On July 21, 2023, Greta Gerwig released Barbie, a live-action comedy based on the eponymous fashion doll franchise by Mattel. In the months immediately following its release, the movie received a wide spectrum of responses.
Rabbi and author, Jonathan Cahn, called it an attack on half the human race and compared Barbie to the ancient Mesapotamian goddess Ishtar. Ben Shapiro called the movie a “flaming garbage heap of a film” and “one of the most woke movies I have ever seen.”
On the other hand, columnist Alissa Wilkinson called the movie, “a kind of retelling of the Fall. In both Genesis and Barbie, a prototypical woman reaches for forbidden knowledge and then offers it to her male companion. Both are met by a loss of innocence and exiled from perfection.” Christianity Today even published a favorable review of the movie, highlighting how “both Barbie and Ken venture beyond plastic tropes to discover their full (and sexed) humanity.”
Among my personal friends and acquaintances, I’ve heard everything ranging from condemnation of the movie as demonic to affirmation of the movie as a timely analysis of patriarchy and extreme feminism. Talk about a range of perspectives!
So when I was tasked with a “Media Analysis” in my Worldview and Apologetics class, I thought to myself, “What better piece of modern media to analyze than Barbie?”
Watching the Movie for Myself
To be entirely forthright, I had no intentions of watching Barbie before being given a media analysis assignment. And, honestly, it’s not high on my “rewatch” list. However, I found myself fascinated by the mixed responses of others and the mixed feelings within myself as I watched. After the first thirty minutes, I took a break. I was bored and didn’t find the storyline overly compelling. But when I came back to it a couple of days later and finished the movie, I concluded it was one of the most brilliant critiques of the current culture war on gender roles and sexed selves.
I’m fascinated by the accusations thrown at the movie. I’m also fascinated by everything Gerwig seems to be getting away with considering our current cultural moment. We’re going to look at why people reacted the way they did, what the movie is about and the worldview it presents along with my overall takeaway. But first, in order to have a proper context for everything, we must go back in time to when Barbie, the doll, first came into being.
Context and History of Barbie
Barbie was created by Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, Inc., in 1959. Inspired by her daughter’s paper dolls, Handler envisioned a toy that would allow girls to imagine themselves as adult women, breaking away from the traditional role of mothering dolls. Barbie’s debut at the 1959 New York Toy Fair was met with skepticism, as her adult-like features and proportions were considered controversial. However, Barbie quickly became a cultural phenomenon, selling over 300,000 dolls in her first year.
Barbie went on to have an undeniable impact on popular culture. She has been featured in films, television shows, books, and video games, and her likeness adorns a vast array of merchandise. The doll has also been the subject of much debate, with critics questioning her unrealistic body image and her promotion of materialism and consumerism. Despite these criticisms, Barbie has been a beloved symbol of femininity and aspiration for generations of girls.
Breaking Traditional Roles
The introduction of Barbie marked a significant shift in the way children interacted with dolls. Prior to Barbie, dolls were primarily seen as representations of babies and children needing nurtured. Barbie, with her adult features and glamorous lifestyle, presented a new model for girls’ play. She encouraged them to imagine themselves as independent, successful women, pursuing careers and enjoying a variety of experiences.
Barbie’s impact extended beyond the realm of play. She became a role model for girls, embodying traits such as confidence, ambition, and style. Her diverse career aspirations, from astronaut to doctor to CEO, challenged traditional gender roles and encouraged girls to dream beyond simply taking care of children.
Filling a Void in the Cultural Narrative
Barbie’s emergence didn’t come from thin air. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a growing feminist movement, challenging traditional gender roles and advocating for women’s rights. Barbie fit right into their mission by providing a new narrative for girls which celebrated women’s independence, ambition, and self-expression.
Until this time in American history, women were often relegated to domestic roles, with limited opportunities for education, careers, and personal fulfillment. Barbie offered a glimpse of an alternative reality with her diverse career paths and glamorous lifestyle. She represented a desired future, one where women were not bound by traditional roles and could pursue their dreams without limitations.
Barbie Collides with Complementarianism
This new narrative, however, clashed with the prevailing conservative Christian ideology of the time, particularly with the growing movement of complementarianism. This theological position, which originated in the early Christian writings and gained momentum in the 19th century, emphasizes distinct roles for men and women in marriage and society.
