Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part One

Polaroid Barbie camera (camera)

“And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years,”

-Revelation 20:2

Articles in this Series

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part One

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part Two

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I had the unfortunate time watching the Barbie Movie in cinemas. It was an experience roughly analogous to having a wet cat dragged slowly over the nape of your neck, given that the cat was also brandishing its claws. However, in writing this review (mainly consisting of theological and philosophical reflection), I do not seek to lament or explore the psychological intricacies of this feline sensation. I fully recognise that in writing a review for a movie as especially pink, vibrant, and tongue-in-cheek as this one, I risk the labels of “Puritanical”, “bigot”, “fun-hater”, or other fallacious bullets contained in the liberal barrage. I will gladly accept the first: the Puritans were excellent theologians. I will deny the second and third while simultaneously wondering if those who utilise these terms have taken an elementary class in informal logical fallacies.

In the first section, I will briefly summarise of the plot of the movie (from my memory, so incomplete and perhaps inaccurate) and hopefully not risk the breach of any copyright laws. In the second section, I will seek to provide a theological framework from which we ought to approach our viewing of media.

The third and fourth sections will be in the next article. In the third section, I will critique the feminism permeating the Barbie movie, showing how it is perhaps more nuanced than expected, and provide some Biblical teaching against feminism. In the fourth section, I will evaluate the existentialism in the movie and provide the only alternative, namely the Biblical alternative. The conclusion, as the name suggests, will conclude. Let us proceed.

The Plot

After a scene I will describe in the next section, the movie begins in a matriarchal utopia named Barbieland. All the jobs, from construction to politics, are run by women, namely Barbies. The men, called Kens, lounge around, doing nothing much apart from seeking the attention of the Barbies. The main Ken (I will simply call him Ken) seeks happiness from the main character called Stereotypical Barbie (I will simply call her Barbie). But she rejects him in favour of independence. Eventually, Barbie has something akin to an existential crisis. She wakes up, devoid of the usual happiness accompanying her existence, and considers death. She also becomes flat-footed and loses some aspects of her ideal physique.

Barbie, after consulting with Weird Barbie realises, that this existential crisis and the physical problems stem from a peculiar relation between the real world and Barbieland. The humans who play with the Babies can influence the Barbies, apparently including the Barbies’ emotions. So, Weird Barbie informs Barbie that the only way to return to perfection is to journey to the real world.

Barbie, unexpectedly joined by Ken, travels to the real world: our world. She discovers that the reason for her sadness and existential crisis was not a tween girl (named Sasha) whom she had seen in a vision (sort of) but her overworked, stressed, unappreciated mother (named Gloria) who had retrieved one of her daughter’s Barbies and played with it. Barbie also realises that Barbies are unappreciated in the real world by girls, and instead of empowering girls, fosters unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, Ken discovers that the real world is patriarchal, which he finds great delight in because of its profound contrast to Barbieland. Because of the appearance of Barbie and Ken in the real world, there are complications with the Barbie manufacturer, Mattel, which attempts to contain the potential significant consequences.

After Barbie, Sasha, and Gloria evade the Mattel staff who are chasing them, they return to Barbieland in jubilation, with Barbie elated to show Sasha and Gloria the utopia. Unknown to Barbie, Ken had travelled back to Barbieland and informed the Kens of exaggeratedly patriarchal ideas, resulting in the Kens taking the Barbies’ houses and using them for masculine activities like boxing. The Barbies are brainwashed, becoming overly submissive and no longer being employed.

Barbie, Sasha, Gloria, and Weird Barbie all seek a solution to this problem, with Barbie falling into depression. Eventually, they realise that Gloria’s recounting women’s troubles is the key to liberation. With this information, they begin distracting individual Kens so that they can take the particular Barbie who was infatuated with him and reverse the brainwashing. They then manipulate the Kens’ pride and desire for female attention, causing them to fight each other so that they miss a voting period, hence being unable to enshrine patriarchy in the constitution.

