that she calls beautiful – and the woman acknowledges it. It’s not a humbling compliment to a woman who’s forgotten her worth – it’s an uplifting one to a woman who knows it and can embrace it.
Yet again, Barbie flips expectations. We don’t expect this woman to know she’s beautiful, because our society doesn’t call old people beautiful. But there’s not a SINGLE hesitation from this woman in accepting it.
Barbie does many things right in opening a conversation about Life, about Death, about Aging, and about Making A Purpose.
Barbie doesn’t know what her purpose is, or what she’s going to do with her mortality, but she knows, she wants to live. She knows, she wants to have the opportunity to create, to change – and that is what humanity is. We all live a life where we can create things and make meaning. We are inventors, whether we just invent feelings in other people for a short period of time with our arts, invent smiles on the faces of our friends, invent airplanes for travel, or invent pet-steps up onto our beds because the ones in the store just weren’t working for our pet’s gait.
Nothing in the movie sugarcoats this, and it expresses death as a Fear. It doesn’t say death is desirable at any point, but it does say it has to be accepted in order to experience and enjoy life. Just as aging, if we are lucky, is experienced, and is a whole other realm of beauty and experience.
Barbie was not the movie I expected it to be, and I love it for that. I love how the longer I sit with the experience, the more I find that comforts me in the message it offers, as a movie about struggling with existence and meaning.
Yes, it genders this message – but it’s not a movie that is Pro-Women, Down With Men.
Ken’s struggles are highlighted, and the mistakes he makes trying to deal with those struggles, too. Ken learns, like Barbie learns, that he has to find out who he is, and who he wants to be, apart from Barbie. He struggles with the expectations of men, the way Barbie struggles with the expectations of women, and both of them come out ready to learn who they really are.
