Barbie

Yesterday afternoon with a vaguely pink shirt I went to a cinema in St Austell.

If you like action films this isn’t it!

If you like romantic/chick flicks etc then don’t go here.

You won’t see vampires, werewolves or zombies. No murders in sight and thankfully no moody wind swept landscapes. Just beautiful tropical sun.

You will be challenged. Whether male or female, this film asks the question, “What does that mean?”

You might be disappointed though because the film doesn’t hope to answer such a huge topic… it does challenge you to think it through. And the questions and the challenges keep going…

Barbie is suddenly not good enough. Girls don’t play with her any more, what is she good for? What is her purpose? The questions this film ask keep flowing.

So do you think about dying? I know I do. Barbie is the beautiful doll that exists to look pretty on our shelves and suddenly she’s not. She has discovered imperfection. The world we live in is a mess and as part of that mess you die. Is Barbie part of the perfect world we create to escape this mess?

And then we have Ken. (Margot Robbie is excellent but Ryan Gosling’s cast as Ken goes one step better). Ken’s purpose is be the perfect never-ending boyfriend to Barbie. But in his crisis he discovers ‘manhood’. He resents his place as second fiddle to Barbie and decides to break the shackles but in doing so creates and even bigger mess.

At the end of the day this film is about Barbie and girlhood. Why would a girl abandon her previous source of enrichment and literally throw Barbie out of the pram (and the pram as well)? What does it mean to age? Teenage girls go on this journey without much help. Barbie is perfect and doesn’t age so that doesn’t help. Where do they go to get their questions answered? Again this film doesn’t answer that question but it does ask the question.

I love the colour pink and we see lots of pink… but Barbie is more than a world of pink, where do we answer the questions this film asks?

For me, the Bible answers all of these questions. It answers the question, why is the world a mess and why do we die? Look at Genesis 1, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 for that one. This time it is about Adam and Eve not Barbie and Ken. After you read Genesis, keep going with the Bible, it answers all of these questions and more.