Barbie as eve: feminist theology and Greta Gerwig

ABSTRACT

Greta Gerwig (BBC 2023) pointed out on the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row Barbie’s retelling of the John Milton poem Paradise Lost. She argues Barbie and Ken’s expulsion from Barbie Land to the “real-world” LA echoes Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. While Gerwig delivered this reading of her film with a self-deprecating laugh, my analysis of the film takes it seriously as an intervention into feminist theology. The film reverses the Creation myth, with Ken/Adam as Barbie/Eve’s helpmeet. We are thus invited to consider the relationship between feminism and religion, a concern also explored in other films by Gerwig and representing her authorial presence. Barbie works toward, in a popular form, the “fully realised alterity” of a female imaginary and a female divine as philosophised by Luce Irigaray (Lucy Bolton 2011, 2). At the end of the film, Barbie’s visit to her gynaecologist is part of the process by which she acquires a soul. Irigaray helps us understand the connection between these events as she insists that the realm of the body, female genitalia and sexuality provide a way for women to think themselves other than phallocratically, including in their relation to the divine.

KEYWORDS:

• Barbie Gerwig Irigaray Eve Cavell

In her opening enthusiastic discussion of how excited she is to be interviewing Greta Gerwig and her co-scriptwriter Noah Baumbach about the process of scripting Barbie, Jane Campion (Warner Bros, 2023) says how much she admires the film, exclaiming “it’s really actually packed with philosophy but most importantly humour, wit, fun, invention, and it’s so much got your personal flavour, and it’s a blockbuster you know […] I can’t imagine how you did this!” Campion’s comment demonstrates why Barbie generated cultural buzz in the summer of 2023. It is doing something innovative within the world of conglomerate Hollywood blockbuster entertainment. It is making room for feminist philosophy that originates in the preoccupations of its co-scriptwriter and director Greta Gerwig that would normally be associated with the smaller budgets and more self-consciously “indie” style features that marked her earlier career as a scriptwriter—Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012) and Mistress America (Noah Baumbach, 2015)—and director—Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) and Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019). Through building on Gerwig’s established interests in religious institutions, spirituality, and female relations, Barbie offers a philosophical feminist perspective on women’s (self)creation. It celebrates female embodiment as a path toward vital self-knowledge, countering patriarchal and religious suspicion of female creativity.

Margot Robbie acquired the rights to produce a Barbie (2023) film from Mattel in 2018 via her production company LuckyChap. LuckyChap had a first look deal with Warner Bros., who distributed the film. LuckyChap managed to structure a production deal with these two global multinationals that enabled Gerwig and Baumbach to retain creative control (Abby Aguirre 2023). This strategy allows Barbie to exist both as a highly profitable commodity object based on IP and as an auteur-driven project exploring female consciousness and its becoming on screen. There is clearly a cultural hunger for representations that ponder what it is to grow up female in an accessible and entertaining format, to the extent that this combination proved so commercially attractive that “if Margot Robbie puts her name on something right now, it quickly gets frothy” (Lacey Rose and Lesley Goldberg 2023). Barbie has much in common, for example, with its fellow 2024 awards contender Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023). Both are visually inventive films in which scientifically engineered women with adult bodies but innocent brains leave a sheltered domain to encounter a patriarchal world in which sex and gender are more complicated than they had been lead to believe. These cinematic explorations occur in the context of a cultural formation in which dominant neoliberal feminist ideologies centre girls and women as self-crafting agentic individuals for whom sexism is either outmoded or something to be resiliently overcome (Wendy Brown 2005; Catherine Rottenberg 2014). These compete with increased feminist activist awareness of misogyny in the wake of the election of “pussy-grabbing” abuser Donald Trump as United States President in 2016 and the scandal surrounding Hollywood mogul and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein in 2017. Over a decade of austerity politics following global financial meltdown in 2008 has also undermined postfeminist emphasis on consumption as empowerment since austerity heightens precarity and fuels inequality (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018; Diane Negra and Hannah Hamad 2020).

