On Being Plastic

Did you watch the Oscars this year? Sorry if that’s a rude question—in my neck of the woods evangelicals aren’t supposed to be attracted to the glitz and glam of Hollywood’s self-congratulatory excesses. But I enjoy the perennial conflict between art and commerce: Who will get the awards? The most widely popular movies, or the critically acclaimed films? 

This year’s Oscars was a battle between last summer’s two most popular movies: Oppenheimer and Barbie. Who should have won? The critically acclaimed Oppenheimer or the popularly lauded Barbie? Both movies use the incredibly powerful medium of visual storytelling to communicate profound messages about human nature, personal freedom, lust for power and quest for self-identity. While pastors and missionaries in America might be tempted to disregard Hollywood entirely, we can't ignore how these stories impact society's understanding of itself and the world. 

The Christian debates about the movies have surged, especially surrounding Barbie. Is the film too progressive? Too conservative? Too woke? Too gender-stereotypical? 

In my opinion, these are the wrong questions to ask. It’s too easy for Christians to think that “the world out there” believes the messages that Barbie embodies, while the “world in here,” in the Church, holds to a different set of beliefs. 

It’s true that Christians and non-Christians will articulate their beliefs about God, humanity and the meaning of life in very different ways. But in our modern Western culture, there are more unspoken beliefs, more default assumptions, that unite these two groups than divide them. And Barbie holds up a mirror to the Church, inviting us to see ourselves in Barbie’s reflection. 

Expressive individualism 

As Christians, we’re called to live like missionaries to our friends and neighbors in that culture. A key first step to living with a missionary mindset is to study and understand the culture you’re called to live in, to uncover the often-tacit assumptions and beliefs that drive everyday behavior. 

Being an outsider to that culture, like an overseas missionary, helps, because fresh eyes let you see things that insiders have never questioned, like the proverbial fish unaware of the existence of water. 

Insiders have a much harder time studying the culture in which they were raised. Insiders often forget to dig below the surface to unearth unspoken and unexamined beliefs and ideas, which can lead to the mistaken belief that people outside the Church are motived by different worldview assumptions than people who have been in churches their whole lives. 

This is where Barbie, in all her plastic perfection, embodies the modern idea of expressive individualism.  

In short, expressive individualism is the modern assumption that each individual has a unique identity, a one-of-a-kind way of being human. Each person’s primary moral task is to discover their unique identity and live it out in the world. The rest of society, then, has a moral obligation to respect and celebrate each individual’s unique identity, and to refrain from suppressing individual’s identities or forcing conformity to an external identity on to them. 

Expressive individualism isn’t all bad! It’s the mindset that allows us to choose our own work instead of feeling constrained to our family’s profession. It lets us move out of our hometowns and put down roots in places where we might more easily flourish. It gives me permission to marry the person I want, to go to the school that best fits me, to participate in the institutions I choose.  

But it’s a mindset that comes with drawbacks—because we can choose so much of what makes us ourselves, we must choose, and we must constantly re-affirm our choices. Choice itself becomes a burden.  

To put it in catechetical language, modern Westerners answer the question “what is the chief end of man?” by saying, “to achieve psychological satisfaction through the public performance of inward desires.” Or to sloganize it, “you do you.” 

The song Choose Your Fighter from Barbie: The Soundtrack puts it this way, “You can be a lover or a fighter, whatever you desire / Life is like a runway and you're the designer / Wings of a butterfly, eyes of a tiger / Whatever you want, baby, choose your fighter.” 

Barbie is a modern coming-of-age story, the tale of a stereotypically perfect woman on a moral quest to discover her own unique self-identity in the face of pressure to conform to Ken’s relational expectations, Mattel’s corporate needs and her own history as a feminist-icon-turned-oppressive-stereotype. 

Charles Taylor writes in his The Ethics of Authenticity, “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me” (italics original). 

And Barbie is an expressive individualist, so she isn’t on a quest to discover who she is in the context of the relationships and responsibilities she holds. She isn’t finding her purpose through service to something greater than herself. Her life’s purpose is to discover herself, to create herself, if necessary. 

She’s not the only one. We are all expressive individualists. Whether Christian or not, we each live our lives believing that discovering and defining who we are is up to us. 