Thus, the Barbies succeed. The Barbies realise they may have been too harsh on Ken and dolls like Weird Barbie. Barbie and Ken apologise to each other and realise their identities: Ken should have an autonomous identity apart from Barbie. Barbie is encouraged on her journey by Ruth Handler (the founder of Barbie), who conveys the idea that Barbie should seek her own destiny. Barbie eventually chooses to become a human and enter the real world. The story ends with her seeking a gynecologist appointment.

Neutrality, Rhetoric, and Boiling Imagination1

When Christians approach any form of media, we must remember that: there is no neutrality. In God’s universe, there is no “maverick molecule” and “not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!'”2. The Lordship and sovereignty of God is not some abstract proposition that has no bearing on our lives. When the early Christians refused to declare that Caesar was Lord and claimed Christ as Lord instead, their boldness and perseverance owed to their correct belief that it is a “profound political reality that Christ now occupies the supreme seat of cosmic authority”.3 As the Christians were turned into torches in Caesar’s garden, they realised that the knees of the men who persecuted them would one day, if they continued in their unbelief and hatred of God, be forced to bow (Phil. 2:10) and that their tongues would with utter fear proclaim the Lord of the people whom they had killed (Ac. 9:4; Phil. 2:11). This principle applies to our own time: there is no neutrality because the cosmos is saturated with the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Moreover, when we approach media, the creators of that media have governing presuppositions that constitute a worldview: ideas that they consider fundamental and integral to reality. These ideas form a framework or lens through which they view the world.4 If the media say that they aim at neutrality and encourage critical thinking, then this is a presupposition of neutrality, which the Lordship of Christ precludes. These presuppositions range from Christian media like C. S. Lewis’ brilliantly and incandescently creative Chronicles of Narnia series to the absurdist and existentialist musings of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, which ruminates on the “benign indifference” of the universe.5

Nor are these presuppositions as explicitly manifested as in Camus’ writings. These fundamental assumptions are found lurking in music anywhere from Moana’s destiny-pursuing and family-eschewing How Far I’ll Go where the “edge of the water”6 could be rephrased to the “edge of the existentialist abyss”, to Taylor Swift’s illicit affairs, which, well, romanticises illicit affairs and promotes a “dwindling, mercurial high” over the immutable, joy-giving commands of God7, to the Eastern philosophical resonations of The Beatles’ Across the Universe, to Death Cab for Cutie’s I Will Follow You Into the Dark, a song replete with a lovestruck eschatological murkiness. Presuppositions are also found in postmodern artwork like Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, a banana taped to a white wall, or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a signed porcelain urinal. Postmodernism considers metanarratives like the objectivity of beauty and its rootedness in the character of God as nothing. They must be fun at parties.

These non-neutral presuppositions are conveyed powerfully through rhetoric, which Aristotle distinguished into logos, ethos, and pathos, Greek terms meaning usage of facts, appeal to respectable character or personal trustworthiness, and appeal to emotion, respectively8. I want to dwell briefly on pathos for this review. First, we must distinguish between pathos and argumentum ad passiones9, which, in its fallacious sense, is an argument appealing to emotion instead of facts. The former used in its proper context is legitimate: Jesus, when He calls restless sinners, appeals to their restlessness and burdensomeness (Matt. 11:28-30). But his call is not a fallacious, groundless appeal to emotion because it is based on the bedrock truth of what He did (1 Cor. 15:17, etc.). Christians should not hesitate to use a sanctified pathos, as I will address in a paragraph. We obviously should not use logical fallacies. But this means that both pathos and argumentum ad passiones can likewise be used by unbelievers to advance non-Christian presuppositions.

These previous paragraphs concerning a Biblical methodological approach build up to a crescendo. Schaeffer wonderfully says: “The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God’s world because God made us to be creative.”10 If it is true that there is no neutrality and that all media conveys presuppositions and a fundamental way of looking at the world, and if it is true that such conveying can be done in a rhetorically appealing way, then those truths mandate the Christian use of the imagination in an apologetical way.11

When we conduct apologetics and reason with unbelievers, our goal should not be to merely present propositions but the beautiful, life-sustaining God (Ac. 17:28) whom they point to. If evangelicalism is but a barren landscape of bitter interdenominational dissent, saccharine sentimentalism, and ivory tower intellectualism, then this lack of vibrancy may indicate that we do not really believe in the Christian worldview and its unifying, God-glorifying effect. If Christians proclaim their worldview as beautiful and provide no evidence that it is, then it is no wonder that people take up Buddhism with its glistening statues or Islam with its resplendent architecture. At least the people of other religions have souls.

