I Believe In Barbie

     When I was a kid, I loved to listen to music with the windows down in the car. This is a habit that I still have today–my fishbowl of a Nissan is always surrounded by a halo of sound waves. Once, when I was in preschool, I remember driving to Target with my mom. She needed to run some errands before we picked my sisters up from elementary school. We were rocking out to “Happy Day” by Jesus Culture. Eager to feel the rush of music in my veins, I called out to my mother from my car seat: “Mommy! Let’s roll down the windows so God can hear us!”

     My mother never shared my affinity for blaring music, but she sure does love her God. She lives her life for this love–it affects every decision she makes–and it’s something that she wanted her kids to have. All nine of us. We were raised on the extreme end of the spectrum of non-denominational Christianity. Church every Sunday and Wednesday, Bible time at least twice a day, and absolutely no music allowed in the car besides worship. Despite her best efforts, I grew up to be someone who loves secular music and pop culture.

     Ever since I was little, I have found solace in stories. I had all of these questions when I was growing up–questions about God and questions about myself–but in both our home and church questions led to scolding and a change in topic. I think that because my entire life I was told to live by one holy book, I started looking towards other books and stories to help fill in the gaps.

     Two summers ago, I attended opening night of the biggest film ever created by a woman: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. I wore roller skates to the premiere, wheeling into the theater with my Ken, a group of fellow Barbies, and high expectations. I was prepared for social commentary and technicolor cinematography, but I didn’t anticipate how deeply I would go on to resonate with the main character. I see so much of myself in Margot Robbie’s Barbie, and her journey runs parallel to mine. Just as she left Barbieland singing “Closer I am to Fine” at the top of her lungs, I stuck my hand out the window and let “Happy Day” wash over me.

     When we arrived at Target, my mom let me look at the toys. I knew she didn’t want to buy me anything that day, but there were still two hours until elementary pick-up began–we had time to kill. With eight older siblings, I had plenty of hand-me-downs to play with, and I wasn’t opposed to them, but Barbies were always my favorite. As we strolled hand-in-hand to the Barbie aisle, I couldn’t contain my excitement. The too-bright fluorescents and sterile linoleum faded into the background as my eyes quickly darted from Barbie to Barbie. I dropped my mother’s hand; all I could see was pink and plastic–a combination so synthetic it made me feel alive. About halfway down the aisle, I saw her: Mermaid Barbie. She looked just like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, one of the first films that fueled my love for stories.

     It isn’t just my love for media that my mom doesn’t understand, it’s my love in general. I’ve tried to boil it down to childhood trauma, teenage angst, and even astrological discrepancies, but we are just fundamentally different people. She was the kind of kid who would’ve been able to walk down that aisle without getting attached to a single doll. Sure, she would have looked, maybe even asked for one, but she doesn’t have intrinsic longing in her the way that I do. My mother is content with just one story, one Creator, one predestined plan for her life–I was never satisfied with that.

     Greta Gerwig had a similar upbringing to me, born to a Catholic mother much like my own. During press junket interviews, Gerwig spoke about how Barbie gives a matriarchal twist to the tales told in the Bible. She explained that Eve was originally created from the rib of Adam, but Barbie is the opposite. There is no Ken without Barbie–he was created to compliment her, the inverse of their biblical counterparts. After the film’s release, Gerwig affirmed that Barbie begins in Eden: “In the movie…when it starts, she’s in a world where there’s no aging or death or pain or shame or self-consciousness, and then she suddenly becomes self-conscious — that’s a really old story.”

     Most people who were raised religious end up like Barbie at some point–questioning if we want to stay in Eden. Recent studies show only 19% of people raised in religion have no religious affiliation as adults. I think the reason that number is so small is because leaving Eden is scary. Like Barbie, religious children were brought up to believe that our whole life exists in a specific context: we were created to be dolls, existing as vessels for God’s plan to unfold. We’re told that as long as we feel the right way and believe the right things, we’ll go to heaven and continue our playdate forever. For a lot of people, that works out. There’s nothing too different about them, nothing they can’t suppress for the sake of remaining devout. No one tells you what to do if you don’t fit into the mold that Mattel–or God–has prepared for you. As the dissonance between the ways mother and I love became more apparent, I questioned if I could still fit into her mold.

