Nietzsche and Barbie: Existential Philosophers

When Pink Plastic Capitalism contemplates death, there's no going back...

The key to living with style is, for Nietzsche, a radical acceptance of one’s existence and the world as it is, embracing all our strengths and weaknesses and all the blessed and cursed events that have been and will be. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Spoilers ahead for the Barbie movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, too bad, or don’t read. This is only partly about the movie. It’s a felt response to the day I saw the Barbie movie, a bunch of ranting about capitalism’s fatal flaws, and my slant on the movie’s subversive message.

I’m not planning to say that the Barbie movie was good or bad. Like everything else, the Barbie movie can be interpreted in many ways, and can mean different things to different people.

During the course of this writing, I went from being snarky about the movie to resisting being snarky (because snark is too easy) to realizing that whatever else it is, the Barbie movie is a spoof and a goof. Taking it more seriously than it took itself is to play the fool. (I will definitely be doing this.) It was a powerful movie in its effect on the culture, that’s for sure. It was a BLOCKBUSTER!

Almost everything has its pros and cons.

I added the word ‘almost’ because, even though it’s just my opinion, there are some things that are all con, no pro… e.g. ticks. (I could easily add to this list.)

The biggest pro for me on the day I went to see the Barbie movie was that I was with an adorable granddaughter who had dressed up for the occasion and who wanted to hold my hand throughout the entire movie. What could be better than that?

The cons… the BIG CON—was a CONtinuum of experience beginning with the ads on the screen before the show, then the previews, then the movie, then grocery shopping afterwards, all adding up to a slight freak out on my part at the pandemic of capitalism.

I hadn’t seen ads like this in a while, even though every other post on Instagram and Facebook is an ad. These were movie/TV ads—little stories designed to convince me that some piece of manufactured stuff—a phone, a car, a candy bar—would offer me pleasure, treasure, satisfaction and security. These stories were not created with my best interests at heart. Their purpose was whatever the ad-makers believed to be in their best interests, aka getting me to part with my money in exchange for their products. So, f*** you, ad-makers.

The previews were for two animated films, full of neon-colored manufactured crises that movies which exist primarily to make money have to include to pretend that they are about something other than making money. Watching these previews was painful; watching the movies they advertised would have been torture.

And then the movie… lots more on that below, but for now, let’s just say that it did nothing to soothe my existential angst.

Even the grocery store, where I shopped after the movie (selling goods that people actually need), struck me as a pre-landfill of overpackaging, overabundance of choice, and the siren song of capitalism, that tempts us to buy and consume what we don’t need, until we crash on the rocky shore of unsustainability and spiritual emptiness.

My emotion that day was pissed-off sadness at the deeply flawed human systems that dictate so much of how we live. I begin by feeling pissed-off and then that mutates into sadness. As a species, we know not what we do.

The system of capitalism we live in/with is a glowing pink potion in a beautiful unrecyclable plastic bottle. The words on the front label say "For health, happiness, and a long life, Drink Me." It is only on the back label, in lettering too small to read, that there is a long list of dangerous side-effects.

Image by rawpixel.com, probably with the help of AI. Modifications by Janina Lamb with the help of Photoshop and Illustrator.

And now for the movie…

Here is my question for the Barbie movie (which I will answer in the next paragraph): Do you exist to make us buy things? Are you a handmaiden to the capitalist matrix that surrounds us like the air we breathe, or do you have a subversive message? Can you be/do both?

Of course you can! This is life… messy and complicated. We are messy and complicated. Yes, the Barbie movie exists to make us buy things (first itself, and then lots of other merch including movie-cloned Barbie dolls). It did a great job with that. Warner Bros. and Mattel are laughing all the way to the bank.

Also, the Barbie movie made people happy. That is an immense virtue. Respect.

And it had some possibly subversive themes. I’m not talking about the matriarchy vs partriarchy theme. That was as cartoony as the rest of the movie.

Did the Barbie movie have a subversive message?

For my money (that I spent to see the movie), the subversive message of the Barbie movie was not about gender and power structures. It was about death. Barbie’s journey from Barbie Land to the real world, and then to becoming a person instead of a doll, begins with her entirely non sequitur comment, “You guys ever think about dying?”

Which is profound cognitive dissonance for all the Barbies and for us too.

Although Barbie Land and the real world are two distinct places, apparently they are separated only by a thin and porous membrane through which the hopes and dreams of little girls are received and expressed by the dolls they play with.

The membrane is so thin and porous that when a depressed grown woman in the real world plays with her, Barbie becomes infected with thoughts of dying and ills to which flesh is heir, like flat feet and cellulite.

The pink plastic ethos, not just of the movie, but capitalism itself, feels like a determined effort to escape from the awareness of death, so for the pinkest, most plastic representative of this ethos to bring up the subject of dying is definitely subversive. It is the beginning of Barbie’s Hero’s Journey into the real world and an expanded consciousness.

Barbie leaves the comfort and safety of her known world, has mind-expanding adventures, and returns home transformed. Then she takes the next step, which is to become human—to face the death of her perfect Barbie doll self, and the promise of death in the human experience. Once Barbie swallows the red pill there’s no going back.

