Life in Plastic
I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world. Life in plastic. It’s fantastic.
I’m one of many for whom the Barbie title that took theaters by storm in July elicits both the lyrics to the Aqua hit song as well as waves of nostalgia painted with scenes in our playroom in which the sitcom-like lives of our Barbies played out as real as anything my sister and I knew in our own lives. I grew up with an assortment of dolls ranging from a baby doll named Greg (random choice, I know) to American Girl dolls; and my sister and I had a good number of Barbies in the mix. I had one named Mary, who was pretty normal, and another named Sparkly Hair. My naming skills have since improved. My sister and I didn’t have a Ken, but we used a GI Joe as our main love interest and created another guy out of the Barbie we deemed ugliest by cropping its hair and calling it Pete. Despite our efforts to provide another husband or boyfriend or whatever we’d intended with this makeover, Pete never had any luck with the ladies. Barbies were different from our other dolls, because unlike when we played with the baby dolls or American Girl dolls, my sister and I were absent from the play, acting as movers and vicarious directors rather than the mother figures we played with our other dolls.
This is a key element emphasized in the opening scene of Barbie, a strange depiction of drably dressed little girls engaged in play with their babydolls on a deserted shoreline. Upon the arrival of a godlike giant bathing suit clad Barbie, modeled after the 1959 original doll, the girls destroy their toy infants, pledging allegiance to this shiny new idol in their violence. It’s funny to watch a bespectacled child, who appears domestic and sweet on first impression, wield her doll by the foot like a certain Greek warrior, smashing the plastic thing to bits on another doll. Disturbing, but funny. And it accomplishes the message that Barbies are not meant to fit in our lives; they are other even in their reflection of our aspirations. Barbies are not designed to function as extensions of our current selves; they operate in a more theatrical sense: as a microcosm of the existence we imagine living out when we put them back into the Dream House or box that serves as a holding space until we next need them. In this way, the Barbies in our lives and in the movie serve a similar purpose: they act as windows and mirrors, providing both a glimpse into a story other than our own and a reflection of truths and conflicts present in ourselves outside the theater or playrooms.
This concept of Barbie Land as an incredibly real illusion of our dream world got me thinking long before I finally arrived on the Barbie screen scene. I had zero expectations other than a desire to see Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie, both whom I have shameless crushes on, and an idea that the premise of the film might work for an essay, so I was easily won over. It’s weird and funny and looks fabulous from start to finish, and it reminds us to not take ourselves too seriously in the things that are really just plastic. Barbie Land is very much not real, a fact reflected in the opening montage in which Barbie mimes eating breakfast and taking a waterless shower. It’s life in plastic, and it’s fantastic. There is no shortage of “Hi, Barbie” and “Hi, Ken” as she makes her way to Malibu Beach, but that’s about the extent of the smiling interaction we see between the dolls. It all looks perfect, except for Ken’s failed attempt to ride a wave, but even his injury heals instantly in the aftermath. This is the ideal existence we try to reach in our substance use; we want effortless connection and perfection, and drinking has this deceptive promise of pain erasure that also rockets us into an illusion of connection without any of the messiness of failure.
Living in Barbie Land is akin to living a life with alcohol at the center. In this world it’s easy to fall under the spell of thinking that everything is fine, that what we’re doing is no different from what anyone else is doing. Problems may exist, but they become more distant and seemingly fathomable the deeper into the influence of alcohol you go. It’s easy to just dance in the same line of shiny pretty people because at least we’re included in that line, regardless of what we really feel. Emotions and tears don’t exist. Real experiences don’t exist, even if they’re played out in perfect mimicry of the real thing. When we let alcohol take over, we go through the motions of living in Barbie Land, and it looks pink and pretty in our blurred vision. It may even be pink and pretty at first. I think that the vision of Barbie Land in the opening scenes of Barbie illustrate the good feelings we associate with drinking that we learned early in our relationship with the substance. We lived in the lavender haze - a phrase I can thank our girl Taylor for knowing - of a new attraction to something that took us outside ourselves and told us the world could be as shiny and pain free as we needed it to be so long as we kept that something in use. That is, until we crossed the line into alcohol being something we needed to keep the darkness at bay. This experience is a kind of slow awakening into the reality that even alcohol, even Barbie Land, can’t erase the reality of our issues or the extent to which we’ve slipped into a relationship beyond our control to escape. Even if so many things are going wrong in reality, the glasses that alcohol puts over our eyes lead us to believe otherwise for a short time. We want this illusion, this Barbie Land to be real, but it’s not. The movie lets us see just how plastic it all is. If it looks facetious and sounds scripted, it’s because it is.
