I Am Become Barbie: The Social Psychology of Barbenheimer
By Emily Courtney | August 4, 2023
On July 21st, 2023, the world witnessed Barbenheimer: an internet meme built on dualistic release of seemingly opposite films: Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, was advertised on the surface as a feel-good, bubblegum-pink adaptation of a doll come to life; Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, as a gritty depiction of the man behind the invention of the atomic bomb. The trailers for each film weren’t wrong in representing the theme of each respective film, but the films themselves were so much more, and so much more alike than a viewer ever would have anticipated.
In Oppenheimer, an early scene alight with smoke and flames and firing nuclear chain reactions is overlaid with Cillian Murphy’s voice reading the quote from the Bhagavad Gita so often associated with Oppenheimer himself: Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. In Barbie, an early scene alight with mirror balls and glitter and poppy choreography is overlaid with a record-scratch and Margot Robbie saying bluntly: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”
As each film progresses, the unexpected parallels become more apparent. Barbie grapples with defining what exactly it means to be a human, alive and thus susceptible to death, while finding meaning during that brief period before the bell tolls. J. Robert Oppenheimer faces the reality that his legacy will be founded not on personal achievement, but rather the way his achievements result in both blood on his hands and a reformation of the world as it used to be known, changed forever by his actions.
Both of these struggles, and the psychology behind them, have been studied at length through the lens of the anthropological works of Ernest Becker, and the social psychological contributions of terror management theory. Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the Denial of Death, suggests that, as humans, we are separate from other creatures in our unique capability of recognizing that, one day, we will die. As a result of that recognition, we try desperately to outlive our physical bodies: we build systems of meaning, standards of living, ideologies in which to invest, benchmarks to live up to, and ways to be remembered by those who survive us. We are striving to be heroes, we are aiming for the stars, we want the marble plaques that bear our names positioned over our rotting corpses to have font large enough that our names remain in plain view and our lives remain in the daily memory of those still living. We aren’t just trying to survive – we are always trying to deny death entirely. All those things we try to do – the meaning, the standards, the ideologies – serve to help with that denial. We deny it because we are terrified, and it is our human propensity for abstract thought that allows us to manage that terror.
Aptly, Terror Management Theory (TMT) puts these Beckerian tenets to use in the realm of psychological literature and experimentation. Psychologists find in a variety of studies that, when people are thinking of death compared to when they are not, they are more likely to defend their countries, punish people who differ from them, and generally search for some way to make them feel better about themselves so as to push the idea of mortality out of their minds. Confronting the idea of death makes people try even harder than they typically would to find things that mean something in the world around them.
TMT makes glaring sense as an explanatory theoretical approach when it comes to Oppenheimer. A brilliant man is confronted with the choice between contributing his own genius to the pursuit of building a potentially world-ending weapon, and allowing the greatest evil the world had known up to that point to beat him to it. We all want to be remembered, but do we want to be remembered for our brilliance or for the suffering wrought unto the world by our own hands? The film is a before-and-after, a macro-level examination of arguably the most important person to have lived in society as we know it. There’s J. Robert and the world pre-bomb, and Oppenheimer and the world post. During Nolan’s crowning shot of the film, in which an atomic-bomb replica is caught on camera, the viewer is basically part of a terror management experiment – we watch death incarnate, more destructive power than had ever been a possibility; while hearing only labored breathing, a stark reminder that we live still.
From there, the characters and viewers alike strive for meaning. Oppenheimer devotes his life and remaining power toward changing the world in less destructive ways; he seeks forgiveness for the blood on his hands, validation for the nature of his scientific work above and beyond his contributions to warfare and decimation. J. Robert Oppenheimer, especially as he was depicted in the film, is likely exactly what Becker had in mind: Man becomes death, destroyer of worlds; and is then forced to spend a lifelong hero’s journey making sense of it all in order to be remembered the way he hopes. He knows that he will die, but that his ideas will live on… even if only to cause more death.
An atomic bomb in gritty black and white 70mm film feels peak-TMT. But TMT can be applied in more ways, through more lenses, to less obvious situations.
So, when Barbie asks if the other Barbies and Kens have ever thought about dying, she is introducing an unexpected terror management paradigm, and setting up the viewer to think about the entire film through the lens of existential psychology – whether you like it or not. A broad array of literature supports exactly Barbie’s points.
First, Barbie’s existential crisis. Bringing up death at a glitzy party is seldom welcome (the author would know firsthand). People are made uncomfortable by thinking of death, and actively try to avoid the topic and push it from conscious awareness. But, the salience of mortality is insidious, and confronting death changes even the way Barbie sees her own body (Goldenberg & Roberts). Her feet, which usually fit so seamlessly into sky-high stilettos, flatten out; her thighs grow the undeniable and unavoidable cellulite associated with being a regular human. Her confrontation with death motivates her to find a way to return to the way of life she knows and loves where every day is perfect and where maybe death can be not only denied, but taken completely out of the realm of possibility.
On her quest for a return to normalcy, Barbie confronts the differences between her world and corresponding understanding of it with that of the Real World, in which women are marginalized and viewed as… well… Barbies. This, too, has an existential underpinning – a patriarchal society has a tendency to push women to the fringes and see women’s bodies as objects to quell the connection between life (like childbearing) and death (i.e., if something can be born, something will eventually die). Norms and expectations infiltrate every part of a person’s life, in that we all feel the need to live up to what society expects of us – especially when we are confronted with death, and unfortunately when those expectations make life so difficult for women and other folks on the societal margins (go back and listen to America Ferrera’s monologue, I dare you).
A happy ending comes with a grain of salt rubbed in a wound. Barbie has a sense of purpose and identity after her time in the real world, and she speaks to her creator (Ruth Handler, inventor of Barbie, and thus perhaps Barbie’s God?) about the joys and sorrows of living a fully human life. The montage of life and love and beauty and loss is presented with the warning: “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.” In choosing to live, Barbie chooses to die; with only the hope that the idea of her will live on.
Barbenheimer’s box office numbers place it in the pantheon of opening weekends; Barbie set a record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for a woman director. It all begs the question – why and how did the combination of films become the social media phenomenon it did? The reality is most likely that, just as would be expected on the stage set by terror management theory, Barbie was expected to be the antidote to the doom and gloom of Oppenheimer. Social media mavens saw the bright pink and bubblegum as the antithesis to the black and white and explosions and ran with it. The Oppenheimer shot, the Barbie chaser – a brazen reminder of death, made tolerable by what we thought would be a superficial joyride composed of undying plastic. Greta Gerwig threw us all for a loop in making a film that was somehow all of those things, plus nearly as existentially unsettling as the story of the man behind the bomb.
And somehow, in both films, the power comes from recognizing death… and also becoming it.
Dr. Emily P. Courtney is a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of South Florida. Her research program employs an existential perspective on contributors and impediments to health and well-being, with considerations for individual, cultural, and gender-based differences.