I’ve been reading some of Pascal’s Pensées recently in preparation for some revisions to my Christian tradition class and was particularly struck by the way Pascal’s comments on the human condition mirror life in Barbieland in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023). Of course, I’m not the only person to have noticed this comparison. For me, the most striking moment in all this is when the cracks start to appear in Barbie’s life in Barbieland.
I saw the movie with a group of my mom friends for mom’s night out when the movie was first released so I do have to admit that I’m writing this from my memory of that viewing. But the general gist of Barbieland is that everything is both perfect and fake. Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, wakes up every morning, takes a shower (where there is no real water), eats perfectly formed play food, flies off the roof of her house (because when playing with dolls, did they ever go out the front door?), and then goes out in her car to socialize with all the other Barbies and Kens. Even when something goes wrong—such as Ryan Gosling’s Ken getting injured when he tries to surf on fake waves—the recovery occurs without any challenge. Doctor Barbie arrives and does not really have to do anything to Ken to heal him.
The whole premise of the movie has to do with when the negative ideas of the mother in the real world start to influence the experience of Barbie in Barbieland. You can see the clutch moment of this in this trailer for the film. The Barbies are all dancing, and one comments, “This is the best day ever.” Robbie’s Barbie replies, “It is the best day ever. So was yesterday and so is tomorrow and every day from now until forever!” As a contrast to that, there is a moment where something else breaks through—Barbie asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” After this moment, all the perfect aspects of Barbie’s daily routine that I noted above start to break down.
What strikes me about this quote is that it is exactly the way that Pascal’s Pensées set up the problem of the human condition. Namely, at some point we are all going to die and facing that fact, in a sense, forces us to consider whether we are living our life in a way that what happens to us after death (should there be the Christian God) will be good or bad. As Pascal wrote, “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever” (fr. 165). The idea expressed here is that humans should remember that everyone is going to die. This is, of course, a marked contrast to Barbieland where nobody ever dies, and nothing ever changes. Ruth Handler’s comments toward the end of the trailer echo these ideas as well: “Humans only have one kind of ending. Ideas live forever.”
But what Pascal noted in addition to the inevitability of death is how humans ultimately want to avoid considering this fact. “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it” (fr. 166). That is, we ultimately want to be in Barbieland—we want to put something in place that prevents us from thinking about the inevitability of our death. Pascal called this divertissement, or diversion. Thus, he sums up the human condition by saying, “Diversion. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things” (fr. 133). This, again, is the description of life in Barbieland, and the type of life Pascal argued that humans aspired to.
Returning thus to the idea of death, I find it interesting that the movie makes the same move as Pascal indicated in the Pensées. As Santiago Ramos describes it, Barbie is ultimately a movie about death and could be considered alongside other existential philosophers like Camus and Sartre. I see the film as specifically mirroring Pascal’s methods in the Pensées. That is, Barbieland represents the normal human effort at diversion—though the fakeness and perfection of Barbieland make it much easier there for the Barbies to divert themselves from normal human thoughts. The way that the movie sets this diversion up as ultimately fake highlights precisely how fake our efforts at diversion are, just what Pascal aimed to do in his text. As he wrote, “The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction” (fr. 414). What breaks through this constant state of diversion in Barbie is the recognition of death, exactly as Pascal wanted to start his apology for Christianity by making the reader aware of their condition—that they will die someday and need to decide whether they want to wager on Christianity being true or false when they do so. Because of the reality of death, as he argued in the wager itself, “There is no choice, you are already committed” (fr. 418). In the end of the film, in a sense, Barbie is faced with a similar wager. Her experiences throughout the film made it so that she cannot simply go back to Barbieland and so she is given a choice—remain in Barbieland or enter the real world permanently, as a human. I think if Pascal were to make a movie about Barbies, the final choice would be similar.
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