The Unbearable Lightness of Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a Celebration of Thought

Welcome to day one of Together, Alone. To celebrate our debut, we're publishing three pieces today. Starting Thursday, we'll begin our weekly publishing schedule.

Discussed: Barbie, Fleabag, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Tuca & Bertie, Cleo from 5 to 7

In one of the most famous scenes in Barbie, Stereotypical Barbie joyfully dances with the other Barbies at her dreamhouse before sharing an overwhelming feeling of existential dread. “You guys ever think about dying?” she asks. The music screeches to a halt. All of the other Barbies and Kens look at her with shock and concern. Poor Stereotypical Barbie has no choice but to try and hide her true thoughts from her friends. Before she drifts off to sleep in her dreamhouse, she calls out to the other Barbies and exclaims, “I’m definitely not thinking about death anymore!”

Many self-proclaimed worriers were tickled by the depiction of Barbie’s dark thoughts. For one thing, there is something deliciously surreal about the ubiquitous doll having an existential crisis. For another, a Barbie contending with potential mental health concerns seemed to perfectly capture the 2023 zeitgeist: the hopefulness of a sparkly pink dance floor mixed with feelings of exhaustion and despair that continue to dominate the cultural landscape. And yet, at a time when thinking itself is often presented as the source of our collective mental health woes, Barbie is one of the few narratives I’ve seen in recent years that celebrates thinking as purposeful. Even though Stereotypical Barbie is unsettled by her thoughts and goes through a period of mourning as she attempts to wrestle with her new consciousness, the overall arc of the film points to how Barbie’s ability to think is connected to her ability to forge a sense of self. 

This is a genuinely subversive idea at a time when thinking has, shall we say, fallen out of fashion. In online discourse especially, a life without the “burden” of thoughts is often presented as aspirational. All the “no thoughts, head empty,” memes that emerged over the last few years are clearly meant to be cheeky response to increasing anxiety, but their rise also coincides with a push back against women thinking at all: the overachieving girl boss icon (problematic in her own right) has been replaced by two twin symbols of 2020s anti-thought, the self-proclaimed “bimbo” who, in an effort to reclaim a specific feminine aesthetic, also plainly professes to not be smart, and the “trad wife” who yearns to not only embrace domesticity but to also outsource some forms of thinking to her spouse. And one of the most fascinating trends of the past several months has been the growth of NPC streamers who make an incredible amount of money repeating the same several catch phrases the way a non-human RPG character would. Clearly, this type of labor takes a tremendous amount of discipline and focus, but one of the reasons the NPC streamer’s job is so fascinating is the way that participants are responding to commands rather than thinking and acting autonomously.

Perhaps thinking itself has gotten such a bad reputation because so many of the ideas we encounter are exceptionally bad. You can’t glance at your phone without seeing an array of extremely uninformed opinions. In some ways, the “think piece” has gone the way of the online “personal narrative,” becoming an easy scapegoat for our collective anger and anxiety at poor judgment. This is also evident in the shifting TV landscape, once dominated by “prestige” shows and now featuring more and more “ambient” forms of storytelling that don’t require us to pay as close attention. Everywhere you look there are messages that we are collectively tired, anxious, and so overwhelmed by content that we are shutting down rather than tuning in.

While it’s true that “overthinking” can be exhausting, the act of thinking can also be a profound human pleasure. I genuinely enjoy letting ideas drift about my skull aimlessly and I also find it thrilling when an idea surfaces that genuinely surprises me. An especially joyful part of my experience being a writer is just trying to make sense of my own thoughts, putting them down in ways that might be new or interesting, even if they might ultimately fail. Thoughts can certainly sometimes feel stressful, but the constant pattern of thoughts that runs through my brain can also feel comforting. I feel most like myself when I am thinking. Some people are thrill seekers who love to climb mountains or run marathons. Thinking is my sport. When I think I feel inspired, delighted, engaged. A good conversation about ideas doesn’t just inspire me to action; it makes me feel alive. 

Perhaps this was why I was thrilled that Stereotypical Barbie is propelled to greater self-awareness through thinking. It’s an exciting counterpoint to a culture that seems to posit that what women really want is for someone else to do the thinking for them. This is true even in feminist stories that I love, such as the famous scene in Fleabag where the central protagonist admits that what she really wants is for someone else to tell her what to wear, what to eat, and who to vote for, as well as the entire overarching storyline of the daring novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, where the unnamed protagonist’s “self-help” journey involves taking a dangerous cocktail of pharmaceuticals to sleep away an entire year of her life. Even fun shows like Tuca & Bertie feature female characters who overthink to the point of making themselves stressed and sick.

In contrast, Barbie unfolds like Agnes Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7, where we see a beautiful protagonist confront her existential fears about a scary health concern and come away more keenly aware of who she is. Stereotypical Barbie gets “out of her box” not when she reclaims the dream houses from the Kens, but when she actively embraces what it means to be a full person. In the end, she chooses to contend with the threat of cellulite, wrinkles, and uncomfortable thoughts rather than stay in her pink paradise. Only then is she able to shift from doll to woman.