This crescendo also means that we are to be a people of castles, dragons, paintings, princesses, and poetry. We are to recognise that the Truth and the eternal Word took on flesh (Jn. 1:14), situating Himself within space and time, placing Himself in the Biblical story and that His life is recounted to us in Greek words by God the Holy Spirit, the master storyteller (2 Pet. 1:21). And unlike the secularists when our children look up at us after we finish a story (whether it be the Gospel of Mark or Narnia) with a happy discontent and ask “Is that the end?” we can shake our heads vociferously and say “No, certainly not, God forbid. It is only the beginning”.

There is more: when Lewis told his godchild, “But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”12 I do not believe he was merely referring to the nostalgia for childhood stories that adults may experience. Rather, he may have been grasping at a more profound point: the Biblical message is “kill the dragon, get the girl.”13 The knight (Rev. 19:11) triumphs over the dragon (Rev. 20:2) and saves His bride (Rev. 19:7). We are to be a people of stories because our religion was conveyed to us in the form of a grand story. And try though the postmodernists might, this story is a metanarrative that arches over eternity past (Eph. 1:4) and eternity future (Rev. 21-22). We read fairytales because they embody a truth that is manifested in the Biblical narrative: there are bad guys, but the good ultimately triumphs. We should not read fairytales merely because they are cute.

This reality of the grand Biblical story is not one that is separated from our experience. We are not to live our lives as functional naturalists but we ought to realise that our reality is one swathed in a resplendent supernaturalism and that the song of the Lion that once rang out in the nothingness to create ex nihilo resounds still in His providence today (Ac. 17:28; Heb. 11:3).14 We are not to think that the cosmic battle described by Paul (Eph. 6:10-20) is one relegated to a bygone era, but we are to acknowledge the demonic elements that pervade our existence, considering with a sombre joy the task that lies before us and the panoply that are we to put on (Eph. 6:13-20), gazing forward to the eschatological hope of the Lamb’s supper (Rev. 19:6-10) where we will discard our war-worn armour, for we will have fine linen instead (Rev. 19:8).

Footnotes

  1. The phrase boiling imagination comes from Francis Schaeffer’s He is There and He is not Silent, where he says: “The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God’s world because God made us to be creative.”
  2. The first quote comes from R. C. Sproul, the second from Abraham Kuyper.
  3. This quote comes from R. C. Sproul’s What is Reformed Theology?
  4. I am deeply indebted to Greg Bahnsen for this presuppositionalist notion, and for Ethan Aloiai who first taught these ideas to me in such a lucid manner.
  5. The quote comes from Albert Camus’ The Stranger. The French may be translated differently.
  6. The quote comes from Alessia Cara’s How Far I’ll Go, which is coincidentally what I wonder when my car is on low fuel.
  7. The quote comes from Taylor Swift’s illicit affairs. I think I am also the first person to quote Taylor Swift on this site. I promise I do not listen to her songs. In response to any accusations to the contrary, I will simply shake them off.
  8. Greek terms for “logic”, “character”, “emotion”, or something like that. It is all Greek to me.
  9. Latin term for “argument to passions”, literally.
  10. The quote comes from Francis Schaffer’s He Is There and He Is Not Silent.
  11. An innovative work on this topic is Justin Bailey’s Reimagining Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age. I do not support everything in the book simply because I do not understand some of it.
  12. This quote comes from the dedication of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
  13. This quote comes from Douglas Wilson.
  14. The image of the Lion’s song comes from The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis. “ex nihilo” means out of nothing, referring to the Christian doctrine of Creation ex nihilo, or Creation out nothing.