Barbie’s awakening from the haze comes in stages. She knows something is wrong when she shares the thought “Do you guys ever think about death?” mid dance party at her Dream House. The questions brings a screeching halt to the good times, and though she brushes it off for her fellow Barbies, the thought of death is followed by a sequence of “malfunctions” the next day: bad breath, burnt toast, a fall from her roof, and gag-inducing flat feet. A visit to Weird Barbie, played by Kate McKinnon, is in order to address the issue. McKinnon’s Barbie, whose look was inspired by that of David Bowie, is the Barbie whose eccentric look and erratic splits are the physical tolls of being played with too roughly and too much. Despite her crazed appearance, Weird Barbie has accumulated the wisdom to guide the better off dolls when issues arise in their plastic-perfect lives. She’s like the token guy/lady at AA meetings who’s been through every wild situation you imagine. Nothing surprises him, and he’s got something to say for every issue.
Weird Barbie , who helpfully reveals that cellulite is also a scary part of Barbie’s issue, deems it necessary for her to leave Barbie Land to journey to the real world in order to fix the problem. Otherwise, she can just stay in Barbie Land and pretend that nothing is wrong. She presents two shoes to Barbie as she explains her choice: a high heel for staying put or a Birkenstock for facing reality. Barbie is obviously uncomfortable and wants to choose the high heel. I’m team Birkenstock all the way, but I get her thought process completely. She’s in the distressing place where she knows she has a problem that can’t be denied any longer, but living with the problem is all she knows. She doesn’t want to live with the problem, but leaving something known for the unknown involves a great deal of fear and risk. She picks the high heel, but Weird Barbie informs her that she doesn’t really have a choice anyway, so the journey is a forced one. That’s the case sometimes for those of us who have been able to give up lives of addiction for recovery. It’s rarely an easy choice and sometimes isn’t even really a choice at first. It wasn’t my choice at first. Even though I wanted to be free and happy so badly, I had no clue how to get there and was crippled by failed attempts at having a life without something to ease the darkness. I needed someone else to take over responsibility for my choices for a bit, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Like Barbie, I needed a push.
Ken tags along with Barbie, and he brings his own blonde chaos into the real world. The two have very different experiences with reality because they each come with a unique kind of dysfunction. Barbie, who has departed a world in which she is the center of everything and the recipient of love and respect, feels self conscious and uncertain of the differences she observes. She tells Ken that she has “fear with no specific object.” This is the awful cloud of anxiety that descends when we no longer have the haze of alcohol to hide it. It’s always been there, and it hits with full force when our numbing agent is taken away. Barbie also experiences rejection for the first time when she tries to engage with Sasha, the girl she believes is responsible for playing with her and causing the malfunctions through her own real world struggles. Though Barbie approaches the girl believing “everyone loves me,” Sasha’s vicious diatribe against everything Barbie stands for quickly destroys that confidence. Barbie’s sense of self in Barbie Land is that everyone loves her because everyone is the same as her and there are no issues. That’s kind of how it can be with drinking. Drinking eliminates the normal inhibitions of self, giving a false sense of confidence and connection and letting us feel at ease with others. For a long time, I experienced crippling social anxiety as a result of untreated past trauma, and drinking seemed like a miraculous cure for it. I felt that I could talk to anyone without fear of judgment or being seen for the broken person I felt I was while sober and feeling. I masked that broken person with alcohol and felt that everyone around me must have seen a whole, happy person in the mask I put on. Without that mask, I feared I didn’t fit anywhere. Barbie experiences this sense of disconnect in the stares she receives and Sasha’s belittling tirade. She wants to retreat to Barbie Land, but that’s not an option. She’s forced to sit with herself and feel everything. That is, until Mattel shows up to talk business.
