Self-Effacing Barbie: The Ideal, the Real and the Quest for Authentic Selfhood

This article argues that the immediate critical responses to the blockbuster film Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023), which diverged along ideological lines, fail to account for the extent to which the film undercuts the very ideological divisions that sustain them. Rather than or in addition to presenting a left-wing or right-wing critique of contemporary gender roles, the film positions this contest within the vexed relationship between the ideal and the real. This metaphysical quandary is what propels the protagonists on a Buddhist-inspired quest for authentic selfhood, a selfhood characterized by both the effacement of the discrete self (the Buddhist concept of anatman) and the eclipse of monumentalized cultural and commercial idols, like Barbie, that organize and disseminate ideology.