The Academy Award nominated Barbie movie can be classified as many things. It felt like a cinematic fever dream, a social commentary, and an absurdist comedy all rolled into one. But at the heart of the story, the theme and premise are quite simple. It’s about a perfect doll living in a perfect world slowly discovering what it means to be human. And through her journey, the audience learns what it means to be human because even humans don’t quite fully grasp their own emotions. It’s a complicated world humanity lives in, and stories like this help cut through the noise to try and encapsulate that human experience. In terms of Barbie, that can be summed up in one scene and through one particular line of dialogue.
The film starts in Barbieland, where Barbie (Margot Robbie) essentially lives a perfect life. But things start happening that make her wonder whether or not something is wrong with her. It’s theorized that the barrier between the toy world and the real world is thinning. Whoever was playing with Barbie in the real world has begun transferring some of her human emotions and characteristics onto the toy Barbie. This leads to Barbie traveling to the real world in order to find this woman. In her search, Barbie tries to tap more into the woman’s feelings to find her location. This leads to Barbie being overwhelmed with human emotion and uttering the line, “that felt achy but good.”
It’s hard to find a sentence that better encapsulates what it means to be human. Being alive is tough. It often makes people feel alone, achy, and cold. But that’s what allows us to be alive. It’s a scary emotion, but it lets humans appreciate life. Barbie isn’t alive. Although she was happy, she never really had emotions the same way that people do. When she finally did experience them, she was overwhelmed, and yet, she still appreciated them in a way that she never had before. Of course, the Barbie film is much longer than this one scene and filled with tons of other themes, but it’s certainly possible to boil the main character’s core journey to this one moment and one line.
Barbie is now streaming on Max.
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