Barbie as eve: feminist theology and Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig (BBC 2023) pointed out on the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row Barbie's retelling of the John Milton poem Paradise Lost. She argues Barbie and Ken's expulsion from Barbie Land to the "real-world" LA echoes Adam and Eve's exile from Eden. While Gerwig delivered this reading of her film with a self-deprecating laugh, my analysis of the film takes it seriously as an intervention into feminist theology. The film reverses the Creation myth, with Ken/Adam as Barbie/Eve's helpmeet. We are thus invited to consider the relationship between feminism and religion, a concern also explored in other films by Gerwig and representing her authorial presence. Barbie works toward, in a popular form, the "fully realised alterity" of a female imaginary and a female divine as philosophised by Luce Irigaray (Lucy Bolton 2011, 2). At the end of the film, Barbie's visit to her gynaecologist is part of the process by which she acquires a soul. Irigaray helps us understand the connection between these events as she insists that the realm of the body, female genitalia and sexuality provide a way for women to think themselves other than phallocratically, including in their relation to the divine.