If we take a longer perspective, it is not so unusual for the Hollywood industry to produce films that consider the deep ethical problems of women’s changing public status in the struggle for recognition and equality informed by feminism. In his landmark work on mid-twentieth century Hollywood, philosopher Stanley Cavell demonstrated that a sub-genre he identified, the comedy of remarriage, considers the new place of women in a society that has granted them suffrage and thus a role in the public sphere. Such a public change in the status of women resonates within the intimate sphere of marriage and how men and women are to relate to each other; Stanley Cavell (1981, 17) thus labels these films “primary data for the inner agenda of a culture.” The right of women to self-determination and the tensions between heterosexual romance and patriarchal norms are the burning issues that enter these films of the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, film is the “modern entertainment in which the distinction between the popular and the learned or the serious breaks down, encompassing both” (Cavell 1981, 251). What is at stake, claims Cavell (1981, 16), is the “creation of the new woman.” What the female characters from Cavell’s case studies and Gerwig’s Barbie share is a quest for self-knowledge. Cavell demonstrates that such a quest lends a popular form’s story great philosophical import. What does it mean to be a human woman? What does it mean to be made (anew) as a woman? Such questions take us back to the Genesis creation myth, which Cavell argues is worked through repeatedly in the films he studies, two of whose titles are extremely suggestive: The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949). Cavell’s films show us a woman’s creation, requiring that she submit to marriage so that her arrival at being “an autonomous human being” relies on her willingness to be educated by a man (1981, 84). Not surprisingly, as Catherine Wheatley (2019, 131) points out, feminist critics have criticised Cavell for the “patriarchal assumption” that women’s education depends on the man; she also reminds us that for Cavell, a central question of the comedies is the man’s fitness for such a task and why the woman chooses him for it. I inform my discussion of Barbie via this detour into Cavell’s philosophy because it illuminates philosophical investment in popular film and its interest in female becoming as an index of socio-cultural shifts in normative ideas about gender. The return to Cavell shows us what is most radical in Barbie as it reverses the genders of the Genesis myth. As Gerwig (quoted in Aguirre 2023) explains

Barbie was invented first […] Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.

It is through her reversal of the Genesis myth that Gerwig moves beyond the neoliberal context of her Barbie film to offer a new feminist take on the philosophical problem addressed by Cavell. How does woman come to understand herself as a fully-fledged autonomous human being? Barbie proposes this as an ontological and divine question. This is how we rescue Barbie from the charge it is nothing more than peak “neoliberal feminism” in which feminist politics are co-opted into securing consent, via the aura of emancipation, for the vast upward redistribution of wealth. Rather than Ken being the source of Barbie’s education, she educates Ken (“you have to figure out who you are without me. You’re not your girlfriend, you’re not your house, you’re not your mink […] you’re not even beach”) to set out on her own voyage of spiritual and existential self-discovery, leaving the Edenic Barbie Land. My comparison of Barbie Land to Eden is informed by Gerwig’s comment on BBC Radio 4’s art review programme Front Row that Barbie is influenced by her study of Medieval and Renaissance poetry, including John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Like Milton, Gerwig is also re-writing the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s exile from Paradise. At the end of Gerwig’s film, Eve/Barbie embraces her humanity and chooses this over the sterile perfection of a place where, as Gerwig explains (BBC Radio 4, 2023), there is “no poetry. Because what do you need metaphor for if everything is literally what it is?”