Perhaps ‘there’s no going back’ is the real subversive message here. For Barbie, becoming human means more than wearing Birkenstocks and having a vagina. It means greater awareness and greater vulnerability. It means accepting the dissolution of a plastic molded self into the great mystery. It means being able to move and stretch and bend and die.

Lots of pink, lots of plastic, and what else?

The Barbie movie was creative and funny. I laughed.

I admit that my visceral memory is pink plastic overwhelm. Nevertheless, the movie is a stunning amalgamation of popular tropes, cultural commentary, and shameless hucksterism. In other words, it is as American as Mark Twain or tarte au pommes. And I love that.

I love popular culture. I love stuff that is funny and weird and not obeying any particular moral code or position. I love humor. I love the creative spirit. The creative spirit is always going to be mashed up in a jumble of flesh, desire, time, space, opportunity.

The Barbie movie brought great joy to many people. It inspired a celebration of friendship and community. Which was awesome.

How did the movie elicit this response?

I don’t know. A few ideas:

Maybe part of it was shared memories of playing with Barbie dolls as children.

And it connected people by being everywhere at the same time. Social media is a form of connection, but it’s too fragmented by algorithms to function as a truly shared experience.

In the good old days when the Beatles put out a new album, it felt to us young folk linked by confusion, wonder, longing, and the music of the Beatles like the next iteration of the ten commandments had just been handed down from on high.

Even episodes of popular network TV shows that everyone watched at the same time on the same day connected people in a way that the individualism of streaming doesn’t. A movie that gets released everywhere at the same time after a big buildup has that cohesive feeling too.

Whatever else it was, the Barbie movie was good, wholesome, non-threatening fun. (Though apparently there were a few men who felt that it had a threatening anti-Ken/men bias).

Creative popular culture is connective tissue that crosses tribal boundaries. It brings people together as lovers, weirdos, humans.

Friends at a Barbie movie party. What a bright and happy look in a grey world. Photo used with permission.

Weird Barbie point I want to make.

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Note: If you haven’t seen the movie, Weird Barbie is the Barbie with her hair cut off, drawings on her face, and other deviations from Barbie Doll perfection. She was played with ‘too hard’ and now functions as the Sage of Barbie Land. The implications of this are deep.

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There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using money as a medium of exchange, or using creativity to encourage the exchange of money for goods and services. The capitalism I rant about is based on the concept that nothing matters except the acquisition of money.

It is no longer necessary to make highfalutin moral arguments about why greed for money over all other considerations is missing the point. We can’t miss it. Because the point is getting sharper all the time. It’s coming close to popping Pink Plastic Capitalism’s unsustainable bubble.

Capitalism tries to make us believe that we can all be Barbies. We can be impervious to decay—to the natural course of things. With the right car clothes phone supplement shampoo exercise course we too could be living in a pink plastic Barbie Land, never to have flat feet or to die.

Barbie chooses human life and death. The subversive message of this movie is not feminism vs patriarchy; it’s the fragile beauty of impermanence vs pink plastic. Accepting death as a natural part of being human blows a big hole in the capitalist story that stuff you can buy is going to protect you from dying.

I want to be able to accept my forthcoming death as fully as possible so that I can live as fully as possible in the present without fear. So that I can be here now. That’s where I would rather be, and it’s not easy. I don’t know if I’m accepting death or not. Probably not. Death is too big a mystery and I’m too fearful.

The best I can do is take Nietzsche’s advice and accept the mystery of being human, of being played with too hard—the incompleteness, the frailty, the creative joy. Creative joy covers a multitude of sins. I wish it for you, for Barbie, and for myself.

Notes on Process:

I’ve been working on this piece of writing for a long time; too long, maybe. It’s all part of the process. How do I know when to stop? At first it’s an inchoate universe coming into being. Big bangs all over the place. Then mixing, matching, cutting, rearranging until some kind of form/structure/picture emerges. That’s the beginning.

There is a point at which I feel that I had achieved enough cohesion/organization/shape that I can work on cleaning up/clarifying language. Every single time I read this I see things I want to change.

And then there comes a time when I have to send my imperfect child out into the world to meet its fate. Because there is no going back, only forward. Other children are waiting to be born. And there is a subtle knowing that something is finished. Not perfect; just finished.

The trick, one of the tricks, in any kind of artmaking, is to allow the gradual refinement of the work to be dictated by the work itself and not by the artist’s insecurity. It’s easy for me to be in a mood where I feel that everything I have written or drawn is no good. Or at least not good enough… and yet (sometimes I think I should have named this blog And Yet), when I feel this way, it is my fear and ego rattling their cage.

What I am trying to do with this publication, and the other projects I am working on, is to break out of my own prison of fear, and accept that being an artist means having the courage and faith to not know. To not know exactly where I’m going or what it all adds up to. To always be a beginner, and to trust that failure is golden.

T-shirt art by Kit Brown and Jasmine Lamb

Which brings me back to the quote about Nietzsche’s philosophy that I started with. I found the words “the key to living with style” fascinating. Not living with ‘heart’ or ‘authenticity’ or ‘devotion,’ but style. Style can seem like form rather than content. And yet. Style is the MO; the art form of living by which we express heart, authenticity and devotion. Style is the proof in the pudding of a radical acceptance of one’s existence.