Barbie

In The Wizard of Oz (1939), Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy at the end of the film that it had been within her power to go home to Auntie Em’s farm in Kansas at any time, simply by clicking the heels of her ruby shoes thrice together. At the end of Barbie (2023), Ruth, who created the Barbie and Ken dolls, tells the traditional Barbie that she can become human herself simply by choosing to feel, and thus to live. The Witch and Ruth occupy similar roles, as do Dorothy and Barbie. But whereas Dorothy is trying to get back to the home she had known and now appreciates from faraway Oz, Barbie is trying to get to what she was made for—something qualitatively different than not being alive. Barbie’s plight is existential, and she discovers that the root of her identity transcends the feminist agenda. As home transcends ideology, what a person is made for transcends even home. Put another way, home is ultimately in being who one really is, hence being transcends location.

Many people who see Barbie undoubtedly fixate on the battle of the sexes between the Barbies and Ken, but I submit that as ideologically titillating as that ideological fix is, the tension between the humans and the dolls is more fundamental. The CEO of Mattel is motivated to close the opening that Barbie had opened between the land of the dolls and the “real” world. Indeed, Barbie does not view herself as real precisely because she cannot feel and is thus not alive. Being something that people pay for is to be of less reality than is someone who is alive and can feel, and thus be happy. To be—i.e., to exist—as what she was made for is not a simple matter with an easy answer for the traditional Barbie, unlike the other dolls. It is only after she has won the battle of the sexes in Barbieland that she goes beyond her gender identity as a woman to focus on discovering her more fundamental identity. It is only at that point that the film becomes sentimental.

In a kind, motherly tone that resembles that of Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, Ruth reveals to Barbie that it is no surprise that the doll is not sure whether she had been made to be a doll or human because Ruth made her open-ended, unlike the other dolls. We too are open-ended, though not with the extent of open-ended freedom of an uncircumscribed horizon that Sartre supposes in his existentialism. Even for an atheist, a person’s upbringing and the culture in which a person is raised detract from complete openness and thus freedom in one’s choices. One’s biology too constrains freedom; aging teaches us this vital lesson. To Barbie, biology is definitely salient in her decision to become human; once she has willed herself to become human and is in Los Angeles, she heads to a gynecologist, for, unlike human women, female dolls do not have vaginas.  Being human rather than a doll involves more than having feeling.

In “being made for” something, it is natural to think in terms of the purpose for which a person was created. Theists believe that a Creator instills in everyone a purpose. In the film, Ruth, a human being, created Barbie and left the doll’s purpose open-ended because Ruth “put some of” her own daughter in that Barbie. Having a purpose, however, can also be viewed as a human construction used to give an ex post facto meaning to what a person (or doll) has discovered to be one’s essence. Hence Sartre claimed that existence precedes essence.

I submit that a person’s biological, psychological, and spiritual makeup gets at what a person “is made for.” Einstein’s brain was “made for” physics—meaning that his brain was particularly well-suited to thinking (e.g. thought experiments) in that field. In coming up with his theories of relativity, he may have said to himself, I was made to do this. “Purpose” could be thought about later, for the aptitude of his mind in particular for physics above all other fields is the key here.

Being a writer was among the last things I thought I was made for, given that the neurological mechanism that fuses both eyes on the same object has never been operative in my brain. Even being a scholar has seemed like something I was not made for. Even if a love for words, ideas, and reasoning reveals what I was made for—in terms of happiness even more than ability—I have wondered whether I have never seen the passion I was made for; such a passion, such as a person says to oneself, I can’t believe someone is paying me to do this, presumably does not suffer from any biological impediments, and so excellence as well as happiness cohere. If only a Glenda or Ruth would say to me that the answer has been right in front of me all along and all I need to do is recognize it—to see it.  In the process in which my brain will die, perhaps I’ll hallucinate a benevolent figure comforting me that I had indeed been made for thinking and writing after all and that my handicap actually made them so. For now, I must admit to wondering if there isn’t something else, something more intrinsic to me, hence the thing I was “made for.” But I am guilty here of reducing essence to function—of thinking about whether there is something I am better at than writing and research because of how I am biologically, psychologically, and spiritually constituted, or “made.”

Barbie decides what she really is. She has transcended functionality by convincing the other female dolls that their innate functions do not reduce to serving Ken dolls. Once she has solved that problem, she finds that she is still in a quandary—still unsettled—for what she was made for goes beyond functions. Beyond even discovering what your passion is lies discovering who you are. Barbie and The Wizard of Oz converge in the mantra that a person is never at home until one is comfortable in one’s own skin. Interestingly, the camera immediately goes to a close-up of Barbie’s now-perspiring skin on her upper chest to show that she has decided to become human. That she had lost the ability to float down to her car and that she had become flat-footed indicate that being a doll was no longer working out for her—meaning that she was really made to become human. Her freedom was circumscribed in that she really couldn’t return to being a doll (whereas Dorothy could return back to the farm in The Wizard of Oz). To be fully alive, and thus happy, is what each of us were “made for,” whether by God or that of the natural sciences. This may turn out to be a false-dichotomy.

To be fully alive is to relish feeling as an end in itself. Rather than keeping up with the Jones, being fully alive is to be at home in one’s own skin. This is more fundamental, and thus more important than discovering the skills at which one excels and one’s proper role in society. Barbie as a movie goes beyond its surrounding marketing campaign and even the salience of the ideology of feminism, for at the end, the film “arrives” at the human condition itself and only does the film come alive in terms of sentiments.

There is no wizard to tell Barbie, as he tells the Tin Man, who wants a heart, “You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable,” though I don’t think this warning would change Barbie’s mind. Had I been a contributing screenwriter of Barbie,  Ruth would also quote the Wizard’s next line to the Tin Man: “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” Essentially, the message would be that Barbie already has a heart, and that to become human all she has to do is realize that she had indeed been loved. Gloria, the human mother who, with her daughter, accompanies Barbie back to Barbieland, shows love in trying to relieve Barbie’s unhappiness, for Barbie has lost her ease as a doll and "Barbieland" to the Kens. Because Barbie is crying at the time, her existential angst running deeper than her shock in seeing the other Barbies serving the Kens, we can infer that she has feelings, and is thus "real" and human even though she doesn't realize the extent of her transition by then. Even the other Barbies and the original Ken display a slight, or muted, sentimentality when they are waving goodbye to Barbie as she walks off with Ruth, never to return to Barbieland. Therefore, Barbie’s heart can be inferred from not only from the fact that she is crying when Gloria tries to cheer her up with a feminist speech and how kind Barbie is to the other Barbies and even to the original Ken during and after the battle over Barbieland, but also how much she has been loved (by humans) and thanked by the dolls.

Pardoxically, Barbie has no freedom in so far as she transitions in Barbieland; her freedom comes once Ruth has revealed that Barbie need only to will to be human. So there is evidence of teleology in the transition, for Barbie has no control over no longer being able to float and reverse becoming flatfooted, and of freewill in choosing whether to make the transition definitive by being and living with humans or resist it by remaining in Barbieland, albeit in a compromised condition. Theists can point to Ruth and the transition that takes place in Barbieland, and humanists can point to the power that Barbie herself has merely from a realization. Only after Dorothy realizes that she could have left Oz at any time can she leave Oz. Similarly, only after Barbie realizes that she has only to will herself to be human can she leave Barbieland for good.