Barbie provides a new feminist theology in which Eve predates Adam, the expulsion from Eden/Barbie Land and awareness of mortality open Barbie’s eyes to beauty and possibility; Barbie meets her Creator, a woman. The film’s final line—Barbie announcing with great excitement “I’m here to see my gynaecologist!”—confirms that in this story of the creation of woman, female anatomy is a blessing rather than a curse. This is the opposite of the Biblical story, where Eve is told she will bring forth children in sorrow as punishment for her sinful transgression. Such a journey is resonant with the insights of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, especially as considered by Lucy Bolton as applicable to the representation of female consciousness in film. Irigaray calls for a state of genuine sexual difference—sexuate difference—that does not see women as lesser men but frees women from patriarchal imaginaries into their own fully realisable alterity. To reach this state, women need a female symbolic and a female imaginary, including a female divine.

Gerwig starts this process in Barbie by reversing the order of Genesis and reimagining a world in which the feminine principle holds sway over the masculine. This is a world that is primarily coloured through shades of pink; where Mount Rushmore has four female faces; where the President is female; where men exist as accessories rather than subjects. Barbie awakens in a perfect pink world in a heart shaped bed covered in a shiny satiny fabric trimmed with ruffles. As Maureen Turim (1984, 4–11) reminds us, scallop curved shapes such as a heart, shiny fabrics, and layers of ruffles turns women’s sexual organs into a fabric metaphor: in other words, Barbie’s bedroom is organised through yonic as opposed to phallic signifiers. This celebration of female anatomy and Barbie’s joyful acquisition of it is congruent with Irigaray’s explanation that female morphology, sensuality and sexuality can be a way for women to think of themselves other than phallocratically. For Irigaray, female genitalia exist in a haptic economy in which fissures and folds touch themselves, creating an autoeroticism unavailable to the male. She contends that this enables a female multiplicity and richness which, as Bolton (2011, 38) explains, is not the ground for an essentialising version of woman but allows women “to become who they are.” This idea echoes in the film’s many Barbies, each of whom are Barbie while also being different ethnicities, abilities, sizes, sexualities, and gender identities. The film plays with the enjoyable (im)possibility of the many Barbies (“hello Barbie!”) without worrying about the mechanics of how this might actually work, in a similar way to the dream logic of how one transfers between Barbie Land and Los Angeles. This ludic quality enables Barbie to manage a tension between Irigaray’s metaphorical deployment of female genitalia as a way to think positively about sexual difference and the lack of metaphor/genitalia available to the Barbies living in the literal world of Barbie Land.

The film starts with the creation of Barbie. She arrives as a fully-adult self in a black-and-white striped bathing suit. The live-action movie Barbie’s costume is a perfect replica of that worn by doll Barbie when she was launched in 1959. This sequence is an enjoyable parody of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Instead of apes smashing their primitive tools in front of a mysterious monolith, little girls smash up their baby dolls in front of a gigantic Barbie. Helen Mirren’s voiceover explains to us that the girls who played with these dolls “could only ever play at being mothers, which can be fun, at least for a while anyway, ask your mother.” As a doll whirligigs into the air and the camera follows it upwards, we cut not to the elegant waltz of Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” and a spaceship floating elegantly in space, but to a bubble-gum pink Barbie logo and the bouncy pop of Lizzo’s “Pink.” Mirren then talks us through the myriad tasks and responsibilities various Barbies (all Barbies!) have shouldered, an Irigarayan version of perpetual female becoming and unfolding. This is a becoming that never ever settles and coalesces into one singular form. Most notably, however, Barbie resists motherhood as a destination in the fantasy play she activates. (We might note in passing here the film’s fleeting reference to Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge, shown waving to Barbie and cradling her bump in the credit sequence; she is summarily dismissed by Mirren, who comments “let’s not show Midge […] a pregnant doll is just too weird”). This resistance echoes a matrophobic impulse in feminism where, as a future-oriented politics of transformation, feminism aspires to offer girls a different destiny than that of their mothers. Irigaray considers that the relationship between mothers and daughters needs to be brought out of silence and into representation and popular perceptions of mothers and daughters challenged. For Irigaray, part of how girls and women re-imagine their relations as mothers and daughters also relates to the divine, for man has God as his divine mirror; women lack such a mirror for becoming. She (1987, 62) explains that “if women have no God, they are unable either to communicate or commune with one another. They need, we need, an infinite if they are to share a little.”

