Having at last succumbed to the barrage of Barbenheimer mania, I can now share my thoughts on the two films from a Zen perspective. (For now, though, I’ll restrict my remarks to Barbie.)
My first reaction to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was that it was the story of the Buddha. Like Siddhartha, she begins life (if we can call it that) in a charmed and sheltered palace, pink and plastic and perfect. Like the Republican ideal of childhood, there should be no taint of the unpleasant world of grownups, no unpleasantness, no dissatisfaction, no suffering, no aging, no death, and above all no mention of social inequality, bathrooms, gender confusion, or sex. It is only when these dark thoughts intrude upon Barbie’s consciousness that she sets off on her journey to “enlightenment.”
Like the prince Siddhartha, however, once she witnesses dukkha (imperfection) in the form of suffering, age, and death, she can’t be kept in the prison of her pink palace. She must make the journey to the underworld (i.e., the “real” world), and meet a teaching prophet (Weird Barbie) and confront even the gods (or at least their simulacra in the form of the corporate board of Mattel). Once she has confronted the twin demons of Capitalist Consumerism and the Patriarchy, she can rejoin the world, “enlightened” now, as a “real” human being. Cue the final frame of the Oxherding Pictures, where the un-Barbie-like chubby Buddha Hotei returns to the marketplace to perform as a bodhisattva, saving other beings like himself. Or, perhaps just as aptly, cue the Pinocchio/Pygmalion theme of the toy/statue coming to life.
These themes were so obvious to me that I didn’t for a second think my interpretation was either original or outlandish. I searched “Barbie Buddha” online and came up with a number of references, including an interview with Margot Robbie who stated that Greta Gerwig was thinking in the archetypal terms of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (“or is it a hundred, anyway….” Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling, still channeling a dim and deferential Ken, says “either way, that’s a lot of faces!”) Robbie says it out loud: Barbie’s journey is “the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment.”
Now that we know the answer to whether Barbie has Buddha nature, we should ask the more pressing and as yet unexplored question of whether Barbie’s dog Tanner (discontinued for pooping choking hazards, as his brief cameo in the film shows) has Buddha nature as well?
— Richard Collins
Sam Grindrod (from Pinterest)