We should look at Ken for a minute before moving on with Barbie. I love Ken. Maybe because Ryan Gosling actually looks great in eyeliner and bleach blonde hair, or maybe because I relate a lot to certain parts of his character. He fits into the scheme of Barbie Land, but of all the dolls we’ve met thus far, he seems the most discontent with how things go there. He wants something more and thinks that something comes from his connection with Barbie, but he doesn’t even know what that is. He admits to Barbie early in the film that he doesn’t have any idea what boyfriends and girlfriends do even though the two are a couple. He longs for attention and love, but he doesn’t know what love really is. Though he tries to present this front that everything is great in his life, he’s really just a bit of a horse girl at heart who tries to define himself by the labels he mistakes for identity and craves the love and approval of others, in particular the one person he thinks can complete him.
When he finds himself in the real world and wanders off on his own while Barbie sits and thinks of a game plan, Ken realizes that being a man is actually a huge bonus and source of respect and attention there. He feels seen and accepted in a way he has not experienced in the world ruled by Barbies. Ken latches onto his perception that patriarchy is a place where all men can be successful and horses hold positions of power - he feels somehow that horses are extensions of the men who ride them and thus have a deep connection with him. He soon realizes that the real world is a bit more complicated than that, so he decides to return to Barbie Land with the better parts of what he has found.
Back in Barbie Land, the Ken who has turned the world run by women into a male dominated version of what it was before sheds light on the insecurities and false sense of accomplishment and connection that define the dolls existence. Even with the roles reversed - the Kens now at the center of all the action, and the Barbies catering to their stories - Barbie Land still operates on the belief that everything and everyone is just perfect so long as they accept the identities given to them as if they have chosen them of their own accord. The Kens accept the story offered to them by Gosling’s Ken, and the Barbies gladly let themselves become objects in the Kens’ horse-glorifying, macho regime. It is clear though that Ken’s attempt to revamp Barbie Land into Kendom stems from his deep insecurity and inability to find a secure sense of himself. Though the horses and powerful male figures in the real world sparked some hope in him, he still found himself unable to fit in there. He laments to Barbie that he wasn’t even able to beach - his main occupation in Barbie Land- since it requires actual swimming.
Loving horses is never a bad thing; they’re majestic, beautiful beasts. These other complexities, however, are unfortunately hallmark symptoms of many of us who suffer from substance abuse, which simultaneously medicates and intensifies a deep sense of insecurity, making us feel at sea even surrounded by others who are the same as us. Ken is one of many Kens, but doesn’t grasp the power to say, “I’m Ken” until he goes to a dark place and emerges with a more insightful understanding of his place in the world, at least in Barbie Land. Ken struggles to understand himself as an individual in a community because he defines himself for much of the movie as part of Barbie’s identity. As our narrator, Helen Mirren, informs us in the early scenes, Ken only has a good day in Barbie Land if Barbie looks at him.
What Ken finds in the real world is that everyone looks at him and that males (and horses) are glorified in a way he has never seen. This sparks a hope in him that he can have the titles, recognition and love that he craves. His efforts to share in the success of men in the real world and his later actions to create a world that emulates what he has seen in Barbie Land reflect the Tactic of Titles that many of us who suffer from addiction resort to in our need for connection. The theory behind this tactic involves building a resume of identity through accumulation of titles, achievements, possessions, etc. - any physical proof of an internal strength that draws attention thereby gives a sense of belonging in the recognition and admiration we misidentify as real connection. We’ve already seen that Ken is very title conscious. A big part of his identity includes his role as Barbie’s boyfriend, though he admits he’s not really sure what boyfriends and girlfriends do. This confession reveals that being a boyfriend isn’t important to him because he understands the nature of what this kind of relationship entails; rather he associates being a boyfriend with being part of something. It seems silly and childlike in the way that Ken articulates it, but he’s no different from any one of us who has ever said “I just wish I had a boyfriend” in a moment of darkness rather than pursuing a relationship because we genuinely wanted to spend more time with a specific person whom we felt real attraction to and connection with. A boyfriend or girlfriend means the security of someone choosing you, and it’s no crime to want that; but wishing for just anyone to fill that role stems from some sense of disconnection in us. When we need someone to complete us, we’re seeking a partner for the wrong reason and doing a disservice to both ourselves and our potential boyfriend/girlfriend. We’re not basing the relationship on real love and connection; rather, we’re placing on this other person the onus of defining ourselves in our inability to do so ourselves.
