Barbie Goes on a Hero’s Journey

That’s Margot Robbie’s take on the Protagonist in Barbie …

When Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t projecting into the future about a story featuring a toy doll going on a hero’s journey. But when I read some early accounts of Barbie’s plot, along with several viewings of various trailers and movie excerpts, that’s what came to my mind: a character leaves their ordinary world, traveling to an extraordinary world where their experiences along the way lead to their transformation.

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read any further if you don’t want to learn key plot elements in the movie.

Barbie begins in Barbieland, then gets transported to the Real World (Los Angeles). Aesthetically, it’s basically the reverse of The Wizard of Oz, where Barbie World has the fantastical feel of Oz, even though it represents Barbie’s ordinary life experience, and the extraordinary world into which she’s transported feels very much like contemporary Los Angeles.

In any event, I thought that was a cool story concept for Barbie: She goes on a hero’s journey. Then I read this from a New York Times interview with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling:

Who was Barbie to you, Margot?

ROBBIE One of the first things Greta said was that she wanted Barbie to go on the classic hero’s journey, like the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment. And I was reading the Joseph Campbell book “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” at the time and I was like, “I know exactly what you mean.” I hadn’t played a character that’s been on that classic hero’s journey before. So that was really interesting.

There you go.

Campbell says this:

“The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward.”

The experiences the heroine has in the outer world drive them into their inner world. For the hero’s journey is fundamentally one involving the character discovering their true self … their authentic nature … which already exists within. Again Campbell

“It appears that the … journey was a labor not of attainment but reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery.”

Apparently, Barbie not only goes on such a journey of discovery, but so does Ken as he is having an existential crisis at the beginning of the story.

I’m going to see Barbie to be entertained by the amazing visuals, the characters, the story’s sense of humor, and all the rest, but I’m especially intrigued to see how Barbie and Ken experience their respective hero’s journeys … and in the process discover some aspects of their psyche which have been there all along, hidden amidst the non-stop party in Barbieland, but now freed up to empower both to move toward an awakened sense of their true self.

If that seems too philosophical for a movie like Barbie, just remember how Robbie sees the story: “…like the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment.”

Movie website

For the rest of the New York Times interview, go here.