by Nate Sheff
(Lots of spoilers for Barbie.)
Plato’s cave allegory depicts the philosopher’s journey out of the world of appearances and into the real light of day. After a long climb out from the pits and puppet shows, our protagonist emerges into the world under the sun, whose light makes everything else visible. Having learned from this journey, the philosopher turns back into the cave to spread the good news. The shadows on the wall pale in comparison to the real. True goodness can only be sought elsewhere, up above, after a journey towards the light.
Let’s picture a different one.
Our version starts in the sky. The sun shines, and the world below brightens and basks in its glow, the sun somehow becoming stronger and even more real. But something else comes into being: sighs and grumbling half-heard from a crack in the rocks. The sun’s light dims. Maybe it’s time to see how things are going down there. So the sun steps down from the heavens, taking the form of just another human, and peeks its head down into the cave. After a climb down – not easy, given this is the first time the sun has felt gravity – the sun finally meets the humans and tells them about the boundless sky and the light of day.
But humans know all about that, and they’ve decided that light is light, even from a measly fire. The sun’s “good news” is empty hype, mere marketing.
The sun considers this and feels its confidence waning. These people are denying the intrinsic goodness of its light. How can that be? How can these humans embrace a messy, complex, blurry world over simple brilliance? Maybe it’s the sun that has some learning to do.
Plato tells a story about the Idea of the Good, a source of goodness that is so independent as to be impossibly remote yet infinitely powerful. We need it to understand ourselves and our place in the world. The funhouse mirror version has that Idea shedding the trappings of the ideal for the sake of understanding the non-ideal, but complicated and interesting real world. I like this version. It might not have Plato’s insight or artistry, but it has a scrappy charm that allows me to think about Plato’s original in a new way.
Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s film (co-written with Noah Baumbach), plays a trick like this.
It asks us to think about human ideals: how they come into our lives, how we think of them, and how our thinking can change them and our relation to them. I’ve heard the movie described as existentialist or feminist, and sometimes subsequently criticized for failing to do right by those labels. I guess I could see that in the trailers, but I didn’t know what to expect. If a movie has to get rubber-stamped by toy executives, what could it really accomplish? A lot, it turns out. Despite being based on a bona fide Brand, Barbie had a lot of love and genuine artistry poured into it by people with a strong vision of what they wanted to achieve. It never feels like a movie made by a committee.
Unlike Pixar’s back catalog or the recent Puss in Boots movie, this is not an all ages film with themes that resonate for everyone in the audience. It’s a movie for adults. There were kids at the screening we went to, and I can’t imagine they got a kick out of the opening 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof, or Depression Barbie that eats family-sized bags of Starbursts in one sitting. That’s fine, though. I admire how often the movie swings for the fences with jokes that are more clever than gut-busting, that work better in concept than execution. No big deal. Grownups are allowed to have movies for grownups. Let the middle-aged audience have movies that explore tricky questions about the purpose of ideals in the lives of mere mortals, especially when those ideals get embodied in impossibly proportioned hunks of plastic in bikinis.
Barbie has ideas that could be described as existentialist or feminist, but those labels undersell a lot of what’s really going on. The hype about the word “patriarchy” in the film is overblown. I’m sure plenty of people would tag me as a cranky Ivory Tower beta male for welcoming that sort of thing in a mainstream movie, but the feminist themes are incredibly mild and pretty mainstream. Any offended men should grow a sense of humor. They sound like people who think black pepper makes food too spicy – sad!
Still – and stick with me while I climb even higher into my Ivory Tower – I think the existentialist and feminist readings can go deeper. It’s true that you can’t ignore either of these ideas in the movie. The Bizarro World matriarchies and patriarchies of Barbieland and the Mojo Dojo Casa House can’t be recognized as parodies unless we understand them as feminist jokes; it’s easy to hear Marilyn Frye’s ideas echoed in America Ferrara’s monologue; and what are Barbie’s thoughts of death, if not the discovery of Camus’s “only serious philosophical problem”?
Margot Robbie plays Barbie, specifically Stereotypical Barbie, the Barbie you think of when you hear “Barbie.” She’s the Barbiest of the Barbies – the Platonic form of Barbie-ness and the ground of being for all Barbies. Barbie is her story: the movie begins with her appearance ushering in a new age of toys for girls, and ends in a line that perfectly caps off her Pinocchio journey to be a real girl. (This is why the inevitable sequel faces an uphill battle to be worthwhile. Barbie’s story arc is complete, so how could Robbie be the lead of Barbie 2 without undoing her progress in this movie?)
I think this elevates Barbie. The trailers made me optimistic; the reviews made me nervous. Would it turn out to be an ironic Gen X pseudophilosophical mask for an extended commercial? I grew up watching a lot of cartoons, which is to say I grew up watching a lot of commercials, including commercials for Barbies – no thanks! As a boy, I knew these weren’t for me, and that was fine. Watch me whistle past the pink aisle at Toys R Us. I did wonder how the movie would handle the elephant in the room: what to say about the pink aisle, those impossible proportions, those hunks of plastic sitting in landfills. I worried that Barbie’s meeting with teenagers would lampshade the controversy before getting back to the fun stuff (Ken discovering horses).
But it didn’t brush anything under the rug. Instead, it’s the gateway into the relationship between Ferrara’s Gloria and Robbie’s Barbie, the heart of the movie. Humans like Gloria have ideals. We tell ourselves stories to make these ideals as real as they can be, and these stories often take the shape of myths that happen in a timeless fairyland. Plato’s forms are eternal. Can we tell the difference between timelessness and endless repetition? Intellectually, yes, but in imagination?
These ideals can hurt us, because the idea of perfection brings with it the possibility of falling short. We see our ugliness by its lights; our imperfections become intelligible once we catch hold of the remote and crystalline good. It’s why Gloria can pass the time by doodling Cellulite Barbie – a plastic idealization with realistic human flesh is a joke in itself. But even though in some way we must posit our ideals as eternal and pure, we know that somehow they can’t be, because they are our ideals, values that are embodied in every sense of the word. Unlike Plato’s forms, Barbieland isn’t so far away that it can’t be touched. Hence, Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie starts to become Cellulite Barbie as a result of Gloria’s drawing. Idealization makes it possible to evaluate, to criticize, and to strive for more, but they are tethered to us, even as we externalize them into myths. We make them as much as they make us.
Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator played by Rhea Perlman, says as much during her final scene in the movie. Handler created Barbie so girls could imagine more for themselves than the baby doll toys allowed at the time. You might find yourself in the same critical mindset as the teenagers earlier in the movie: How does a doll in a bikini push the boundaries of the social imagination? It seems backwards from this point in history. But if we do imagine our ideals into being, then they have to start somewhere. Even as we imagine them as existing outside history (somewhere in Barbieland), they really find their roots in history. When Barbie decides to take part in that process and figure out who she really is, she steps into history as a human. She has to figure it out for herself, and she has to start somewhere.
What will the sun do in our version of the cave allegory? Plato had an extramission theory of vision, where seeing partially depends on rays that shoot out from the eyes, as well as light sources like the sun. Can light sources see the shadows they cast? Maybe the sun would like to try seeing like a human for a change.