Barbie and Original Sin: Reflecting on the Role of Idealism in Shaping Our Response To Existential Crisis

Not always a fan of the stuff that comes out of Christianity Today, but they do have some decent stuff littered in the mix.

This take on Barbie is particularly interesting to me given that it touches on some issues I have with certain forms of Christianity while also bringing to light the tensions that Gerwig tables in what is arguably a pointed social commentary.

First off, it rightly frames Barbie, and I think Gerwig’s intent based on the interviews I have heard, within the context of the Biblical fall.

“The movie is 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.”

But the author then goes on to evoke the language of “original sin”. What’s even more relevant to this evocation is how original sin takes the larger story of the fall and writes it almost entirely into the question of “individual salvation”. The author writes,

“For evangelicals, framing maturation in light of original sin can be deeply unsettling, especially because Gerwig seems to suggest that experiential knowledge is necessary to human development. By contrast, we understand the Genesis narrative as a story of rebellion. In choosing what was forbidden, the woman and man disobey and come under a curse that will plague their entire existence—from the earth under their (flat) feet to their own bodies.”

Notice the emphasis on “human development”, which is then played through isolating the woman and the man by describing existence as “theirs”. The earth gets reduced to that which is under “their” feet and something that only exists in relationship to “their” bodies”.

The writer then goes on to say,

“Even more, much of evangelical theology and practice is aimed at reversing this curse. We understand Jesus as the Second Adam, come to redeem and restore what was lost (Rom. 5:12–20). We look forward to the day when we are perfect once again.

And yet, within this frame, we sometimes overlook the process by which God sanctifies us. As we confess our sinfulness, we then convince ourselves that life with Christ will be an upward trending line of increasingly good performance that eventually results in perfection. Having begun by the Spirit, we’re pretty convinced we can continue in our own strength. But insofar as this approach to discipleship denies our humanity, we will struggle to live with our imperfection. As a counselor told me recently, “You’re not an angel, Hannah. You’re a human being.”

Notice how the appeal to Jesus as “coming to redeem and restore was lost” gets directly tied to the “we” who look forward and the “we” who will be made perfect once again. Therefore, as “we” confess, “we” convince oruselves, finally resulting in this point of observation:

“In this way, sanctification requires that we leave behind plastic ways of being and embrace our God-given humanity, flawed as it is. It requires that we move from idealized forms to the complexity of embodied lives. It requires that we leave Barbie Land.”

So here is the issue I have with all of this. It sells the Gospel as the proclamation that “we” are saved. That existence is about “us” being sanctified. That the process is about a fall being used to bring us to eventual perfection. It then frames the entire existential question that it notes in the film within a personal crisis of sin and perfection. The problem of a world that is not right or not as it should be, meaning a world with sin and death, is explicity defined as a problem with us that needs God’s forgiveness in order to be solved. The world that we percieve outside of ourelves becomes an afterthought. At best any concern for the world becomes part of our own sanctification. We become the primary point of this story of existence.

This is, of course, made all the more problematic when it attaches original sin to an Augustiinian point of perspective on the world. Here any mention of the fall becomes subtly swept up into subsequent appeals to God’s sovereignty. The fall becomes the divinely orchestrated means of our sanctification. It becomes the necessary proocess through which God brings me to perfection. All nods to a cursed reality or a cursed existence become merely a means to establishing the creator-created distinction rather than a reality that exists in opposition to God’s good creatiion.

All of this is a very common way of telling the Christian story, of course. But I think it misses the point of the story. In its rush to make the story of salvation about us and our salvation it quickly bypasses the necessary foundation for which to make sense of the problem salvation actually addresses. Existence is not us and our imperfections, even if there are grains of truth in those observations. Rather, we exist in an imperfect reality. A world with Sin and Death is not reflective of God’s good creation or Divine directive. It exists, necessarily, in opposition to God’s good creation and Divine directive. If we lose sight of this we lose all basis for speaking to the person and work of Jesus as accomplishing a victory over the opposition. If we lose sight of this we lose all basis for speaking to what is good and what is evil in this world. When it comes to speaking to an “embodied existence” in a cursed reality, we lose all sense of what precisely is being redeemed and restored.

