What the Barbie Movie Taught Me About Existential Panic
6:30 p.m. on a Saturday night.
5 years old in pink t-shirts screaming at each other as they run around the dark, narrow theater.
The smell of stale popcorn wafting through the ever-so-slightly-must of the 80s bowling-alley-inspired floor.
The sound of teenagers slurping overpriced ICEES and slamming back Sour-Patch-Kids as they whisper the latest High School Gossip to their friends.
And me, sitting quietly in the Theater, dumbfounded at the awful movie trailers rolling that have gone one for WAY too long.
“What the hell happened to Cinema? What did I just watch”, I whisper to my Mom as she munches on a fistful of popcorn.
She laughs and digs back into the popcorn.
Finally, the lights dim as the tacky AMC Nicole Kidman starts rolling.
A few minutes later, I’m greeted by the sight of little girls playing with Dolls as the Barbie intro starts.
And an hour and a half later, after a few genuine laughs, silent moments with my eyes glued to the screen, and one bucket of popcorn later, I’m left satisfied. In fact, I am in awe.
I was not expecting much from this Barbie movie. I only heard about it a month or two before its release, and in complete honesty, I was WAY more fascinated by Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan(which was fantastic btw, but I’ll dig deeper into Nolan later). Margot Robbie as the lead seemed pretty safe, but I’d never really seen her in action. I loved Ryan Gosling in La La Land and Blade Runner 2049, but his role as Ken didn’t seem that interesting in this movie(boy, was I wrong). And overall, I saw the public hype of the movie being all about dressing up in pink, taking your family to see the movie, screaming children in theaters, and living happily ever after!
I was most definitely wrong.
This was not a kid’s movie by any means.
At least in my opinion, it wasn’t.
So many themes were covered, ranging from identity, existentialism and the meaning of life, gender roles, social dynamics, patriarchy, autonomy and self-determination, etc. And these are the themes I LOVE talking about, so surprise, surprise, here we are.
The major moment that stuck out to me was when America Ferrera(Gloria, one of the real-life characters) talks to Barbie(Margot Robbie) about the fact that life is hard. Life changes. Barbie doesn’t want things to change, but despite that, they do.
And this brings out the major theme that connects Buddhism, Absurdism(Camus’ philosophy), and the Barbie movie.
Life changes.
Whether we want it or not.
Shit happens, regardless of how we feel.
And either we can drop into Existential Panic, diving into a pit of despair, anxiety, hopelessness, and depression(like what Barbie did), or we can flow.
We don’t have to fight the inevitable changes in life.
Barbie tried to fight her changing identity. The onset of cellulite and flat feed caused a massive rift in who she thought she was, completely disrupting her social role and place in society as Stereotypical, pretty-blonde Barbie. This led her down a journey of self-discovery and self-determination, ultimately realizing that she can liberate herself from societal expectations and flow with the natural changes of life, taking on new identities and social roles that SHE chooses to take on.
I’m not saying society is a plague. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have social roles. But what I am saying is those social roles can change. And we can be that change. We can flow into that change. We can be the ones who change it.
Absurdism, popularized by Albert Camus, posits that humans suffer. The Existentialists, like Jean-Paul Sartre, claims that humans must make meaning for their suffering, an idea popularized in The Matrix. Absurdists take this one step further than the Existentialists, claiming that maybe humans don’t need to make meaning from suffering, and instead, can simply embrace it. Simply let it be. We don’t need to fight against it by creating meaning from suffering — we can simply allow ourselves to exist with the inevitable suffering and flow of life.
And I believe that is what Barbie is getting at here.
We don’t need to fight suffering. We don’t need to fall into existential panic as soon as our identity is uprooted. We can flow with the change and just let it be.
I truly enjoyed the Barbie movie, and if you haven’t seen it yet, go. You won’t regret it.
THANK you for reading, you’re the best, and I love you oh so dearly.
Stay curious :)