     When my mom told me that I couldn’t have Mermaid Barbie, I immediately burst into tears. She sighed in frustration–either with me for being an emotional little brat, or with herself for thinking we could come out the other side of the aisle unscathed.

     “Brycie,” she tried to take the box from me as I pulled it closer to my chest, “please don’t cry. I told you we couldn’t buy you any toys, we were just looking. When I tell you something like that I mean it, okay?”

     “Please,” I sniffled through my sobs. “I’ll be good for the rest of the night. I’ll be good forever, I promise. I love her, mommy. I can’t help it that I love her.”

     “Well, I love you. Can’t that be enough?”

     I knew there was a right answer to that question. I also knew I couldn’t say it without lying. Lying is a sin.

     She tried to take the doll again, but I held on even tighter.

     “Alright, why don’t I let you hold it while we get our groceries? You can play while we’re here, then we’re putting her back. We are not taking her home. Do you understand?”

     My breathing began to even out as I acquainted myself with this new reality. When you’re five, a trip around Target feels like it could be days. I hugged Mermaid Barbie closer to my chest, and we set off for the produce.

     As it turns out, that wouldn’t be the last time I cried over Barbie. One of my favorite parts of Gerwig’s film is just after Stereotypical Barbie arrives in the real world, straight out of Eden. She sits on a bench and tries to focus on her human, intuiting clues as to where she will be. After a montage of a daughter growing further from her mother, Barbie sheds her first tear: “That felt achy…but good.” As I shed my first tear in that theater, I felt achy, too.

     She takes a look around at the people in the park. She notices the joy, mirth, and life that’s all around her. As her gaze wanders, she also notices the pain: a couple fighting, a boy crying alone. Finally, she notices the old woman sitting next to her at the bus stop. A woman who has lived and learned, and without ever speaking, Barbie knows she has a good life.

     “You’re so beautiful.”

     “I know it!”

     I glanced down my row to see if any of my friends were crying, too. There were tears here and there, but no one seemed as impacted as me. Gerwig captured what it felt like when I joined the unsanctified world for the first time; when I realized the fantasy I’d been fed since birth–that I was lucky enough to be born into a family that believes, that my life would go by fast and I would go straight to heaven, that earth is the closest to hell I would ever get–it was all wrong. I knew it for years, but acknowledging it potentially meant hell for eternity. There is no forgiveness for those who choose to live secularly. Then I see people like the woman at the bus stop, who have sinned and made mistakes, but their humanity makes them beautiful. Their beauty does not exist in spite of pain, it exists because of it. I wanted that for myself.

     Before this scene, Barbie had been opposed to the idea of coming to the real world. However, when she observes this park–a picture of life all around her–she sees value in humanity for the first time, realizing this world might not be so bad. She wants to be more than a doll for someone else to play with. She wants to be someone who’s playing, too.

     As we walked back to the Barbie aisle, our cart now full, I began to cry again. This time I wasn’t throwing a tantrum or begging, I was genuinely mourning the loss of Mermaid Barbie. My mom frowned–I cared about this doll a lot more than she’d realized.

     “Brycie,” my mom lowered herself to the ground so she could look me in the eyes, “I want you to understand that we can’t always have the things we want. And we didn’t come in here for a doll today, so I really shouldn’t get one for you. But I loved what you said in the car about rolling down the windows for God to hear us. I’m going to buy you this doll because that was good. I think that God is happy with you for that, so he’s going to give you a present through me.”

     My tears didn’t miraculously stop when she said that. She furrowed her brow in confusion. I was also confused. The intense longing in my chest was now replaced with something bitter, too complex for me to understand. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the moment I gained consciousness over my upbringing, when I began to question more than just the inner workings of our belief system. Eventually, the tears did stop. We paid for our groceries and left. I held Mermaid Barbie the whole way home. As I took her out of her box and ran my fingers over her tail, I wondered what I had really traded in exchange for my new doll.

     Gerwig’s film pays homage to Ruth Handler, the creator of the first Barbie–a doll she designed for her daughter, Barabara, who is Barbie’s namesake. In the film, Ruth provides a place for Stereotypical Barbie to hide while on the run from a team of all-male Mattel corporate executives, an allegorical nod to how one of the greatest female icons in history is now in the hands of men. This sequence is widely taken as feminist commentary, but all it does is make me wonder how God's love–and the Creator’s design–can get lost in translation when the wrong people are vessels for it. Ruth’s love for her daughter is stolen by men; God’s love for mankind is misconstrued by organized religion; my mother’s love for me is overshadowed by her love for God–every action that she takes for me has an undercurrent of guilt.

