The orbiting fantasies of Barbieland, Barbie’s “real world” and the audience’s “real world”
A still image from Barbie (Gerwig, 2023)
Contains spoilers for the films Barbie and the Truman Show
In the recent film, Barbie (Gerwig, 2023), action takes place in two separate worlds: Barbieland and “the real world”. Barbieland is the fictive world in which Barbie dolls, Ken dolls, and other related properties of the toy company, Mattel, all live. “The real world” is the world in which human characters play with—and the world in which Mattel manufactures—the dolls. Using the interaction of these two worlds one can posit a deeper, more central reality in a way which draws on a tradition of ontology which stems back to Immanuel Kant. This system of reality is subjective, and is accessed via the experiences of the characters of the film, such that the relationships of the characters in the film is of vital, ontological importance. Furthermore, the interrelating realities of Barbie operate as a mirror of the interaction between the world of the audience—the audience’s “real world”—and the world of the film, such that the ontology of Barbie teaches us how to understand the way in which fiction impacts upon “reality”.
1) Death: the point of interconnection
The protagonist of Barbie is Stereotypical Barbie (henceforth referred to simply as Barbie), played by Margot Robbie, a Barbie doll who lives in Barbieland. Barbieland is presented as a utopia of feminine power, in which the various Barbies (all women) hold a variety of significant and important careers, from doctors, to political leaders, to Nobel prize winning writers etc. Meanwhile the Kens of Barbieland (all men) lead shallow and less significant lives: for instance Barbie’s Ken, played by Ryan Gosling, explains that his job is “just beach,” which seems to mean standing by the shore and holding a surfboard (but not actually surfing). We see Barbie leading an average day of her life: waking up in her luxurious Barbie House, eating perfect foods, spending time with her successful Barbie friends and being fawned over by her Ken, whom she seems to have little interest in. During a spectacular party which she hosts at her house in the evening, she asks her friends “Do you guys ever think about dying?”. This unexpected awareness of her own mortality is the first major crack in Barbie’s relationship with herself, and demonstrates a lack at the heart of her reality which becomes the motivation for the rest of the events of the film, leading Barbie to journey to “the real world” to help the person, presumed to be a little girl, who is playing with her and causing her to have these experiences.
We later learn that the reason Barbie has been suffering from existential dread is because Gloria, a woman in “the real world” who works for Mattel and who raises a rebellious daughter, has been playing with a Barbie doll and using this play as an outlet for her own anxieties. Here, we see the function the two worlds have for each other: Barbieland is an object for “the real world” to reflect on “the real world’s” deficiencies; and “the real world” symbolises the lack at the heart of Barbieland, which enables the object, Barbie, to come alive in an attempt to fill that lack. Observe the paradox here: people of “the real world” use Barbie as an object to contain their own lack, but using Barbie as such causes Barbie herself to experience this lack. This experience of lack draws Barbie’s subjectivity to the surface and she no longer functions as the dead object that “the real world” requires.
In all of this grappling with reality, we can naturally read the presence of Kantian ontological traditions. For Kant, all of our senses, our means of knowing the phenomena of the world, exist on the side of the observer and, therefore, there is another side (the side of the observed): that which really is—the thing in itself—can only be known by reason and understanding. Insofar as we accept the reality of our observations (an act of understanding), we acknowledge some aspect of reality beyond what we have observed (Kant, 1783). Before Barbie travels there, the residents of Barbieland can only posit “the real world” as the reality which is beyond their reality, but whose presence is felt in Barbieland. The character of Weird Barbie explains that the reason Barbie is suffering from a variety of crises is because a girl in the real world is playing with her in such a way as to provoke these experiences. “The real world” seems at this stage to be the thing in itself: behind the phenomena that Barbies experience, there must be some reality which is more real.
However, during the film we see Barbie and Ken travel to “the real world”. This makes “the real world” into an object of sense, and therefore it cannot be understood as the thing in itself. You may wonder why I have consistently placed “the real world” within quotation marks, and here we find the reason why: by visiting “the real world”, and gaining experience of it, we see it being given the same status as Barbieland, as a space which is attainable via the senses. If Barbieland is not real, then “the real world” can be no more real, for they are both knowable in the same ways; or, to put it the other way, if “the real world” has the mark of reality, then so must Barbieland. Here, let’s remember what Hegel says about self-consciousness, that it “is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself” (Hegel, 1807). Is the same not true of these competing realities? By recognising reality in “the real world,” Barbieland must see itself with the same means it uses to see the Other: by reflecting on the reality of “the real world”, Barbieland can see that the same reality runs through itself. Furthermore, if “the real world”, after gaining direct experience of Barbieland, maintains that Barbieland is a fantasy space, then the experience of fantasy in Barbieland is an extension of the way in which “the real world” is experienced. At this point, we must acknowledge the next paradox that we have encountered: for Barbieland to be self-conscious qua reality, via “the real world”, and for “the real world” to be self-conscious qua fantasy via Barbieland, fantasy and reality must inhabit the same space: a single continuum of fantasy-reality which encompasses Barbieland and “the real world”.