Ken’s insecurity and lack of self knowledge drive him to seek certainty in titles that others can recognize and know him by. We see this lack of awareness as he does the rounds in the real world, using his status as a man to justify his requests for jobs as a doctor, a businessman and a lifeguard. He lacks the credentials for these positions and definitely does not have the knowledge of what any of the roles entails, but he wants the respect and identity that accompany them. Back in Barbie Land, having successfully secured roles for himself and all the Kens as the alpha males of their society, Ken is clearly still unhappy. His state of discontent stems from the reality that he has not been driven by genuine passion, but rather by a misguided attempt to solve his sense of disconnection. The Tactic of Titles is recognition-based rather than founded in fulfillment.
Like Ken, I’ve become a culprit of this faulty mindset in many of my own pursuits, often without recognizing it. I love reading, running and school; these are pursuits in which I’ve engaged most of my life and today because I love them. However, when my conscious connection with myself, God and others was suffering, I let those pursuits become title seeking tactics when I expected them to feed that empty space in me or serve as proof that I was OK. I think that’s a large part of the reason I never felt proud of my success in school and didn’t believe I was a good runner. I had evidence that I was successful in both, but because the evidence lacked the sense of connection I craved, I felt that they just weren’t enough. I found myself slipping into that mindset with books too. I read because I love reading, but in the past few years I found myself counting the number of books I got through and becoming weirdly competitive about my number in comparison to what I heard other people I knew were reading. That mode of thinking, when it popped up, made the books into a statistic rather than a source of comfort. I had a rare moment of self awareness of the harm in that thinking at the beginning of COVID when I deleted Instagram because I was becoming a little too title conscious in my engagement with the app. When alcohol ruled my life, this sense of disconnect was at its strongest, so I signed up for races, spent hours on school assignments, logged my books, and waited for the sense of connection to stay with me longer than the fleeting relief that came with each small achievement. It didn’t, so my accomplishments meant nothing to me.
When Ken has actualized his vision of patriarchy in Barbie Land, he doesn’t get the sense of connection and wholeness he expected, so behind the double pair of sunglasses he dons to emanate coolness, he suffers even deeper loneliness and despair. In this suffering, he punishes Barbie - whom he blames as the source of this unhappiness for her failure to give him the love he thinks comes with being a boyfriend - by treating her in the way in which she treated him before: she is just part of his story now, existing in Kendom only if she can be his “long term, long distance, low commitment, casual girlfriend.” That title doesn’t appeal to her, and she finds herself without a Dream House, without a following, and without a title.
Subsequently, Barbie surfers a torture of her own making. Having made it back to Barbie Land with Sasha and Gloria, Sasha’s mother, Barbie finds that the anxiety, displacement and inferiority she experienced for the first time in the real world have followed her back to what once was her perfect world. Though she blames it on the role reversal wrought by Ken, this inability to escape herself reflects the same discontent we live with once we’ve witnessed the reality that we’ve chained ourselves to a curse rather than a cure despite our continued efforts to use alcohol or any other drug of choice medicinally. Once we know that alcohol is the problem responsible for so many of the issues in our lives, we’re stuck because it’s also the one constant source of relief we’ve learned that makes these issues survivable. Our Barbie Land has become Kendom, and we are not in charge.
The ease with which Barbie Land has become Kendom reflects the shallow basis on which Barbie Land existed in the first place. There was no deep sense of identity or conscious connection before or now. Though they share names and wear clothes that reflect their professions, they have little appreciation for their true selves and so don’t realize that they are using each other and only identifying each other by their socially accepted title and/or appearance. So long as they play the role deemed fitting for the agreed upon society, they think they must be happy or at least as close to happy as they can get. Their appearance based lifestyle reflects what it is to be functioning and successful on the surface while suffering in the bondage of addiction. They go through the motions of looking their part and engaging in activities that complement their new roles, but they’re doing it to fit in rather than to fulfill a deeper sense of self.