Complementarianism argues that men are the head of the household and are naturally suited for leadership roles, while women are primarily responsible for domestic duties and child-rearing. Such ideology was deeply ingrained in American culture during the 1950s and 1960s, and it posed a direct challenge to the message of empowerment and self-determination embodied by Barbie.
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), a leading organization within complementarianism, was particularly vocal in its criticism of Barbie. They argued that the doll promoted unrealistic body image and encouraged materialism and consumerism. They also criticized Barbie’s diverse career aspirations as being contrary to the biblical roles for women.
This clash between Barbie and complementarianism reflects the broader cultural struggle over women’s roles in society during the latter half of the 20th century. As feminist voices grew louder and women began to demand greater equality, traditional ideologies like complementarianism faced increasing scrutiny and challenges.
Complementarianism Marries the Moral Majority
The late 1970s saw the rise of the Moral Majority, a movement formed by Christian fundamentalists who were alarmed by a number of developments that, in their view, threatened to undermine the country’s traditional moral values. Under the leadership of men like Jerry Falwell Sr, Paul Weyrich, and eventually Pat Robertson, the Moral Majority codified a series of values as “traditional family values.” These include, but are not limited to, “a child-rearing environment composed of a leading father, a homemaking mother, and their nominally biological children. A family deviating from this model is considered a nontraditional family.” This also became known as the “nuclear family.” In most cultures at most times, the “extended family” model has been most common, not the “nuclear family.” However, the “nuclear family” became the most common form in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.
As an effort to combat the criticism and challenges these values faced, along with the challenges facing capitalism under the rising acceptance of socialist methods at the time, the Moral Majority married select ideologies of certain branches of the church in America, such as complementarianism, with political passion. Under the Moral Majority’s spotlight, the definition of “morality” underwent a dramatic transformation, shrinking to fit their narrow mold. Any deviation, however innocuous, was branded “immoral,” blurring the line between their ideals and orthodox Christian doctrine.
While all Christians can affirm the desire to see biblical values promoted in society, we must be willing to engage the broader Christian community around rightly defining what those “biblical values” are. Married with complementarian theology, the Moral Majority opposed the Equal Rights Amendment designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. After all, for women to be anything other than homemakers was deemed “immoral.”
Why Some Christians Think Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Movie Is Demonic
Fast forward to today. Even though the Moral Majority has since faded into the atmosphere, its ideology remains embedded within much of Western Christianity. We now live in a world divided along the lines of conservatism and liberalism and those lines have gotten increasingly exaggerated over the last four decades.
It should be no surprise that a movie such as Barbie reignites the hostile conflict between complementarian Christians and the feminist movement. Like most things, the conversation around gender roles has been reduced to the binary perspectives of “progressives” and “fundamentalists” and neither appear any too willing to let the conversation nuance beyond their prejudices.
It Challenges Their Definition of Morality
To the fundamentalist Christian, this is, as Cahn says, an attack against half of humanity. He sees this as inherently threatening morality because the Barbie figure has always been an advocate for female autonomy. Such autonomy is deemed immoral within Moral Majority ideology.
Furthermore, Barbie as Ishtar fits right into Jonathan Cahn’s view of eschatology that involves specific manifestations of ancient gods in the modern world. He is predisposed to interpreting the character and the movie through this lens. Therefore, he equates the opening scene of Barbie where girls smash baby dolls as a symbolic destruction of motherhood and an endorsement of abortion. He connects this to Ishtar’s historical association with child sacrifice and the ancient spirits known as the Shedim, whose goal is to cause self-destruction by removing purpose. Ironically, he completely ignores the narration that takes place during the scene where the young girls smash their baby dolls. Because he has built his whole ministry around a particular view of eschatology, he likely won’t spend much time considering other ways this current cultural item (the Barbie movie) could be interpreted.
Additionally, Shapiro spends the first two minutes of his review of the movie spurting a cascade of repulsive adjectives about it. But what are we to expect? Shapiro’s whole career is centered around destroying progressives. His review is not about analyzing the merits of the narrative; he wants to destroy the industry behind it. They are his number one competitor. His media company is in the middle of attempting to launch their own movie industry pushing their own ideology. In a world of rhetorical warfare and binary analysis of current events, Shapiro does what he knows best.