The role of death in Barbie’s fractured reality is of utmost ontological importance. In Freud’s terms, “The goal of all life is death,” (Freud, 1922) a paradox with profound implications for Barbie’s reality. An awareness of death, an awareness of her ultimate telos, marks her out as living. For Freud, the Death Drive is a drive of the ego; the ego is tasked with enforcing a coherent image of reality, as a point of mediation between the id (which seeks pleasure via the sex drive) and the external world. While the id seeks always to maximise pleasure, the Ego is more concerned with the minimisation of displeasure, even if this means accepting a small amount of pain in order to avoid a larger amount. This, for Freud, is the reality principle: a delay on the immediate attainment of pleasure which the id seeks; the reality principle replaces the pleasure principle and so inflicts pain by way of mediating the satisfaction of desire (Freud, 1916-17)1. The id is the objective part of the psyche, an objectivity which explains the pleasure principle as the retention of objective wholeness – the object in itself. The ego is therefore the seat of subjectivity, and while the pleasure principle of the id “is in some way connected with the diminution, reduction or extinction of the amounts of stimulus prevailing in the mental apparatus” (ibid), the ego’s reality principle functions as the opposite of this annulment of stimulus. The psyche, under the influence of the reality principle, becomes stimulated, divided, disintegrated: the drive which fulfils the reality principle results in a non-whole reality. For Barbie, awareness of death results in this fragmentation and she seeks for a large part of the movie to return to the prior state of ignorance; a state in which she is simply an object (she is only alive and a subject insofar as she is moving towards death).
Here, let us venture an answer to the Billie Eilish (2023) song which plays at the end of the film, “What was I made for?”: the “I” of the question, the ego, was made to enforce reality, but the reality it enforces is necessarily lacking; “I” was made to incorporate death into the psyche and to establish a subjectivity which contains its own negation.
2) The Nothing around which reality orbits
After Barbie returns from “the real world” with Gloria, they discover that Ken, having been inspired by “the real world”, has established a patriarchal system in Barbieland in which all the other Barbies seem to be willing participants. Discovering that she is unable to restore Barbieland to the way it was before, Barbie falls into a deep depression, during which time Gloria spells out the paradoxes at the heart of her experience of womanhood:
we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin…You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining… always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful… It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
Gloria, in Barbie (Gerwig, 2023)
Accepting the feeling of never quite getting it, never quite being there, always seeming to have missed the mark, is essential to Barbie’s recovery from her depression. Here is the Kantian horizon of reality: the thing in itself never emerges, and any attempt to find it will only succeed in pushing it further away. And here is the Freudian Death Drive in which every attempt to mediate pain results in a mediation of the mediation. Barbie must live with paradox, with the essential impossibility of her being: all attempts to live in the world point to the thing in itself, the nothingness which secures reality.
Fig. 1: in a system of bodies of equal mass, the barycentre would be exactly equidistant between the two bodies
Fig. 2: in a system of bodies of unequal mass, the barycentre would be closer to, or even below the surface of, the more massive body.
In astronomy, the concept of the barycentre refers to the dynamic point around which a system of bodies orbits. For instance, while in everyday language we might say that the planets of the solar system orbit around the sun, the gravitational pull of the planets moves this orbital centre (the barycentre) to a point just beyond the surface of the sun, such that all the bodies—the planets and the sun itself—orbit around this point (Ridpath, 2012). We could theorise that if more bodies were added into the orbital system, the barycentre would move further and further from the sun. Such is the structure of reality: each account of it is like a new body which enters into the orbital system, pulling the point of the Real (the real reality, the thing-in-itself) further and further out into dead space, equidistant between all realities. This barycentric reality is visible in Žižek’s account of repetition:
Repetition is not only repetition of something that cannot be repeated and, in this sense, repetition of the impossibility of repeating, but repetition of something that does not exist in itself, that emerges only retroactively through its repetition.
Žižek, 2017
The barycentre is the point which is created retroactively, through the introduction of new bodies. For Žižek, this can be seen in the repetition of a novel in a film adaptation:
The film does not “repeat” the novel on which it is based; rather, they both “repeat” the unrepeatable virtual X, the “true” novel whose spectre is engendered in the passage from the actual novel to the film.