Just as Irigaray argues that the response to the matrophobic impulse in feminism is to discover the female divine, so Gerwig’s Barbie’s journey to discovering her humanity and her soul occurs through two intersecting mother/daughter stories, in another echo of the unfolding intertwined logic of the Irigarayan narrative principle I trace here. Gerwig (Amazon Prime, 2023) explains in a short promo clip that “early on I decided that there was going to be a mother/daughter story in the movie, because listen, I am interested in mothers and daughters.” This is a recurrent authorial theme and makes Gerwig unusual for, as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (2011, 12) argues “in the more prestigious forms of film and primetime television, women have rarely existed as interesting characters once they become mothers, especially mothers of daughters.” She (2011, 13) singles out the multiple film adaptations of Little Women—also adapted by Gerwig in 2019—as almost unique for their cinematic portrayal of a “strong and beloved” Marmee.

The first mother/daughter story in Barbie is between Gloria, a disaffected Mattel employee, and her daughter, Sasha, who overcome their differences on the trip from Los Angeles back to Barbie Land. This is enfolded into Barbie’s own journey of self-discovery. As she rejects the film ending offered her by Mattel’s boss, Barbie’s Creator, Ruth Handler, steps forward and walks her through an empty soundstage. Handler explains to Barbie that she named her for her own daughter, Barbara, so we have Handler the mother and Barbie the doll/daughter as opposed to God the father and Adam the first man and Jesus the son. Handler advises Barbie that “humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever. Humans not so much. You know that right?” and Barbie replies “I do.” Barbie gains a real body, mortality, and by extension a soul, intimated through a whirling rush of images culled from amateur footage of various life events.

This direct conversation between Barbie and her maker picks up another pre-occupation of Gerwig’s, one that she explains in a limited-edition zine produced for indie production company A24 as merchandise promoting her earlier film, Lady Bird. Lady Saints and Mystics contains the following:

I am interested in what women do in spaces that are primarily male, in structures that are patriarchal. Most religions and religious institutions fall into this category. Priesthood and direct communion with God is usually reserved for men. But then every so often a woman, usually a young woman hears directly from God […] she is possessed by piercing truth and awe. (Gerwig quoted in A24 Shop, n.d.)

Gerwig tackles head-on here the problem of the divine for women: its association with the justification and perpetuation of patriarchal structures. In its playful reimagining of the Genesis myth and the expulsion from Paradise, Barbie continues the important strand within Gerwig’s films that aligns a fraught relationship between a daughter and a mother with a broader question about how girls and women might understand their relation to the divine. Images of Mary and Jesus are omnipresent within Western culture. We have relatively fewer positive images of mothers and daughters. In Irigaray’s philosophy, the woman always has a different relationship to the issue of creation than the man. She can create from her body; he can only create from outside of himself. The girl is more tied to others, a fact that leaves her more vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the other but also that enables connection. For Luce Irigaray (2009, 14), “sexuate belonging concerns not only the body but the soul.” Barbie undertakes an Irigarayan journey toward the feminine in the divine as she learns her difference from the other Barbies. For Irigaray (2009, 16), “maintaining an irreducible difference between the other and herself” is key to women searching out transcendent possibilities. Barbie transforms received patterns of symbolism to embrace her female embodiment positively. She thus reimagines Eve as a potential source of feminist becoming. Through crafting a film that engages with how girls and women might find a way to transcendence outside of patriarchal religious structures, Gerwig proposes a deeply humanist film that resists entire neoliberal incorporation even as she creates a blockbuster text.

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Fiona Handyside

Fiona Handyside is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the co-editor of International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (Palgrave, 2016) and the author of Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Cinema (Peter Lang, 2014) and Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood (I.B.Tauris, 2017). She is currently completing a project on girls’ hairstyles in contemporary screen cultures.