But what are we to make of the everyday folk who say watching Barbie opens oneself up to demonic strongholds? Where do such inflammatory suggestions come from?
It Exposes Their Limited Understanding
I suggest there are at least three dynamics playing into this.
1. Moral Majority’s Dominance
First, such Christians tend to come from church traditions that have been shaped primarily by fundamentalist/Moral Majority thought over the last forty years.
2. Isolated Community
Second, these Christians also tend to come from communities that live rather isolated from culture at large. I don’t mean to suggest they do not work and live among everyday American people. Rather, the vast majority of their social life centers around their church community and their church community, being shaped by fundamentalist thought, deems it more moral to surround themselves with people and voices that communicate the specific values they want to promote.
This leads to the development of a strong subculture that has a lack of awareness of felt realities within the culture at large. They’re so immersed in their own Christian community that they’re not aware of what life is like beyond them. They’re not aware of what life is like for their neighbors, their co-workers, the people who work at Walmart or AT&T. As a result, they are not aware of the ways discrimination against women happens. They read any promotion of equal rights for women as an attempt to tear down men.
3. Genre Illiteracy
Third, such Christians don’t seem to be very well versed in media and the role of genre in storytelling. Interestingly, Karen Swallow Prior released a fantastic book on this subject right over the time Barbie came out. It’s called, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis.
For instance, I would suggest that Cahn misses the metaphorical imagery taking place in the opening scene.
The girls smashing their dolls isn’t about killing babies. Rather, it’s about the metamorphosis taking place in young girls being liberated to move beyond playing mother to playing other things that women can also be when they grow up.
I have also heard some people say that the explicit purpose of the movie was to make it normative for men to not be in positions of leadership.
I’m not sure where people get that. I can’t find Greta Gerwig saying that anywhere. I can’t find any script writer saying that. The only thing I can think of is that Barbie says it in the movie. But she says it in the process of explaining how Barbieland came to be. The movie goes on to actually confront the flaws of Barbieland and show how when only women are in charge, it flips the vacuum. Patriarchy rises out of insignificance. When a people group has no meaningful role to play, they will eventually seek to dominate those who left them out.
I tend to think those who say the purpose of the movie is to make it normative for men to not be in leadership misunderstand what is happening in the dramatized retelling of how Barbieland came to be. The message of the movie as a whole and the particular things its characters say are not necessarily one and the same. In order to communicate a more holistic message, the author of such a work needs to be able to let the particular characters say many things that might even contradict the ultimate message she seeks to communicate.
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Is the Barbie movie by Greta Gerwig demonic? I don’t think so. I think it’s a brilliantly contextualized analysis of the gender role conversation. Let’s dig into it.
Unveiling the Plastic and the Profound
Gerwig’s Barbie transcends the typical children’s film and aims for a broader audience. The witty dialogue, layered social commentary, and self-aware humor resonate more with adults who grew up with the Barbie brand and its complex cultural baggage. Yet, the film’s playful visuals and heartwarming core message about self-acceptance also retain the potential to spark meaningful conversations with younger viewers.
Gerwig created Barbie in the post-MeToo era, where societal expectations of gender and beauty are undergoing intense scrutiny. She uses the iconic doll as a canvas to critique patriarchal structures, highlighting their damaging effects on both men and women. The film’s playful satire and metafictional elements serve as a Trojan horse, allowing these critiques to land with a deeper impact.
A Surprising Critique of Both Patriarchy AND Matriarchy
The film’s exploration of patriarchy cuts deep, not just highlighting its detrimental impact on Barbie but also its corrosive effect on Ken. Consider Barbie’s line, “A dreamhouse without a man is just a house.” It succinctly summarizes the societal pressure for women to prioritize male validation. Meanwhile, Ken’s whole world rises and falls on what Barbie thinks of him.
Barbie’s journey, however, exposes the hollowness of this cultural posture. Despite embodying perfection, she feels unfulfilled, trapped in a plastic paradise devoid of genuine connection. At the same time, no matter how hard Ken clings to his patriarchal “trophy husband” identity, it ends up rendering hollow and ultimately discarded when he fails to conform to its unrealistic expectations. He can’t quite ever get enough attention. This masterfully illustrates how patriarchy harms both genders, fostering isolation and emptiness under the guise of empowerment.