Žižek, 2017
Is the same not true of the relationship between Barbieland and “the real world”? Barbieland is a fictional universe created by Mattel and modelled on “the real world”, but it is an adaptation of “the real world” which “corrects” certain errors present within that world. Barbieland is a matriarchal society, and as such it is a body of mass which pulls the barycentre away from the patriarchal society of “the real world”. Barbieland acts upon “the real world” as one massive body acts upon another massive body, the former changes the path of the latter; as the narration at the beginning of the film says, “Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything,” (Gerwig, 2023). Of course, the latter body also changes the path of the former and the extent to which one body is more or less effected by the other is dependent on their relative mass. In this instance, “the real world” must surely be seen as the more massive of the two worlds, to the extent that the entire structure of gender-based power which manifests in Barbieland is a formal replica of patriarchy in “the real world”, even while the relative power of the genders is inverted in Barbieland. In fact, the power of Barbies in Barbieland is not truly power that Barbies have acquired for themselves, but power which Mattel has invested into them.
The film itself is a repetition of our “real world”; it recalls content and structures from our world (Barbies and Kens, women and men, fantasy and reality, manufacturer and commodity, matriarchy and patriarchy) and recreates them on screen. If our reality shares the form of the Barbie’s reality, then we and the film are simply satellites around a barycentric reality, which is posited (much like the Kantian thing-in-itself) once we see that our reality is an observant reality, facing towards some unseen observed.
3) Letting go of the objective other in order to embrace subjectivity
The barycentre is what Lacan calls objet a, “the void presupposed by a demand” (Lacan, 1972-73). The demand that Barbieland should be perfect and unblemished by death, ageing and other imperfections, is an attempt to otherise the void. The characters literally posit the problems of Barbieland on the side of the big Other2, “the real world” as the symbolic order which secures the function of Barbieland. Think of it this way: we are introduced to “the real world” in the prologue to the film, which explains that before Barbie, girls only played with baby dolls, role-playing as mothers and homemakers, but with the invention of Barbie, girls could now envision themselves in different and changing roles as women; from the point of view of its inhabitants, Barbieland is only a meaningful place insofar as (either consciously or unconsciously) there are problems in “the real world” to which Barbie is the answer. It is the judgement of the big Other (as “the real world”) which stipulates that Barbieland should be a place of feminine utopia, free from death or aging, free from civil unrest or disharmony; and if Barbieland is like this then it is only meaningful because “the real world” is not those things. However, when those imperfections infiltrate into Barbieland, we see that they actually belong to the little other (objet a), the idealised other which is actually a reflection of the self: the void is a part of Barbieland.
The antagonistic force of the film, as represented variously within Ken, Mattel and Barbie herself, is the force of otherisation and objectification. When Ken says to Barbie “I only exist within the warmth of your gaze” (Gerwig, 2023), he is ensnared within the clutches of these antagonists: his reliance upon Barbie to guarantee his existence is indicative of a failure to live with nothingness; he requires an object, Barbie, to fill the hole of his uncertain being. Ken cannot be authentically subjective while he hinges his existence upon Barbie’s continuation as an object as he is trapped in mis-recognition, whereby he attempts to see himself as a completed object via another supposedly completed object. But, of course, Barbie is incomplete and she cannot be the wholeness which Ken is desperate to reflect from. The fictional executives of Mattel are determined, throughout the film, to render Barbie as an object, to the point of attempting to literally put her in a box. For Mattel, the wholeness and objectivity of Barbie translates into commodification and economic value—Barbie rendered as something which can be priced and sold. For Mattel, Barbieland is a product: for a price the consumer can buy “female empowerment”. The character arc of the Mattel CEO is resolved when they discover they can make money from selling “Ordinary Barbie”, who suffers the same everyday problems and anxieties as ordinary women. Where once Mattel boxed and sold female empowerment, now they can box and sell female ordinariness: the id-like objectifying power of capitalism trundles on in the background of Barbie’s subjective story.
For Barbie, she begins perfectly content to be an object: to be a doll without ageing, or death, or cellulite. Her depressive breakdown in the middle of the film is the product of her desperate desire to remain an object. However, at the end of the film, Barbie chooses to become “a real woman”. This moment is comparable with the moment in The Truman Show (Weir, 1998) at which the character Truman (who has discovered that his entire life has been filmed and broadcast on television, and that every person he knows is a paid actor) decides to open the door at the edge of Seahaven (the fictive town in which he has been incarcerated) in order to leave his former life behind. At the edge of his reality, Truman gains a vision into a new reality which is not orchestrated by scriptwriters, directors and actors. By crossing the threshold, he steps from a known reality into an unknown one, which is supposedly more real than the one he has hitherto inhabited. The problem is, the idea that Seahaven is less real depends upon the greater reality of the outside world, and vice versa. As Simone Knox puts it:
In The Truman Show , both the inside and outside can be understood as having a primal lack; an inside cannot be conceived of without an outside. The one requires the other to fill up this lack and complete it.
