“…[A]n element of mystery will always surround the notion of a transcendent self that can be revealed only partially and indirectly in its unfolding over time.” Ken Collins
What is the Self? According to Kierkegaard, awareness of and relationship with the human experience as a “synthesis of opposites.” God what a mouthful. The Self comprises our ability to understand that we are a bundle of paradox stuffed in a meat sack.1 Similarly, Wesley says that we are a compound of matter and spirit. Throughout Chapter 2, “Humanity: Created in Holy Love, Fallen in Nature,”2 I kept coming back to Barbie.3 Barbie illustrates the Wesleyan conception of the development of the self and Kierkegaard’s ideas about sin as despair of the self.
Stereotypical Barbie demonstrates transcendence. She reflects Wesley’s notions of the three-fold image of God. After an Edenic “Day 1,” she experiences a (literal) Fall (precipitated by Ken) that introduces her to physical decline and spiritual death. Grace emerges (having existed all along), illuminated by way of Weird Barbie and later Ruth Handler. Outside of Eden (in the Real World), Barbie experiences depravity, including temptation to abandon her other-directed mission of love and her budding Kierkegaardian sense of self, and an encounter with her Creator that results in a re-birth.
Beginning with the three-fold imago Dei, Barbie illustrates these concepts. Collins describes the three parts as the Natural, Political, and Moral expressions of God. The natural image of God comprises our spiritual nature and the immortality of the soul. From the moment Barbie wakes in the opening moments of the movie, she knows who she’s created to be. She is Stereotypical Barbie, and she always has been.
Within the natural image, Barbie has understanding (an ability to comparatively consider things and reach her own conclusions).4 She has a will. She is, like humans before The Fall, oriented toward the good. In the day 1 montage (set to Lizzo’s “Pink,” because God is Good), everything happens in perfect synchronicity. In the kitchen, we can see another Barbie in a background kitchen. Their waffles pop out in perfect time. When brushing her hair, Barbie looks through an empty mirror frame. She does not need to see her own reflection to know that she is good; she understands herself as made in the image of her creator. Later, all pretense of a mirror will disappear as she obsesses over physical imperfections. Finally, Barbie has liberty to choose. While the story, history, Ken, and even the audience expect that she and Ken are “boyfriend and girlfriend,” her will and understanding steer her away from that identity.
The political image plays out more subtly but is there all the same. While there are overt imitations of governance in Barbie Land such as a President and a Supreme Court, there’s an undercurrent of responsibility for the well-being of women and girls in the Real World. This mirrors the Wesleyan presumption that humans are responsible for the well-being of God’s creation as God’s governing regents.5
Finally, the moral image as the third part of the creator’s image evidences in the Barbies’ embodiment of their creator’s feminist values.
Having established Stereotypical Barbie in her Eden, Gerwig next initiates a fall with her clever gender-bent reversal of Adam and Eve’s roles. While Barbie suns on the beach, saying hi to everyone there, Ken experiences temptation: He wants to be seen, noticed. He wants to be important, too. His effort to surf utterly disrupts the reality of Barbie Land, and Stereotypical Barbie will bear the consequences. Barbie literally falls after waking on Day 2: first from her rooftop and later on the beach.
Collins describes humanity’s fall as having both physical and spiritual consequences. Physically, Barbie experiences bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. Her breakfast is burnt, her milk is soured, and she even struggles to walk. Spiritually, Barbie falls prey to the disorientation that Kierkegaard describes when humans try to pinpoint our despair, but we simply can’t see its cause. She finds herself in fear of losing who she thinks she is because of the physical changes. She’s mortified6 by the physical changes she’s seeing, but even more obviously, she is plagued by Thoughts of Death that terrify her and leave her alienated from her community. In his description of the consequences of original sin, Collins says that “Alienated from the knowledge and love of God, encased in isolation, men and women immediately engage in a species of idolatry by worshiping themselves as the center of meaning in life. ‘We worship ourselves,’ Wesley points out, ‘when we pay that honour to ourselves which is due to God only.’”7 This immediately brought to mind the scene where the Barbies are sending Stereotypical Barbie off to the Real World, and they comfort her, saying, “All those grateful, powerful women who owe their wonderful lives to Barbie.”
She descends into depravity. That same self-worship surfaces in her conversation with Weird Barbie. Wesley says that, “For though some of them ‘run well,’ they are still off the way; they never aim at the right mark. Whithersoever they move, they cannot move beyond the circle of self. They seek themselves, they act for themselves; their natural, civil, and religious actions, from whatever spring they come, do all run into, and meet in this dead sea.”8 Sure enough, when faced with the opportunity to put everything right (the hard way), Barbie insists on choosing the “easy” path: Just brainwash me and make me forget this ever happened. Of course, once fallen, that’s not an option.
Once in the Real World, her depravity deepens. She punches a man (admittedly, he deserves it), steals clothes, and arrogantly ignores all social cues to humiliate herself in front of a bunch of middle schoolers. Later at Mattel headquarters, she allows herself to be tempted back into “the box,” where she can return to her self-idolized, pre-Fall state.
But Grace.
While Barbie remains bewildered and lost in her quest to rid herself of this problem of Cellulite and Thoughts of Death, happily stepping into “the box” that promises (blithely) to restore what can’t be restored (who doesn’t love a quick fix?), in that moment, Barbie experiences a grace that allows her to use her liberty to choose a path that she can’t predict. She steps out of the box and into a new reality, one where she will be guided not by her desire to avoid cellulite (death) but by a new awareness that another way exists.
Once she accepts that initiating grace, Barbie encounters the creator (although she still doesn’t recognize her, a wonderful theological perfection). In a careful nod to the transformation from prevenient to co-operant grace, the creator tells Barbie which way to run to escape her pursuers, the ones who would put her back in the box. Barbie listens, follows, and well, watch the movie.
Based on Collins’ comparisons of the Western and Eastern paradigms of the Fall and Co-operant Grace,9 I think Barbie ultimately follows a more Eastern than Western paradigm. In particular, I think that while she experiences a Fall and even a kind of depravity, I don’t think she suffers the kind of total depravity that Wesley says would make her unable to respond to grace without the grace to respond. The case could be made, though.
In addition, based on Collins’ description of the modern and post-modern deconstruction of the self, I was surprised (although I don’t know why) to find such a traditional, Wesleyan approach to the self in the Barbie movie. In terms of the transcendence that Collins accuses post-modernism of ignoring, Barbie at the beginning of the movie and at the end of the movie are transcendently the same and also objectively different. “Revealed only partially and indirectly in its unfolding over time.”10
I went on a date once with a guy who got really mad at me for referring to my body as a meat sack. No sense of humor, that guy. I blocked his number.
Ken Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. 2007. 49-86.
Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Barbie. Warner Bros. and LuckyChap Entertainment. 2023.
Collins, 52.
Setting aside, for the moment, the discomfort of a domination-based theory of God’s political image. I’d love to talk about that idea with John Wesley.
If “mortified” isn’t the most perfect word for her experience, I don’t know what is.
Collins, 69.
Ibid, 69.
Ibid, 81.
Ibid, 85.