     I was eleven when I went to my first secular concert and realized that what I thought was the Holy Spirit moving through me during worship was actually just the adrenaline I got from hearing live music. I thought about “Happy Day” and how I felt when we rolled the windows down. Three years later, I realized I was queer. I stayed up all night thinking about what it meant for me and my religion. I remembered Mermaid Barbie, how my mom never understood my love, even back then–maybe that was why. At fifteen, I stopped identifying as a Christian. I had long since left behind the rules and regulations, but I still had hope that maybe the God I knew my whole life was real. Then one day, I was praying in my room, and I realized I was talking to a wall–I thought about the praise I got for memorizing the right verses and praying for the right thing; I thought about Mermaid Barbie, how she was a reward for trying to please God; I thought about how devastated my mom would be when she realized I didn’t believe anymore. To this day, I feel like one of Pavlov’s dogs, like I was conditioned to exist in just the way my mother–or God, or my mother’s God–wanted me to. That day, I knew I had to stop trying to exist for them and find my own meaning for existence.

     Stereotypical Barbie’s epiphany comes sooner to her than it did to me. At the climax of Barbie, Barbieland is restored to its full pink and feminine glory, but Margot Robbie’s Barbie remains melancholic. Mattel tries to convince her that her ending is to be in love with Ken, but she knows that isn’t true. Ruth Handler returns to remind us that Barbie doesn’t really have an end. The Creator helps Barbie figure out what she truly wants:

     “I want…I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I want to be the one imagining, not the idea itself…Do you give me permission? To become human?”

     “You don’t need my permission.”

     “But you’re The Creator. You control me.”

     “I can’t control you any more than I could control my own daughter…We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back and see how far they’ve come.”

     “So being human isn’t something I need to ask for or even want, it’s something I discover I am…?”

     Ruth and Barbie join hands, and there on the big screen in the crowded theater I saw it: not Ruth creating Barbie, nor Barbie creating herself–a Creator inviting her creation to change, to feel, and to find her meaning for existence.

     I rolled out of that theater with a new sense of belonging. This is the magic of stories: they make you feel seen in the most unexpected ways. I opened my mouth to discuss the religious undertones, but the girl next to me spoke first:

     “I need to call my mom and tell her that I love her.”

     My mouth snapped shut immediately. I had seen the maternal messaging in the film, but I didn’t cry when my friends did. Their moms stood still out of love, but mine stood still out of fear. Fear of leaving Eden, fear of change.

     My mother saw Barbie a few weeks after me. I asked her what she thought about it.

     “It was good,” she said dryly. “Cute movie.”

     “Yeah! Awful lot of subtext there, too, don’t you think?”

     “Subtext for what? Like feminism or something?”

     “Or something.”

     My mom wanted me to stand still with her for eternity. When I look back at her, I’m grateful to see how far I’ve come, but a part of me wishes she was standing beside me.

     I don’t know if I have an omnipotent Creator, but I know that I have a mom. She created me, just as Ruth created Barbie. Barbie was supposed to be an idea, something that would live forever, but in the end, she chose humanity. She chose to feel. I don’t think I’ll ever find my way back to the God that my mother believes in. She is living to die, to continue her playdate, but I want to live. I want to be human. Like Ruth, my mom taught me how to feel: in my own way, I feel the love my mom wanted me to have, just not for a singular Creator. Instead, I feel it for the creators of every story I’ve ever been told. What my mother doesn’t realize is that I don’t find peace in passive existence the same way that she does. That’s not what I was made for. I’m still finding my meaning in existence, and I’m still figuring out what I believe. In the version of the universe where I have a Creator, I believe in the Creator who allows me to choose, who doesn’t punish me for crying or reward me for rolling the windows down to sing their praise. I believe in the Creator who created me so that I, too, could participate in the act of creation. My Creator isn’t a man in the heavens, but rather a lady smiling at a bus stop, who finds humanity in omnipotence. She doesn’t control me, she simply watches my journey from a distance. She can’t wait to see what happens next.