Knox, 2010
For the viewers of the fictional show from which the film takes its name, the reality and authenticity of their lives is guaranteed by the fantasy and falsehood of Truman’s life. For Barbie, “the real world” is only real insofar as Barbieland is not real. She, like Truman, faces out across a threshold on a new kind of reality. The reality Barbie chooses is one in which her subjective lack is actualised in the form of sexual organs and medical appointments; a world in which the mundanity of human, bodily frailty is treasured for its ability to encapsulate the goal of the ego as it charts a path towards death: subjective living.
Ending
On the first day of Barbie’s life that we witness, before she is confronted by awareness of death, she says “It is the best day ever. So was yesterday and so is tomorrow and every day from now until forever” (Gerwig, 2023). In a perfect reality, unencumbered by death (or objet a), there is no differentiation: every day is the best day; every day is the same. To put it another way, in a universe of only one, continuous substance, there is no barycentre and there is no orbit: there is only whole, totality of being. Continuous substance is as good as Nothing—a state of continuous one-ness is maximum entropy: inert and dead. This very paradox of perfection reveals imperfection: perfection is self-decaying. It is only through decay that difference may be observed and the very fact that there is an observer presupposes this decay and differentiation. Barbie’s reality never was perfect—even before she became aware of death, her world is a world of repression. This repression is evident in the shunting of Weird Barbie to the edge of Barbieland: Weird Barbie is evidence of the nothingness that Barbieland traverses in its interaction with the Other (“the real world”). Weird Barbie exists: this very fact shows that decay is breaking through. Consider the fact that Barbie’s thoughts of death are labelled “irrepressible” by the characters of the film: they break out from the repression which previously characterised Barbieland.
Differentiation has its own problem: it creates boxes in which we do not-quite fit. Barbie is not-quite an inert object. Ken is not-quite a harmless, bland idiot. Barbieland is not-quite fantasy and “the real world” is not-quite real. To exactly grasp what all of these differentiated things quite are is to identify them as the barycentre of their own reality. But the barycentre is not an object for itself: it only exists for the not-quite realities which orbit it. To claim a self-sustaining reality which is concentric with its own barycentre is to return to that continuous whole substance, which is a Being entirely contiguous with Nothing. Differentiation into ever-shifting not-quite is the arc of life; coming-to-terms with life is acceptance of this not-quite. What better example than when Ken has the epiphany, “Ken is me” (Gerwig, 2023); he does not say “I am Ken”, for this would be an over-identification. He is not, as he previously sang, “just Ken”: since his Ken-ness is only guaranteed by Barbie’s gaze, without Barbie that would mean that he is nothing. And yet, there is a something which escapes from the boxing-off of Ken-the-object and, by saying “Ken is me”, he places the Ken part of himself into the objective position, finally allowing his subjectivity to escape around the cracks of the not-quite Ken.
- It is important to note that Freud does not use the Latin terms, Id and Ego, but instead the German das Es and das Ich (in english, the it and the I). Ego is best thought of as the psyche’s self-conception, a kind of return from the id which posits a controlling “I” with the power to restrain the id through identification. This “I” with the power to control the id, however, is a fiction insofar as the subject is concerned: the posited controlling “I” is not the ego, but the superego, the perfect “I” which exerts complete control, while the “I” of the ego is stuck in limbo between perfect order and perfect disorder; a state of half-being in which “I” never truly is so long as the id enforces instincts and drives which cannot be restrained. Ego is a state of Hegelian becoming, in the dialectic of a subject which proceeds from being (Superego), to non-being (id), to becoming (ego). Superego is the absolute recoil: the absolute “I” retroactively posited as logically prior when the ego returns out of the id (absolute recoil and retroactivity are both central to Slavoj Žižek’s ontological position in Incontinence of the Void (Žižek, 2017)). ↩︎
- For Lacan, there are two meanings of other: the big Other (A) and the little other (a) [hence why objet a is often called objet (petit) a, to distinguish it from A]. A is the other in “radical alterity” (Evans, 1996), as the other which cannot be identified with, while a is the other which is not truly other at all, but rather a projection of the ego. ↩︎
Bibliography
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James Waide 