Gospel of self-creation 

We could call this the “gospel of self-creation.” If the problem I face is that forces outside of me—religious, political, social, cultural—want me to conform to their idea of who I am, then the gospel, the good news I need to hear, is that I have the power to define myself, to create myself, with no responsibility to adhere to what anyone else says.  

This gospel of self-creation is the so-called “good news” of the modern coming-of-age story, the good news of Barbie. In a key scene near the end of the film, Barbie meets her creator, Ruth. Barbie has decided that maybe she doesn’t want to be stereotypical “Barbie” anymore, she doesn’t want to be an idea, but a person. She tells Ruth, “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made…do you give me permission to become human?” Ruth tells her she doesn’t need her permission, but Barbie doesn’t understand. “But you’re the creator. Don’t you control me?” 

Ruth, significantly, responds that she can’t control Barbie, any more than she could control her own daughter, whom Barbie is named after—Barbara. Mothers can only hold hopes for their children, not control them.   

After their back-and-forth, Barbie realizes, “So being human’s not something I need to ask for, or even want? I can just—it’s just something I discover I am?” 

This is the turning point in the movie, the moment viewers realize that Barbie’s struggle to discover her unique self is the fundamental human project: to discover who we are and choose to live it out, no matter what. In its final few minutes, the movie humorously portrays Barbie embracing her full humanity.  

But is that good news? Is the gospel of self-creation really a gospel, really good news to a modern individual who is crushed under the weight of defining their self? 

If Barbie were a few hours longer, would we eventually see the now-fully-human Barbie continue to struggle to form an identity, to create a self? Would we see her long for the days when her identity was given to her and she knew exactly who she was, what her purpose was, and how to live fully into that purpose?  

The hauntingly beautiful song playing underneath that pivotal scene, What Was I Made For by Billie Eilish, doesn’t give much hope. Its lyrics recapitulate Barbie’s experience. “I used to float, now I just fall down / I used to know but I’m not sure now” before asking “What was I made for?” And the only answer the song can give is its assertion that we were made to be happy, and “someday I might / someday I might.” 

The gospel of self-creation turns out to be no gospel at all, not good news but a curse which condemns individuals to the Sisyphean ordeal of trying on identity after identity in the hopes of discovering one of the identities might be solid. 

The only alternative is to find an identity outside of the self, in someone or something that names the individual and gives them an identity. But Barbie has already rejected the identity given to her by her creator. For her, there is no comfort in going back.  

Eilish turns this into a lament. “I was an ideal / Looked so alive, turns out I'm not real / Just something you paid for.” Because if you’re “paid for,” you’re a possession. You’re owned. You are controlled by the one who owns you. The one who owns you gets to name you, gets to give you an identity. 

The true gospel  

In his brilliant book You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, Professor Alan Noble writes,  

“If you are your own and belong to Christ, then your personhood is a real creation, objectively sustained by God. And as a creation of God, you have no obligation to create your self. Your identity is based on God’s perfect will, not your own subjective, uncertain will. All your efforts to craft a perfect, marketable image add nothing to your personhood. The reason the opinions of others don’t define you isn’t because your opinion is the only one that counts, but because you are not reducible to any human efforts of definition. The only being who can fully know you and understand you without reducing you to a stereotype or an idol is God” (you can read his full argument in an excerpt published here).

Even though Christians believe it is true that “personhood is a real creation, objectively sustained by God,” we’re still expressive individualists. Too often, Noble argues, finding our identity in Christ is simply another identity we choose off the shelf of possible identities, another cup we try to pour ourselves into in a quest to feel like we’re “solid.” We’re like stereotypical-Barbie deciding to try being Dr. Barbie or Journalist Barbie or President Barbie. 

But the true gospel, the real good news, is that we are paid for. Being “paid for” doesn’t make us a “thing,” as Eilish laments. Being “paid for” rescues us from the burden of self-creation and brings us face-to-face with the God who knows us, who names us, who tells us who we are. Only by being “paid for’ do we become more than a thing, more than a possession. We become a self. I am me because I am bought and paid for, named, known, and loved.  

“Do you not know?” Paul asks. “You are not your own. You were bought with a price.” 

Beautiful, insightful, poignant and funny, Barbie, ultimately, doesn’t give answers that satisfy. Barbie is afraid that if Ruth, her creator, names her, then she controls her. But the God who names us doesn’t control us. He rescues us at the cost of his own self. He invites us to receive our identity—child of God—as a gift, and to live out who we already are.