What I found especially intriguing–and surprising–was the backhanded way in which Gerwig also offers a critique of the matriarchal world where everything centers around women. The film playfully subverts our expectations of a “feminist” narrative by showing the downsides of an idealized matriarchy. Under matriarchy, men become as superfluous as women are under patriarchy. The movie ironically portrays the very patriarchy it critiques rising again within the vacuum of purposelessness that Ken feels in Barbieland. By doing this, Gerwig brilliantly challenges viewers to think critically about gender roles and power dynamics beyond simplistic binaries.
Perfection in Brokenness
Beyond critiquing societal norms, Barbie encourages us to embrace the messy beauty of imperfection. The film’s central message lies in Barbie’s breaking free from her plastic shell and venturing into the “real” world, a world filled with flaws and uncertainties. Here, she encounters and learns from diverse characters who exist outside the confines of Barbieland’s artificial perfection. This journey emphasizes the transformative power of stepping outside rigid expectations and embracing our vulnerabilities. As Barbie declares, “The perfect doll isn’t perfect. She’s broken,” highlighting a central theme of the movie in celebrating human authenticity over manufactured ideals.
Gerwig weaves into this dismantling of perfection a critique of our tendency to objectify one another. Whether it’s Barbie’s commodification as a fashion doll or the ways individuals within Barbieland view each other through a competitive lens, the film exposes the detrimental consequences of reducing people to objects or status symbols. Barbie’s transformation into a teacher, embracing connection and nurturing over superficiality, embodies a shift away from objectification and towards valuing individuals for simply being human.
The Matter of Immodesty in the Barbie Movie
When I first sat down to watch the movie, I felt discomfort with the noticeable immodesty portrayed on screen. The overt display of beauty and perfection was almost too much for me at one point. I found myself tempted to lust, even. But as I watched, and as the movie expounded on this larger narrative of objectification, I realized that’s what I was doing to these characters. It forced me to confront the posture in my own heart. As I began to view even these characters through the lens of them as human beings and not objects of pleasure, I found that I no longer dealt with temptations to lust.
I would not show the movie to someone struggling with habitual lust as I think the immodesty would be so distracting they would likely miss the deeper message of the story. They have bigger issues to deal with first. But it was an interesting experience to go through where I vividly felt the objectification happening in my own heart, had a paradigm shift, and then felt the objectification leave.
Greta Gerwig’s Call to Partnership
As I reflect on the movie’s portrayal of gender roles, one notable observation is the movie’s nuanced approach to the concept of partnership. I wholly disagree with Cahn and Shapiro that the film is an attack against half of humanity. Sure, it addresses the failures of patriarchy and alludes to the failures of matriarchy. But there is a strong underlying metanarrative inviting men and women into partnership. Gerwig brilliantly straddles this line, in an age where it feels like the extreme pursuits of either male or female dominance prevail, of actually saying goodness is found in living in harmony with each other.
Having said that, I felt the narrative was building to a much stronger landing of partnership than what the film actually presented. That’s probably my biggest critique of the movie: I think Gerwig could have fleshed the call to partnership out even more.
Conclusion
The release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie sparked a diverse array of responses, reflecting the deeply divided perspectives within society and the Christian church. From accusations of demonic influence to praise for its nuanced exploration of gender roles, the film stirred conversations that reached far beyond its intended audience.
I wasn’t sure whether or not I should watch the movie. Would I come away feeling dirty and evil? And maybe I’m deceived and blinded by spiritual strongholds just for opening myself up to it (even though that contradicts what scripture reveals about people filled with the Holy Spirit). In the end, I come away feeling Barbie is a far more nuanced and sophisticated narrative than Greta Gerwig’s critics gave it credit for. I’m not sure it’s a movie I would put on my top ten list of must-sees. But considering our current cultural moment, Barbie is a brilliant critique of the ongoing cultural war surrounding gender roles. Gerwig skillfully tackled the pitfalls of both patriarchy and matriarchy, exposing their damaging effects on individuals. Even more, the film’s exploration of the hollowness within these paradigms challenges viewers to critically examine gender dynamics beyond simplistic binaries.
Question: Did you watch Barbie? What did you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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