Now here is what I think the article teases out that is helpful. I think one of the dangers inherent to the kind of story Gerwig is telling is that it uses relgiious imagery and language to etablish a basis for morality, but then uses that to reinforce an appeal towards living rightly in a materialist world. If Gerwig rightly locates the crisis of the enlightenments appeal to an undefined point of perfection and its culturallly rooted expressions, she also is wise to locate a necessary pushback to these perfections in a rejection of necessary “idealism”. But herein lies the problem. Can we truly reject idealism in a world that is admittedly not as it should be? If the world is indeed moving forward to something, what is that something? Where is it heading? If not to perfection, then where? These questions get to the heart of the crisis inherent to the enlightnment era,, and it is why idealism is both inevitable and also a very real problem when it comes to wrestling with the larger question of “existence”.

Gerwig ultimately takes the oft paved road around these questions rather than facing them head on. She romanticizes the same “fallenness” she presents as the problem. She skirts around notiions of becoming and tries to root the idea of being within the confines of a life lived between 0 and 100. If ideas live forever, existence is meant to die. The sentiment sounds nice on paper, but even a minutia of thought can betray the sentimment as muddled and nonsensicle. Death is made into a god rather than existing in opposition to life. It assumes that life can only be valuable in a world where death exists, and yet it also wants to say that death is at the root of the existential problem.

Death here is more than simple non-existence. Death speaks far more broadly to its primary expressions in this world- suffering and decay. And ironically, the materilastic worldview inherent in Barbie is not that different than the religious point of perspective it is subtly critiquing. The ultimate point of existence is the self and its salvation. Now, to be fair, I think Gerwig has written a story that is intelligent enough to breathe some necessary nuance into the equation. This is both the stories strength and weakness, as it finds itself wrestling with these big ideas and struggling to bring it all together into a fully coherent portrait of existence and its inerhent struggles. And I think those nuances are trying to cut through the noise of dangerous forms of idealism to locate some semblance of togetherness. But I do think she falls prey to some of the trappings of the worldview that ultimately underlies the story. What she glosses over is the fact that simply romanticizing death and its primary expressions (suffering and decay) does not actually do away with the existential crisis. In fact, it could be said that it ignores it in favor of simply living a life detached from any coherent and definable trajectory, at least at first glance. If she rightly notes that the world we exist in, the same world in which we locate our own imperfections, is something that requires “embodied” living, she misses how it is that we become free to emoby this existence. I am “me” might cut through the noise of our messy and often harmful cultural constructs, but if being “me” becomes my motivation for living in a not right world it becomes easy to simply see suffering and death as necessary to it and our overcoming of such as our measure of success. It simply replaces God with existence as the author of suffering and death, and further yet applies this to an undefined trajectory and unexpressed idealism that appears to be deconstructed but ultimately still remains. It limits our perspective of existence to the here and now while allowing us to pretend that the sentiment “ideas are foreever” somehow justifies this reality as it is. That might afford us motivation to get out of bed and face the struggles while turning them into opportunity, but it doesn’t have the necessary foundation to actually contend for the plasticized illusions that are ultimately driving it.

If my issues with the Christian story presented in this article stem from its message of me as the problem and my potential sanctification as the solution, the worldview that we find in Barbie is every bit as selective in that sanctifiying force. It unifies us around “original sin” by breaking down the illusions of our perfections but then anchors the ultimate goal in my story of overcoming, a story that is completely dependent on the luck of the draw and the harsh nature of a reality that hinges our success as humans on an endless list of external factors. If an Augustinian perspective has a very real penchant of celebrating ones election to that promised sanctification, in Barbieland it depends on being born in the right place and with the right abilities to overcome realities struggles. Unfortunately this “reality” has a way of reminding the many of where they sit on both sides of this forward moving story. Motivation to those who won the luck of the draw. Potential defeatism to the rest. And what is most telling about this is that in its rejection of idealism it quietly sneaks idealism back into the picture as the necessary driving force of a “succesful life” lived between 0-100.

Link to Christianity Today Article