Barbie no longer has a part to play, so she sinks into a deep despair, collapsing and lying prostrate on the ground to wait out the pain she experiences; “this is the lowest I’ve ever been,” she moans. We’ve all been there on the rock bottom just clinging to the belief that everything bad will sort itself out if we just wallow. Barbie blames everyone but herself as the root of this feeling, saying that her life had been perfect before Gloria ruined it by taking her out of storage and making kind of morbid, weird sketches of Barbie ideas. Gloria and her daughter could just leave her to her pity party, and they almost do, but recognize that she is their doll and they have a responsibility to her. It’s a group effort to revive Barbie and each of the other Barbies who have been brainwashed into loving Ken’s patriarchy, and this aspect of their recovery reflects the importance of community in our recovery.
In order to thwart the Ken’s intention to vote Kendom into permanency, the Barbies concoct a scheme to turn the Kens against each other. They use their greatest weapon - the attention the Kens crave from them, and it’s a success. The Kens face off in a pink remix of Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (2004), which features Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom fighting on a beach in a war that’s all because Menelaus’s beautiful wife Helen left him for a Trojan prince. So the Malibu Beach War of the Kens is really the same as theTrojan War: a bunch of beautiful men fighting in the sand in a war they think is about a woman. Less beautiful men and more blood in Troy, but same idea. On Malibu Beach, the Kens’ fight turns into a sort of flash dance choreography that unites the two fronts, who realize they are all “just Ken” and fighting because of the same insecurities and desire to be seen.
They are finally able to identify with each other rather than compare, which only led to disconnect and resentment before. That’s a common saying in AA - identify don’t compare - when we hear each other’s stories. On one level, the stories we hear are all unique, but on a deeper level we share so much of the struggle and strength that we hear in a stranger who shares a piece of a larger experience. By choosing to identify rather than compare, we choose to connect and to see ourselves in others. When the Kens finally realize that sharing a name goes deeper than the surface level they’d seen before, they are able to break through the sense of isolation and resentment that had erected walls between them.
Barbie is also finally able to identify with Ken’s struggle in one of the final scenes. Ken still feels incapable of being “just Ken”; he understands himself by who he is to Barbie even if he’s made the step of recognizing that he’s not alone in feeling that way. Barbie advises him to figure out who he is without all the things - the beach, the relationship, the clothes - that he uses to define himself. She gives him the freedom to look at himself as a real person, as he is, and to accept himself as he is.
The Barbie Land we see at the end of the film is not perfect, but it is on the right track. The dolls are finally able to look at each other and at themselves and experience a deeper sense of love and belonging because they finally feel they are worth being loved and belonging as themselves. Barbie finally looks at herself and reflects that she doesn’t feel like Barbie anymore. She has seen too much to return to her pre-reality modus vivendi, and she no longer wants to pick the high heel over the Birkenstock. The ghost of Ruth Handler comes on scene in this moment and takes Barbie aside for a chat. Barbie finally sees what it means to be a real human with all the real emotions and experiences in this scene, which has become famous as the reason people in pink have been departing theaters everywhere in a mass exodus of tears. Barbie realizes that she has always had the power to find this connection in herself and that she can decide to live without the plastic of Barbie Land.
There’s a scene early in the movie in which Barbie sits in front of her mirror as she gets ready for her day. It’s a mirror made for Barbie Land, so there’s no glass and no reflection. The absence of a looking glass in this scene illustrates Barbie’s failure to look at herself honestly. She doesn’t see herself in the mirror because she can’t. This scene struck me because I’ve had that experience of looking at my reflection in the mirror and just not seeing myself. Whoever stared back at me from the glass looked like a stranger, someone who resembled me but just couldn’t be me either because I couldn’t bear that face to be mine or because I felt no physical reflection adequately reflected everything I felt but could not describe in me. It was a dark place that I’ve left behind by the grace of God, but it was a part of my story and unfortunately is a part of many stories.
The Barbie who really sees what it is to live is no longer looking in a mirror for her answer, but she sees more than she ever did in her glassless Barbie mirror. This is the conscious connection we find when we cultivate a deeper relationship with God, with ourselves, and with others. We can see in a way we couldn’t before. And we don’t just see a vision of ourselves; we see everyone, and we know we are in that everyone. Barbie finally sees herself as she was meant to be, and she chooses to recover that identity and live with it, flat feet and all.
